(V) YASD - a frozen mage

[azfalt]

Phillipe III joined his short-lived ancestors in the great gnomish beyond.

This was my most succesful mage yet. I went with an all-casting strategy, wielding a ring of escaping constantly to get around the slowing caused by my char's pathetic strength. My progress was achingly slow compared to playing my usual experience with rangers/rogues/paladins, but I was lucky enough to find Raal's as my first dungeon book! I should have known then my character would die soon...

I took one step on 2050' chasing a necromancer, stepped into LOS of an ancient white dragon, insta-death.

Oh - I just looked back and realized I didn't have RCold - I had just recently swapped my Defender for a weapon of Westernesse, and assumed Thalkettoth covered the basic four resists since Hithlomir does, too. Oh man that is stupid. Still not sure I could survive singly-resisted frost breath with only ~150hp though.

This is sad. I think I'm going to play a warrior next.

[PowerDiver]

Actually, the low hp are kind of liberating. I posted about this to rgra. If you cannot survive a resisted breath, you don't need to bother worrying about that resistance!

With low hp at that depth, you cannot afford to move before detecting. If you do not have ESP, infravision and light radius can be more useful than elemental resistances to try to live a little longer before the inevitable ignominious demise. Sometimes you need to flee at your very first move.

[azfalt]

It looks like it just comes down to having that ESP - the dragon was around a corner, so I wouldn't have seen it even with good infravision.

Anyway, I got tired of playing mages, so I've been running a half-troll warrior. He found ESP early (and Resistances of Scarabtrices even before that!), got a +3 RoS and just picked up Hammerhand around 2000', all in about half the time of that poor dead mage.