moocowmoocow wrote:Try not to ever think you're "committed to the battle". Naga is hard because it takes away the option of simply walking away. For abilities like BiA and other buffs, they should be activated before the monster is in range to hit you. If you realize mid fight that you've engaged something too hard, it's time for escape consumables.
When you find ID scrolls, always use them to identify unknown potions. Potions of speed and invisibility will often save you more surely than heal wounds. Read ID scrolls on cleared levels; none should be dangerous to you. Scrolls of blinking and fear can almost ensure survival. Teleport is less appropriate for high danger due to its delay. Perhaps play a centaur or spriggan to feel the power of kiting and running. This will show why potions of speed and the haste spell are so valued. Above all, make a conscious effort to identify enemies and gauge their strength before you move towards them. Without that it is hard to go far.
Oh and also do you make use of items like blowguns and slings? Poison needles can turn dangerous monsters like ogres into harmless bags of XP. Also if you find wands of fire/cold/draining/disintegration, they are going to be way more powerful than your character's offense in the early game.
Perhaps you misunderstood what I said. Committed doesn't mean emotionally or mentally committed but as in...fighting for my life. Yes I know about running away (I think I mentioned the tele scrolls, didn't I?) I didn't try to BiA. I mentioned it because I didn't ever use it for fear of it failing before the encounter became close quarters in the cases where I expected to need something like it, using Berserk was typically effective enough even if I had to escape after. I do use darts, slings or blowguns but more the thrown projectiles than slings because I don't like giving up my melee weapon and I really hate the damned message "are you sure you want to swing with your sling?" (or however its worded). Man that pisses me off. I would expect that if you aren't able to equip both a melee and missile thrower that you could at least use the Unarmed attack that comes without equipping a weapon, instead of the horrible (Yes or No, no lower case letters will do) prompt that repeats and repeats.
Yeah I used the wand of fire I found to great effect on several lines of monsters. And if I had seen what was approaching before it got there (I was resting on a stair case (ugh why can't (r)est be a command that stops automatically when monsters come in view like movement???) using '5' and they were there next to me. I assumed wrongly that the knight was a warrior because the tiles look the same to me.) I would have fled upstairs and tried a different stairs (there were two on that level of the mines.) I don't want to sound like I am blaming the UI because I know that these older UI type games are inherently flawed and that part of the game is to work around and get used to the flaws. Clearly I need to be more patient with controls.
I may try another Centaur but I didn't like the one I did try and it was not something I wanted to repeat. Spriggan seems like a willful suicide mission unless you know what you are doing (which clearly after hundreds of deaths I still don't.) The food benefit has yet to be a factor. I think I've starved maybe twice altogether and both times were in the beginning.
To be fair though I think advising players to use wands is a bad idea in general. Because you need a pretty decent evoke (it seems) to get a good chance of a decent effect out of them usually. I have no idea by the way what you mean by the term "kiting" if that is some tactical term it escapes me and I am pretty good with lingo usually.
@Zogre no shame but definitely not much fun either. Particularly that combination of Gargoyle Berserker seems horrible to me. Mino Berserker was fun but hard ...I did get one to a similar level as the two characters I've posted here. (But boy that Ghost is/was nasty.) Your last suggestion seems interesting. As far as not playing with Naga I think I did fairly well with that one considering I'd not used them before. It did fairly well with the beserk ability (except for the end where the berserk ran out before I could finish off the threat.)
Thanks for your input both. I think the main problem is that I just will always find a way to screw up what I am doing because I will run into something OP early on. This has happened every single game. A few times I have overcome the difficulty but not because it wasn't insane but because I was conversely lucky and or had the wit to try the one out that had a chance to work. The unforgiving nature of this game is really harsh.
I've played Angband (vanilla and others), Tales of Middle Earth, Tales of Maj Eyal, Portalis, Elona (and+), Nethack (and variants), Adom, and dozens of other similar games in each of the major roguelike categories (not to mention the many roguelike lites) and I have never encountered anything quite so randomly harsh as the RNG in DCSS. In fact if anything it reminds of the old Warlords game in that aspect. That's why I've had moments of wanting to just delete and forget. (Although come to think of it it does remind me a little of the pink molds from the old TOME. Kill one and suddenly a godlike monster comes and eats you.)
Watching others may help, though I will note that I am typically fumble fingered so unavoidable accidents become disasters when I am otherwise doing fine, this won't be remedied by seeing just how someone used their wand of digging (why is there no tunneling in this game btw??) to set up the perfect place to fight off a hoard, etc.
Saturday, 15th February 2014, 03:30 
. It automatically handles disturbance, etc.
