A new instadeath for me

[awldune]

Gnome mage, clvl 32, very carefully cleaning out a vault at 2600'. There were two lesser vaults side by side, not much to worry about in either after killing off a dozen dreads. Found a nice crown of the Magi.

ID'ing the loot from the second vault, suddenly I see, "The Ethereal Dragon breathes confusion... You die."

It came from outside detect range through the walls. Tough break!

[cofresi]

Most unfortunate indeed. I take it you did not have Thranduil or any other form of telepathy at the time. It just goes to show that when the RNG says your number is up, there's nothing more to be said.

[PowerDiver]

I put ethereal dragons on my most dangerous monster list. Check out http://groups.google.com/group/rec.g...insubject:list

You may have to scroll up. For some reason my browser starts in the middle of the thread and I don't know how to fix that.

[Derakon]

The reason your browser starts partway down the page is because you've linked to a specific part of the page, instead of the page in general. Remove the "#97e7a075c1e81e1a" from the URL and it'll take you to the top.

What's particularly terrible about Adunaphel?

[PowerDiver]

The reason your browser starts partway down the page is because you've linked to a specific part of the page, instead of the page in general. Remove the "#97e7a075c1e81e1a" from the URL and it'll take you to the top.

What's particularly terrible about Adunaphel?

I just did an advanced search with google groups, making no particular reference to the post that got aimed at, and I tried searching with qualifiers such as written by me, so I have no clue why that was added to the link. With luck I will remember to cut after the '#' in the future. Thanks. I might as well edit it now.

Read the thread. ISTR that discussion was in there. I remember Timo also was perplexed why I ranked Adunaphel so high, but I have lost a huge number of characters and loot and consumables, mostly indirectly but caused nevertheless, to trouble with Adunaphel.

[awldune]

Most unfortunate indeed. I take it you did not have Thranduil or any other form of telepathy at the time. It just goes to show that when the RNG says your number is up, there's nothing more to be said.

Yeah, ESP would have saved me, as would another point of CON. Oh, well.

[the Invisible Stalker]

It would be nice to see some statistics about how many @'s on the ladder have been killed by which monsters. Unfortunately there seems to be no easy way to extract this information. Anyone with a full set of dumps could cat the lot of them to

sed -nE '/^Killed by (.*)$/s//\1/p' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

but I wouldn't want to download all of them.

[pav]

Vanilla only, 337 dumps, 141 unique causes.

4 The Lernaean Hydra.
4 Uriel, Angel of Fire.
4 an Air hound.
4 an Ethereal dragon.
4 an Inertia hound.
4 an Undead beholder.
4 starvation.
5 Azriel, Angel of Death.
5 a Chaos hound.
5 a Drolem.
5 a Gelugon.
5 a Pit Fiend.
5 a Plasma hound.
5 an Ancient green dragon.
6 a Dracolich.
6 a Dread.
7 Carcharoth, the Jaws of Thirst.
8 The Phoenix.
8 a Time hound.
8 an Ancient multi-hued dragon.
12 a Gravity hound.
44 Ripe Old Age.

[PowerDiver]

Vanilla only, 337 dumps, 141 unique causes.

4 starvation.

This is indicative of the problem with this exercise. I suspect some or all of those were actually deaths to fire attacks that burned the last scroll of recall. The final blow is often not the true cause of death.

It can get convoluted. Adunaphel appears in a wall where I cannot teleport him, finding me badly wounded, and I am forced to teleport self. Then energy hounds destroy my wand of teleport other and surround me, and I have to teleport again to get killed by I forget what, but I remember I thought I would have survived with the wand. I blame that death on Adunaphel even though his appearance was two steps removed.

[Derakon]

I suppose a more in-depth analysis would involve examining the message history and giving all monsters seen there an "assist" in the death. That of course would ignore monsters that influence your behavior without actually taking any direct action (e.g. "oh shit, there's a balrog on the other side of this wall; time to teleport"), but it'd be less likely to lose these indirect causes.

I'm kinda surprised so many people die to The Phoenix. I always saw him as a bit of a one-trick pony whose only major attack could be double-resisted by any character, though I see he now has light breath and a summoning spell. Time hounds also surprise me, because while they're annoying, I've never found them to be directly dangerous.

[buzzkill]

I blame that death on Adunaphel even though his appearance was two steps removed.

I attribute it to cowardice . Tis better to die a warrior.

[Nick]

I'm kinda surprised so many people die to The Phoenix. I always saw him as a bit of a one-trick pony whose only major attack could be double-resisted by any character, though I see he now has light breath and a summoning spell.

Also breathes plasma, which I would guess is the big killer.

Time hounds also surprise me, because while they're annoying, I've never found them to be directly dangerous.

The big danger is getting CON drained to the point where you die from lack of HP (if you see what I mean).

[Pete Mack]

[Phoenix] Also breathes plasma, which I would guess is the big killer.

Yes, and he is also speed +20 and is very alert, so he can blow you away before you realize he is there.

The big danger [from time hounds] is getting CON drained to the point where you die from lack of HP (if you see what I mean).

The big danger is that they are speed +20 and breathe en masse for a lot of damage. CON draining is just a nuisance unless you are playing ironman. The only stat draining that's likely to be fatal is draining of STR by a group of (summoned) dreads.

[Pete Mack]

ID'ing the loot from the second vault, suddenly I see, "The Ethereal Dragon breathes confusion... You die."

Beware of Death Drakes too, for similar reasons.
(Speed +10, invisible, pass through walls, breath higher elements for a lot of damage.)
However, their breaths don't generally leave you blind or confused as a side effect, so they usually only get one chance to finish you off.

[the Invisible Stalker]

Thanks, pav.

The final blow is often not the true cause of death.

The true cause of death for almost all of my characters was going down that first set of stairs. Without that they would still be happily running around town level.