Newbie question on dealing with first "immune" creatures

[prolog]

Hi,

I'm pretty new to DCSS. I like to play Wz and FE quite a bit (their squishiness forces me to play cautiously), and had a question about dealing with immune creatures. When you run into creatures immune to your primary damage type (e.g., summoned imps for FE), what's the best way to deal with them? I would assume having melee or ranged weapons trained to a decent point would be useful, but this gets at the part of Crawl I find the most confusing: training skills. I see posts where people are told, "Oh, you've trained foo too much!", and because of this, I tend to be super cautious about how much I train particular skills. With FE, for example, I go Manual, and put my skill points into Dodging, Spellcasting, Conjurations, and Fire Magic. So when I get to a particular immune threat, I have some real trouble dealing with it.

How do you go about dealing with creatures immune to your primary damage type? Do you have other skills trained up to a certain level, and then turned off? What do you train?

My current best character is a TrMo, and is tearing through just about everything he meets (Sigmund, Grinder, etc., were all dispatched very quickly). However, I'm acutely aware that there are likely things I'm going to want to deal with from a distance, so I assume the above advice would apply to this char as well.

Thanks a lot in advance!

[BlackSheep]

Wands are a good fallback for most characters, though early on it's not guaranteed that you'll have an appropriate wand. Melee enhanced by potions of might can also work, though those are pretty valuable to waste on small stuff. For an early FE or VM facing crimson imps, you can just get them to chase you up some stairs then melee them till they blink. Then head back downstairs and either annotate the level or just ignore them entirely.

For especially dangerous things like some player ghosts or uniques, sometimes it's best to just leave the level and come back later. You don't need to kill absolutely everything, and you don't need to kill stuff in the order you find it.

Trolls will want to pick up large rocks as soon as possible, but can use all of the above tactics as well.

[jejorda2]

The imp will eventually blink away from you and you can just walk away. If you get it to follow you up stairs, it will blink away and be too far away to follow you back down. Once you have melee trained up to fall back on, or something like stone arrow or mystic blast that they don't resist, start killing them.

TrHu start with large rocks that kill things from a distance quite easily, but otherwise play mostly like TrMo. Trog or Oka will give you more rocks so you don't run out if they mulch before you run into Cyclops.

[crate]

The only thing you have to worry about with FE that is immune to fire for a long time is crimson imps. Unless you run into an imp that has found a weapon of some sort, imps are very unlikely to kill you, and they are very easy to avoid, so just don't fight them. A good way to get rid of them is to lure them to a different floor and then ditch them at the staircase after they blink away.

Things that resist fire will still die to fire eventually, so fire drakes or some orc that has picked up an rF armour will still die to your spells. You may want to avoid these fights though.

---

A question like "what do you train" is a bit too broad for me to want to answer in any depth. I will say that in general you want to first train the skills you use to kill things, then train defensive skills when you are killing things well enough, and train more offense as necessary. Skill training past your starting book or the first few levels of D almost always depends on each individual game so giving generalisations other than "use your brain" is not terribly useful.

---

You do not need any ranged method of dealing damage to win the game. I have won several times with no real ranged damage outside of attack wands. It can be good to have ranged damage, but most of the good methods of dealing ranged damage require a sizable xp investment. For a trmo in particular I would recommend carrying some large rocks and possibly training throwing to about level 5 for a bit more accuracy.

Also the most dangerous enemies tend to have spells, so if your melee is stronger than your ranged damage it is often better to just get out of LOS and then fight once the enemy reaches you instead of trying to hurt it from range, since the more turns you spend in LOS/LOF (depending on the enemy) the more likely it is to do bad things.

[JeffQyzt]

Nothing is immune to melee damage, so a TrMo doesn't have a whole lot to worry about in that department. Specifically for dealing with ranged threats, options include (but are not limited to)

• Using terrain tactically so that you're only fighting in melee (e.g. back down a corridor/around a corner to get out of line of sight). You should do this regardless.
• Throwing things at the threat (as a troll, large stones and javelins are especially good options)
• Learning a ranged skill (sling would probably be best, as with an unarmed troll you're hopefully using a shield)
• Picking up some ranged damage spells and spellcasting skills - options will vary. This is a lot bigger investment than the others, so you want to synergize with other goals if possible.
• Picking up translocations to position yourself more optimally with respect to the threat (e.g. controlled blink away/toward depending on situation.) If you find a ring of TP Control, blink is a pretty low investment that can be perhaps be upgraded to controlled blink later in the game.

If you're talking more generally about "immune" creatures (e.g. many demons are immune to fire) the usual course is to pick an alternative in the cases when your primary attack is not as effective - e.g. pick up iron shot on a FE for fire resistant critters. Note that this is something that you worry about well after getting your primary attack and defense options solid - until then, you just run away from the "immune" threat. Also note that the higher level conjuration spells in conjuration schools tend to have some physical component as well as the "flavored" component - e.g. firestorm, ice storm, poison arrow, etc. all do some damage even when the target is "immune" to fire, ice, and poison respectively.

[yogaFLAME]

When in doubt, run away from it and ignore it. This works for 95% of crawl.

[prolog]

Thanks, all. I made it to clvl 10, and Lair:1, where I went toe to toe with a hydra and died. I didn't Google hydras beforehand, and didn't realize that the extra head growth was a byproduct of my claws. I'll train up another weapon skill next time, and won't make that mistake again!

[sanka]

I found it more effective to just kil hydras with large rocks or wands. Or simply evade them. Training an other weapon is a lot of xp early on wasted for only one monster, and a hydra can be strong without regrowing heads.

[prolog]

Good idea. I found a number of wands, which I didn't think to use (again, won't make that mistake again), but I never found any large stones. Do those usually appear at a certain point in the dungeon, or can they be made, somehow?

[rchandra]

The best way to get large rocks is to start as a Hunter, so you have them for tough early enemies. You sometimes find them lying around, but there are no guarantees when this will happen. You will eventually get them from enemies like cyclops and stone giant that will throw them at you. Trog and Okawaru can gift them if your throwing skill is high (8 or more). You cannot make large rocks.