Sprucery wrote:byrel wrote:Allow me to expand on that. Pretend you're playing Nethack. Now get your ascension kit together. Now ascend.
- gray dragon scale mail
- cloak of displacement
- shield of reflection
- amulet of free action
- boots of speed
- helm of brilliance
- gauntlets of strength
- blessed unicorn horn
- blessed luckstone
- blessed back of holding
- wand of death
- 4 scrolls of gold detection
- a lizard corpse
- wand of digging
- ring of levitation
- blessed potions of full healing
I probably forgot something but damn I'm already having trouble finding some of these things!
Well, I ascended Nethack 4-5 times. And while badwiki will tell you you need all sorts of things, once you ascend a couple times you start realizing that they're equipping you for idiot-proof ascension. And since you managed to get to that point, you're not an idiot.
What you need:
- The basic invocation Macguffins, plus candles to fill the Candelabrum
- Some source of MR
- Some dragon scale mail (about as hard to find as it is in crawl, but with no downsides)
- Unicorn horn (you've been carrying this since midgame)
- Some source of levitation (spell, stack of potions, ring, boots, whatever)
- Some source of portal detection (scroll of gold detection, wand of secret door detection, whatever)*
- Good AC
- Some method of dealing with hordes of adventurers and priests. Can be good weapon(s), good spells, ring of conflict, pet purple worm, or whatever.
*I've ascended without this once, but it was tedious and obnoxious. The amulet of yendor itself will play hot-and-cold for portal detection. Would not do again.
Things like lizards, etc. are overrated. Any good cloak will protect you from slow stoning, and on the rare chance it pierces, you can just pray it off. Though lizard corpses don't rot, so you can carry them as comestibles if it's convenient.
It's really not that much longer than a crawl ascension kit. Crawl has the advantage of being less kitified, which is one of the reasons I play it more. You can have EV instead of AC. Or just a boatload of HP. You still need some source of rF++ and rMut (or a ridiculous number of potions.) You still need either irresistable damage or ninja tools.
And the fact that the specific resistances you need are caused by exactly one type of endgame monster is poor design. It'd be one thing if Zot:5 was hell-themed or something and there was a general theme benefit to high rF. That would be good design. This level is clearly a fire level, and new people will understand going in they should have fire resist. If it was a realm of fire and chaos, mut resistance would make a lot of sense too.
But as it is, there's this one stupid monster who happens to have the highest HD in the game, generally not show up anywhere else in similarly themed levels (Zot1-4) and be the only monster to combine fire and malmutation attacks. And randomly is unaffected by some tools for dealing with enemy casters (silence). On a level where there are no significant equivalent threats of other types, aside from torment from summoned fiends. This suffers from a lack of theming and coherancy. I really think it should be reconsidered. Though I'm not sure what the best answer is... it's got to be better than this spoilery mess.