You do not see a plain gold ring.

[ElmerHomero]

At 5350' (DL 107), the last two monsters were a mature white dragon and a young white dragon. I head straight for the kill without casting Resistance because of Nenya (which I found a few levels before killing Morgoth).

I Mana Storm the mature dragon (injuring the young dragon with spill damage), then I proceed to Mana Bolt the pair to finish them off. The result is quite predictable: a bunch of &'s in the floor as most dragons drop money as well as objects.

It is because of these &'s that I do not realize there is an unidentified ring on the floor. As I stand on the last &, I see the message:

On the ground: the Ring of Power 'The One Ring' (+15,+15) <+5>.
You have no room for the Ring of Power 'The One Ring' (+15,+15) <+5>.


In hindsight, I think I honestly would have not been able to handle excitement of reading the message

You see a plain gold ring.

As I write these lines, I have yet to pick the ring up.

In a follow up post I will provide some highlights of this dive. The goal is to kill all the remaining uniques, then head over to the town and retire.

Here is a screenshot of the level:

[fph]

Congrats! Living the dream!

[Pete Mack]

You are at DL 107, so it is kind of after the fact. Nevertheless, nice find!

[ElmerHomero]

Thanks, guys.

I did not realize the screenshot was so small. Any suggestions about linking a higher quality image?

Thanks again.

[Pete Mack]

That's an artifact of the bar. Choices:
A. Reduce the size of your main window so that the reduction isn't so severe. (I use this, in effect, since I play primarily on a phone.)
B. Post on an image hosting site and use <img> link

[will_asher]

I have wondered how many players bother to go deeper than dL100 after killing Morgoth.
I think this is the first time I've seen someone post about it. (In my variant I will have monsters (and maybe objects) native to levels deeper than 100.)

[Pete Mack]

I've done it a few times. But it always seemed kinda pointless. Monsters of deeper native depth will still appear in vaults and special rooms.

[ElmerHomero]

I have wondered how many players bother to go deeper than dL100 after killing Morgoth.
I think this is the first time I've seen someone post about it. (In my variant I will have monsters (and maybe objects) native to levels deeper than 100.)

I wonder that too. I've done a couple of times before: the first one was when I finally beat the game. The second one was to cheaply inflate my score on agband.live (before the pandemic hit). I was number 1 in the leaderboard at that time and wanted to pad my lead a bit more.

This time as I mentioned, I want to simply kill all the remaining uniques (Shelob better hide) and then retire. Ever since DL 60 or so, I have been diving via scrolls of deep descent. Only using stairs when I run out of scrolls.

On unrelated notes:

* I have yet to pick the ring; and
* I managed to crop pieces of the original screenshots. I'll link to them later Today.

[ElmerHomero]

Firstly let me apologize. I do not intend to turn this into a zombie thread. I just want to link to the screenshots I mentioned earlier, as well as to tell a bit about some of the highlights of this dive.

The finding of 'the One Ring'

This is the final state of the labyrinth level



Some rather random things about this:

• As soon as I chugged a !Enlightment and realize it was a mini maze I was ready to simply Dimension Door to the stairs and abandon the level. The level feeling 5-5 didn't help either.

• After casting Detection, I decided to quickly clear it. Some notable residents were: 2 Great Wyrms of Annihilation, 2 Gelugons, a pack of Nether Hounds, and a Serpent of Chaos.

• I cleared the level from right to left, but skipped the family of white dragons; after this I almost went straight for the stairs again... I'm glad I stayed a bit longer.

Here are some of the auxiliary set of windows I use



As you can see from the set of messages, I was wrong when I claimed there was a stack of treasure on top of the ring. There was treasure on top of a !Heroism, as well as on top of a =rPoison. The plain gold ring was right there all along for me to see... I just never expected a young white dragon to drop it (keep in mind that this was a 5-5 level).


Highlights of the dive

• Somewhere before DL 30 I encountered a 9-9 level. A pit of Demons was responsible for the first 9. It was also almost responsible for the death of my character: I misjudged LOS rules and an imp teleported me near its buddies ---nrulings and bodaks--- which gave me a run for my money.
  
  My reward for all the trouble was a dungeon Magic Book (which I reckon is responsible for the second 9 in the level feeling). I am colorblind and I did not realize it was a dungeon book. If it wasn't because there was another Magic Book next to it I might have just left it there. I am glad I did not, because the RNG surely tried to make me pay for this lucky find.
  
  At this point I was thinking: "Great. With Arcane Control I should be able to do just fine for the next 30 dungeon levels". But boy was I wrong. It wasn't that dungeon book. It was Wizard's Tome of Power!
  
  Of course, at this point WToP is almost useless, as most of the spells are locked by character level. The only spell I had access to was Shock Wave, which together with a Wand of Anihilation allowed me take on some early uniques that resist elemental attacks. Lucky for me, the wand was able to take several recharges without blowing up.

• Around DL 52 or so, I was ready to give up. Although native to DL 40, Arcane Control decided it wasn't ready to meet my character yet. By this point in time, Shock Wave was not doing enough damage for me to take on monster at that depth without worrying about my really terrible CON score as well as a reliable mana source (yes, I know about the Tap Magical Energy/Recharging combo, but not having access to Dimension Door and Door Creation is really worrying, at least for me). What definitely helped here was the finding of a weapon of *Slay Demon* that spawned with Telepathy at DL 46.

• At DL 56 Arcane Control finally decided to show up. After this, I had pretty much the game won. By this time my CL was in the early 40s and was able to level up quickly. My CON score was still terrible, but hey I'm a mage, if we can strike first and remain unseen, the only thing that can kill us is... ourselves by being stupidly overconfident.

• From this point on, the game pretty much reduced to hunting for ?Deep Descent and killing uniques that showed their faces. Here are some examples:
  
  I entered DL 65 with a CL of 44 and left it at CL 46. The mouth of Sauron, Adunaphel, Ungoliant, Omarax and Tevildo were responsible for this improvement.
  
  DL 80 was definitely not kind to the unique list: Pazuzu, Uvatha, Kham&#251;l, Ji Indur Dawndeath, Thuringwethil, Uldor, Smaug, Hoarmurath, Huan, The Tarrasque, Quaker, Ossë, Wiruin, and Tselakus died quickly and withouht laying a hand/paw/claw on us. The game was kind enough to generate a big room next to a vault with entrances at just the right angles for me to lure monsters in, then Mana Bolt/Thrust Away them to oblivion.
  
  On DL 99, after killing Sauron, I learned the hard way that Thrust Away has no effect on Baphomet. I let him get too close and he sure made a good impression on me: both of his horns are now imprinted on Himring.
  

As a final note, checking my character history I realized that I also lied in my original post when I said that I had found Nenya "a few levels before killing Morgoth". The ring was dropped by a ranger chieftain on DL 99.

That's about it. Thanks for reading.