Dealing with Hell Sentinels

[BountyHunterSAx]

I consider myself something of a veteran player at this game. That said, I'm also quite stuck in my ways as far as 'veterans' go and have my own lazinesses and idiosyncracies. As such, it's not terribly surprising to me that there are some things I still just dont get. Hell Sentinels are such a thing.


Say you've got a nice post-endgame character going. He's got Firestorm, rF+++, 50mp, some means of mass-channeling mana, and 150-200 hp. Nice guy, right? Can kill most Pan-lords in 4-7 firestorms. Most fiends in 2-3. Most any enemy in the game in 2 or less. Strong stuff. He switches off to his low-powered Iron Shot when there's just not enough badguys to justify a firestorm. Blink/cBlink away from adjacent baddies.

Then along comes a Hell Sentinel and now you suddenly need 7-10 firestorms! You *could* Iron-shot him, but then you're putting yourself in closer range and he suddenly has a clear shot at you. And that rF+++ you have? Useless. Completely useless.


Needless to say, I'm sick of it. I've never died to a Hell Sentinel, but in the post-endgame they are responsible for more emergency "shit, low/no mana and they're still on me!" moments than any other enemy. Except maybe the occasional pan lord if i engage poorly. I want a nice, reliable, efficient way to 2-shot Hell Sentinels without facing their retribution (or, at absolute most, taking one hellfire to the face).

Options I'm considering trying out in my current run include:
1.) A fully-powered Iron Shot (i had 0.0 in Earth Magic thusfar, but 27 conj and spc))
2.) Bolt of Inaccuracy (sp?) -- i hear their EV is absolute shit.
3.) Polymorph Other. -- Unless demon's are immune to such gimmickry (rats!) I can think of no other fiend I'd rather deal with less. Even the brimstone fiend -- a close 2nd to my hate for this sucker -- still has gone down reliably to two iron shots or one iron shot and two firestorms (if I wanted to do it without getting hit at all.) Also? Having the Polymorph other spell in my spell list would allow for all sorts of fun humiliating kills and ally-morphing shenanigans .
4.) * Lehudib's Crystal Spear. This spell misses its target far too often for me to be considering it. Especially since it deals 10d22 damage -- and thus far from guaranteeing a one-turn kills means that I need to land this sucker twice! But if the 'miss' effect is being calculated vs an enemy's evade? Well then maybe this is the answer to Hell Sentinels that I need.

Options I consider inadequate:
* Haunt/Dragonspam. Yes, it works, but really it's just skirting around the issue of not being able to blow up a goddamn hell sentinel efficiently. Also, mass-abjure can totally undo the value of all my hard work far too often -- and in hihg-stakes situatiosn no less.
* Summon Butterflies. Thusfar in all my trials, hundreds and hundreds of butterflies are not enough to drain the Hell Sentinel's HP. Also, he still seems to catch up with me. Perhaps the butterflies are not as deadly as I thought, but let it not be said that nobody ever suspects the butterfly .
* Abjure/Mass Abjure. These guys are 'real' often enough that this band-aid is not an answer.
*Run from it/Kite it. This solution - though I use it a lot and it does indeed work - skirts around the real issue of being unable to kill them outright. Also, Zigs/certain hell floors can make this a non-option.

Anyway - thoughts?

-AHMAD

[Galefury]

I want a nice, reliable, efficient way to 2-shot Hell Sentinels without facing their retribution

Hahahahaha.

[crate]

There are a few things that are definitely good vs hell sentinels:

1) Good melee
2) Bolt of inacc
3) Tornado (ideally plus one of the above)
4) moving out of their LOS and never killing them

LCS is good too (it's significantly more accurate than iron shot and sentinels have bad EV) but there's the risk that you will run out of MP, melee doesn't run out of swings so it's really the most reliable way to kill them.

[Psieye]

Kiku simulacrum spam and holy longbow kiting is how I prefer to deal with them. Pretty much their entire purpose is to be durable nuisances that you need to respond to.

[njvack]

Fully-powered Shatter?

But seriously they have a boatload of AC and they're supposed to be hard to kill. At least they can't smite you with hellfire.

[Jeremiah]

What about haste + kiting with OOD?

