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This character was part of competition 75. This was the first competition I had entered. I was caught off-guard when the contest suddenly ended; turns out the competitions end at the *beginning* of the specified day, rather than the *end* of that day. The character was going very well so I thought I'd finish it even though the contest was over.
Starting from the competition character dump (#4 in contest 75, i.e. http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=9442) : within 2 more hours of play, I had found both Thorin and Narya. These made the character enormously more powerful and so I started descending. I still had to switch between an annoyingly large collection of gear to cover all the resists. When deciding what equipment to keep and what to leave behind, I had crafted my endgame plans around the idea of finding an amulet of Trickery: it would have sust-dex which I lacked, a modest speed bump, plus resist poison, which in turn would allow me to wear Colannon rather than Colluin, giving me a base speed of 20+, and any additional boost I might get from a melee weapon. My only problem was finding the amulet. So I began hunting monsters with good drops with attacks I was immune to. I kept finding more and better stuff, but still no Amulet of Trickery. Towards the end it became kinda silly: Fingwind was massively overpowered against anything except Morgoth, and still no Amulet of Trickery. I killed dozens of Horned Reapers, entire pits of greater demons, uncounted Wryms, and still no Amulet of Trickery. I found Nenya *and* Vilya (an artifact I have never found in any previous game), and still no Trickery. Finally a monster dropped an unidentified amulet .. nope. Elessar. Well, close enough.
Even despite all the drops, I had collected a fairly paltry amount of consumables: I had only 3 !*Heal*, 3 !Life, 6 !Heal, 3 !RestoreMana, 6 !Speed, 2 ?Banishment, and 1 ?MassBanishment, although I had respectable stacks of !CCW and ?Teleport. The preliminary bout with Sauron was uneventful. The fight with Morgoth, anything but.
Since Fingwind is a Paladin, his prayers always have at least a 5% chance of failure. So I could not rely on the Heal prayer in a life or death situation. My battle plan was the same one I've used with paladins in the past: as much as possible, attack Morgoth hand-to-hand, saving my SP to cast Heal frequently anytime I had lost significant HP, and using the consumables in potential life or death situations (e.g. anytime I had less than 600 HP). Because my heavy-weight consumables were precious, I did a lot more running than in other Morgoth battles, using ?Teleport, or Portal, or even Blink to be able to recover by quaffing several CCW, and/or to avoid the summoned hoards of nasties. But I had to be careful with that too, since I had limited amounts of !Speed and my base speed was below 30. It went right down to wire, raging back and forth all over the level, but I managed to slay Morgoth while on my final !Speed boost, with one last *Heal* remaining and virtually everything else used up. Morgoth summoned lots of stuff, and seemed to use a lot of mana-storms, but mercifully never summoned a Black Reaver, a small miracle for which I am grateful.
I debated ending immediately, and if the competition were still going on I probably would have, but I decided to clean up the mess and eliminate the remaining uniques Morgoth had summoned to get a "complete" victory.
The other reason I am inordinately pleased with this victory is that this was only the second time I had ever tried an Ironman game (the first was part of the same competition, but he died early). I've played a lot of Angband over the years, but never Ironman before. Beginner's luck I suppose.
But I never did find that Amulet of Trickery I was looking for.
Starting from the competition character dump (#4 in contest 75, i.e. http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=9442) : within 2 more hours of play, I had found both Thorin and Narya. These made the character enormously more powerful and so I started descending. I still had to switch between an annoyingly large collection of gear to cover all the resists. When deciding what equipment to keep and what to leave behind, I had crafted my endgame plans around the idea of finding an amulet of Trickery: it would have sust-dex which I lacked, a modest speed bump, plus resist poison, which in turn would allow me to wear Colannon rather than Colluin, giving me a base speed of 20+, and any additional boost I might get from a melee weapon. My only problem was finding the amulet. So I began hunting monsters with good drops with attacks I was immune to. I kept finding more and better stuff, but still no Amulet of Trickery. Towards the end it became kinda silly: Fingwind was massively overpowered against anything except Morgoth, and still no Amulet of Trickery. I killed dozens of Horned Reapers, entire pits of greater demons, uncounted Wryms, and still no Amulet of Trickery. I found Nenya *and* Vilya (an artifact I have never found in any previous game), and still no Trickery. Finally a monster dropped an unidentified amulet .. nope. Elessar. Well, close enough.
Even despite all the drops, I had collected a fairly paltry amount of consumables: I had only 3 !*Heal*, 3 !Life, 6 !Heal, 3 !RestoreMana, 6 !Speed, 2 ?Banishment, and 1 ?MassBanishment, although I had respectable stacks of !CCW and ?Teleport. The preliminary bout with Sauron was uneventful. The fight with Morgoth, anything but.
Since Fingwind is a Paladin, his prayers always have at least a 5% chance of failure. So I could not rely on the Heal prayer in a life or death situation. My battle plan was the same one I've used with paladins in the past: as much as possible, attack Morgoth hand-to-hand, saving my SP to cast Heal frequently anytime I had lost significant HP, and using the consumables in potential life or death situations (e.g. anytime I had less than 600 HP). Because my heavy-weight consumables were precious, I did a lot more running than in other Morgoth battles, using ?Teleport, or Portal, or even Blink to be able to recover by quaffing several CCW, and/or to avoid the summoned hoards of nasties. But I had to be careful with that too, since I had limited amounts of !Speed and my base speed was below 30. It went right down to wire, raging back and forth all over the level, but I managed to slay Morgoth while on my final !Speed boost, with one last *Heal* remaining and virtually everything else used up. Morgoth summoned lots of stuff, and seemed to use a lot of mana-storms, but mercifully never summoned a Black Reaver, a small miracle for which I am grateful.
I debated ending immediately, and if the competition were still going on I probably would have, but I decided to clean up the mess and eliminate the remaining uniques Morgoth had summoned to get a "complete" victory.
The other reason I am inordinately pleased with this victory is that this was only the second time I had ever tried an Ironman game (the first was part of the same competition, but he died early). I've played a lot of Angband over the years, but never Ironman before. Beginner's luck I suppose.
But I never did find that Amulet of Trickery I was looking for.
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