How would one beat Arena of Blood?

[nordetsa]

Just tried wizmode to survive till Meatlord, and my impression is that it is impossible to beat this sprint for me. At certain point you get invisible enemies, and even before the Meatlord appears enemies are nasty enough to kill you multiple times (my troll got 3 consecutive 'Die?' message).

How do you do it? There isn't much item you can take, pure melee will inevitably get you in trouble, you don't get much spellbook plus there isn't much time to learn the spell as a spellcaster. I feel there would be a way to utilize the insanely fast exp gains, but how I can't figure it out.

[Kate]

There are rings of see invisible at the top and bottom, it's easy to pick one of them up before the spawns really ramp up (play Warper for an extra scroll of blinking to make it even easier). Pure melee is fine, learn which enemies it's safe to stand next to, keep hitting things to heal. Ghoul for the torment immunity is pretty decent too as long as you still watch out for dispel undead.

[dialectric]

Formicids offer a big advantage in the Arena of Blood. If you survive long enough to get to a perimeter wall, you can dig yourself deep into it, then memorize all of the spells in whatever starting book comes with your caster. Still very difficult to survive for long, as the Viles can dig you out, but having an array of spells gives you more options.

dialectric

[Hirsch I]

Dj is awesome, i managed to kill the meatlord once with one. fire, hellfire immunity and rN+++, life is good.

[Azrael]

pick up the Axe of Woe
go Mahkleb
kill
kill
kill

[dck]

DDWr I think is the most overpowered combo for a regular meatsprint win.

[dialectric]

DDWr I think is the most overpowered combo for a regular meatsprint win.

Just because of the extra blink scroll? it seems that unless you are a formacid, you need to play 10+ games before you ever get enough space/time to learn a spell without the onrush of enemies interrupting you.

[crate]

Well as far as background goes in meatsprint....

Backgrounds give you only a few things: starting stats (basically useless, since you deal so much damage with enormously high accuracy, and enemies deal so much damage with generally high accuracy, though I guess dex is not bad--but wr has good starting dex); starting skills (entirely useless, since after you kill a single enemy you have obliterated all traces of your starting skills); equipment (basically useless, since it's not the axe of woe); spellbooks (not entirely useless! But wr has maybe the best book for meatsprint); and then very rarely consumables. By far the best consumable of any background is the scroll of blinking that wr gets. So how can you argue any other background is better?

Also a few backgrounds include gods but these are worse than makhleb so they're actually negatives.

[dck]

@dialectric: Wr is the best background because it starts with ?blink and then has apportation already memorized which allows you to be grabbing your first ring around 15 turns in.
DD imo is the best species because you have huge HPs, good MR, damage shaving and then a bit of rN and all of those things are important in meatsprint.
The only thing Fo have going for them is that they can't be slowed (which is really great) but not really great enough to make up for being unable to use ?blink, !speed or !berserk and paying for this immunity to slow with max HPs also makes it too high a price.