[BountyHunterSAx]

Oooh! OoD!!! I hadn't even *thought* of that. That's actually quite brilliant! They aren't fast enough to stop it, i can do it from out of range. 6mp with vehumet. Pure conjuration - so no side-branching to max power. And it's probably 100% reliable on slower-moving enemies. . . like the hell sentinel

-AHMAD

[diviton]

I've always found a couple Iron Shots to be enough to finish them. The only character I had that had trouble with them was my Mummy Summoner, surprisingly.

[pratamawirya]

Big, fat anti-magic weapons murder them.

[njvack]

Wait, is hellfire not full LOS?

[KoboldLord]

Hell Sentinels are designed specifically to be big, burly meat walls that you have to pummel down through attrition while they beat on you right back. If you find a way to guarantee killing them without allowing a chance to respond, it's a bug and you should report it.

Anyway, the only place that has Hell Sentinels that you might actually want to fight is Dis. If I'm not going heavy earth magic, don't have Fire Storm/Ice Storm/Tornado, and for some reason I also haven't picked up good melee skill to work with, I swap Orb of Destruction onto my list and use that. It's good enough as long as I'm not stupid enough to pull two at once, and they're usually polite enough to stay at range so it does good damage. If you see them in the Abyss or Pan, just walk away.

[BountyHunterSAx]

My fear wasn't so much finding them in Pan, but rather being forced to fight them in a Zig.

Picture this: you see a couple hell sentinels. You can firestorm them both at once. You blow a bunch of mana firestorming three of them to death, but they don't *quite* die, so no vehumet mana refund. You're hiding behind summons and such so you've managed to take only 1-2 hellfire blasts. And then a pan lord shows up, so you cBall for energy quickly . . . and you're tapped out to 0 mp.

With the exception of Hell Sentinels, brimstone fiends, and Pan lords with lucky resist rolls, I can basically 2-shot almost any enemy in the game. This puts me at a healthy 35-40ish mp, with at least two firestorms more in me before I need to c-ball. In other words: safe for a Zig. With Hell Sentinels that average had gone down a lot. My fear was that just the appearance of a batch of hell sentinels would mean me blowing inordinate amounts of mana and not getting results.



At this point though I *can* 2-shot them with Iron Shot and regularly 3-shot them with the same. As I alluded to earlier, my earth magic was far from maxed; so lots of room to grow which I''ve now taken advantage of. They never use hellfire when I'm adjacent to them, and their iron shots are pitifully easy to avoid thanks to my 20~ EV or to tank thanks to my 51AC. So my attitude with them now is to ignore/let my summons (even if that means just butterflies) tank them while I deal with the massive army of threats, and then pick'em off if they get close enough to engage at point blank range. Obviously, if i can include them in my firestorming I will since firestorm *can* deal significant damage to them - depending how the AC rolls go.

-AHMD

[dassem]

One thought I had about this is that for Zigs, you'll probably encounter lots of weaker things around the Sentinels. If you're using area-effect spells, as you burn through those Vehumet will replenish your MP at a helpful rate.
For my last Zig-trawling character (5/5 complete), who was spamming Ice Storm, the concern was not for groups of regular baddies but for singles. A group of Pan Lords was barely even worth casting haste for (there would be probably be at least one susceptible to cold), but dealing with one or two at a time would carry more of a risk of running out of MP.
Positioning such that I could hit several weaker things at the same time as the biggies was the way to proceed...

Oh, I'm probably a "veteran" too. In the sense that I think I've been playing Crawl almost as long as some of the younger posters have been alive (I remember the early newsgroup posts from Linley). Doesn't mean I play well though.

[Lasty]

* Summon Butterflies. Thusfar in all my trials, hundreds and hundreds of butterflies are not enough to drain the Hell Sentinel's HP. Also, he still seems to catch up with me. Perhaps the butterflies are not as deadly as I thought, but let it not be said that nobody ever suspects the butterfly .

Suddenly I want a spell called Summon Murderflies. Level 4 summoning/poison, is just Summon Butterflies, but non-Murderfly creatures take 1 damage for each Murderfly next to them when they start their turn -- including you (no resist, no AC, no evade).

[Psieye]

Suddenly I want a spell called Summon Murderflies.

I think you misspelled "Summon Chaos Butterfly".