@TehDruid:
oh my god you're my hero for posting that pic ;///;*ahem!* Yes I would think casters have a more forgiving time in the
Abyss than straight melee in general. My latest
Abyss journey was kind of tough since I didn't have Flight as a spell this time, and I got cornered by an Executioner and three Skeletal Knights. I used the Wand of Teleport, and the message said "You have a feeling this Teleport will take a while to kick in"... evidently, in the
Abyss your Teleports are hindered and take like 10x as long to work, and the Blink spell has a high chance to fail when used as well. But I was JUST BARELY able to endure the assault of the Executioner and the other foes, by casting Phase Shift, Summon Scorpions a couple times, and backing away from him as best I could. The teleport finally kicked in when I was down to less than 10 HP, and I survived and was able to recover before continuing to explore the
Abyss. Whew.
Later on, even though I already had the Abyssal Rune, I went back into the
Abyss anyway, because A: I had almost died on D:27 (the final floor before Zot) from Draconians and felt like I needed to level up some more, and B: I was stressed out, and I needed to de-stress, so while I was exploring the
Abyss to relax I also turned on some
Super Metroid music. It worked wonders. I soon found ANOTHER Executioner, but this time I was a much higher level, and the moment I spotted it, ORB OF DESTRUCTION FIREEEE! Blasted the thing down to 1/3 of its life, followed up with two Mystic Blasts, it was BARELY ALIVE and zipped in to strike me twice (down to half my health already!), I tried to Blink away and it worked, called in the Demonic Horde, let it cut open an opening through the army of imps, and finally, one final beautifully aimed shot through the middle while it was distracted by other foes,
goodbye first Tier-1 demon I've ever killed! Fucking. Glorious.
Eheh... so yeah, that was my most recent
Abyss adventure. ^^ It gets rough down there, but as long as you're leveled high enough (typically the bare minimum of XL 12, not saying lower levels can't survive but you have to be real lucky), and Flight/Levitation Potions to get over lava along with Swiftness/Haste/Speed Potions to enhance your retreats will
tremendously improve your chances; Teleport too, but not as much, since the
Abyss specifically cripples teleportation actions just by being there.
If you can go toe to toe with Tier-3 demons and win, you're safe in the Abyss. The most common foes I find are Tiers 1 through 3 demons, Skeletons and Zombies in the D:15 through D:27 range (possibly the Vaults range too), Small and Large Abominations (the latter of which hit like a truck, but are extremely fragile defense-wise; my melee-caster hybrid could four or five-shot them with a Fire branded Long Blade, so straight melees at that same level as me should be able to one or two-shot them). The ones you want to be very careful of are the Nexequocs because of mutations; an Amulet could fix that, if you have one, otherwise either stay out of their LoS, or if possible try to run in if they haven't spotted you and mow them down before they can inflict a mutation, because they are actually pretty frail for a XL 16+ player. The other dangerous ones are Skeletal Knights simply because they're very heavy in defense as well as attack, not frail like most of the mid-level demons, and they come in groups; Efreets are more dangerous than Smoke Demons (unless you have a Freezing weapon) but rather rare, and occasionally you find packs of Slime Creatures too, same as always, pick off one at a time if you can possibly isolate them and not let them merge, otherwise just run away from them,
Abyss has water and lava everywhere and you can usually use it to block foes like that from chasing you.
Stay in control of your surroundings.The most dreadful foes that only the most advanced characters should fight are of course the Tier 2 and 1 Demons, such as the aformentioned Executioners, along with the Fiend-class demons, and then viscious non-demons such as Liches and Ancient Liches (the normal Liches are somewhat frail and can be cleaved down by a powered-up character but they HIT YOU LIKE A BUS, especially if Ranged, particularly with Orb of Destruction; best to treat them like Nexequocs only with a near one-shot death attack instead of mutation attacks, and don't even think about fighting Ancient Liches unless your character is SPECIFICALLY made to combat unholy opponents, i.e. a The Shining One build). There are also Daevas (read: rouge angels, complete with Smiting attacks and double your speed), and their unholy counterparts, Profane Servitors (I never even knew these existed until today! Good thing it didn't spot me .__. It even radiated a BLACK Halo, it was really trippy). I managed to kill one Daeva in my last trip here, and I did it with summons to help distract him; for straight melee I don't know what the right strategy would be, other than potion up and let 'im have it and cross your fingers and be ready to heal or teleport out if you can spot well in advance that you won't win the exchange in hasted blows.
Keep in mind that I am not a Crawl expert like many of the blue-named Councelors here; most people would say you'd have a safer chance in running away from everything, and as a straight melee that might be more true than I'm imagining, but as for me, I've always preferred to fight it out and defeat every foe I even remotely can without dying. Even an underleveled visitor to
Abyss will have things to kill, after all; the place is crawling with Tier-1 Imps for instance, and I reckon an XL 9 character can fight the Tier-2 demons at least decently, as long as he's not being swarmed and he takes them on one by one. The shape-changing walls can be used to your advantage to isolate foes you want isolated, or to block their advances completely, or another dirty trick is to lure a foe into the shallow water and then kill it while it faces its accuracy penalty for not being on land. But whatever your strategy, the #1 rule that I'm sure everyone can agree with me on is that
practice makes perfect! The more trips to the
Abyss you have, the better you'll get at handling it. I'm not saying get banished on purpose, but later in the main dungeon if you're leveled enough and you spot one of the manual enterances to the
Abyss, why not give it a whirl, on your terms, after preparing for it, and give yourself an educational lesson in netherworld dungeoneering 101?
Never give up!