YAVP: DrFE^Sif - Slow and steady wins the race

[MrDizzy]

Morgue:
https://crawl.project357.org/morgue/MrD ... 122400.txt

Quite a slow win (19 hours), but I got there in the end.

First win on all three counts (species, background, god).

I had intended to make this my first 4 rune win as well, by doing Slime after clearing Zot, but I auto picked up the Orb, so I had to get out. The orb run was a bit hairy too. More than once, I got trapped next to a nasty demon and took a beating. I camped on the next upstairs to heal as much as I could until something else nasty turned up.

I struggled for food quite a bit in this game, until I finally picked up an amulet of the gourmand in Zot. It seemed like the game was trolling me. I'd go through long periods where monsters were inedible or left no corpse, then as soon as I'd finally relented and eaten a ration because I was nearly starving, I'd get an edible corpse that I now wasn't hungry enough to eat.

I had a bad scare in Orc. As soon as I went down the stairs into Orc:1, Harold and Fannar were both there along with a crowd of the usual suspects. Harold then used his harpoon to pull me off the stairs and suddenly I was surrounded and couldn't get back to the stairs (in fact an orc was standing on them). It took me a few teleports to get to a place where I could hole up and heal and then quite a long time to work my way back to the upstairs.

I think I like Sif better than Vehumet. Sif gives you many, many spells to choose from. Vehumet only gives you a few and quite often trolls you by giving you spells you don't want.

I like draconians as casters too. You get free AC without wearing body armour that could affect your spellcasting. Although, it does mean one less slot to get resistances from.

[stormdragon]

Congrats on the win! Don't worry about the time, devoting more realtime to your play is just a sign that you enjoy really trying to win; playing optimally does take more time. Also, characters that rely on spamming spells to kill things tend to take more time in general.

The regeneration spell is a huge help on the orb run (and anywhere else that it's hard to rest - basically Abyss and Hell), and you had it in your library. Probably would have been good to memorize it to squeeze more healing out.

You also had Deflect Missiles and Ozocubu's Armour in your library, which are both extremely strong in general. Not sure if you had scrolls of amnesia available, but I would have advised forgetting some spells (fireball and orb of destruction are pretty redundant with fire storm, and ignite poison and teleport other are just lackluster) to pick those up. Battlesphere is also pretty good.