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YAWP: [V] 3.1.2v2, High-Elf Mage
This is a follow-up character to my priest character who won last month.
Playing a priest spoiled me because of the ability to heal-self so easily. Mages have limited healing ability, but they make up for it with easy early ID, plentiful haste-self, and awesome offense. Tough monsters with no resistances can be a problem for a mid-level character, but once you have Meteor Swarm you finally have a tough, non-resistible spell. Later, Chaos Bolt becomes a great weapon against uniques, who can't be polymorphed as a side effect. And, of course, Mana storm is great when you need to deal out damage fast and SP are not an object.
This character didn't get great equipment quite as early as the last one did. I had to deal with a few holes in my resists around DL 40. I tried not to let that slow me down too much (even though I am somewhat slow to begin with), because I didn't want to get into the you-can't-go-deeper-until-you-have-good-equipment-but-you-can't-get-good-equipment-until-you-go-deeper catch-22.
Eventually my character found a good equipment set. Every time I would find a new piece of equipment that gave me different resists, I would go through a long process of swapping equipment around to see if I could keep my resists covered but make less of a sacrifice in either stats or speed. I went through this several times, coming up with a lot of innovative combinations, even wielding Calris for awhile (which is actually quite a nice weapon once you enchant it to-hit quite a bit and get rid of the curse). I finally settled on what became my character's final outfit, which covered all resists, gave ESP, and yielded +39 speed; not bad for never finding Ringil or Feanor. I did have to give up 80 HP because of having only 18/190 CON, but thought that was an OK compromise for getting everything else. I imagine the other townspeople got quite a chuckle at the sight of this character outside his house furiously wielding and unwielding weapons and swapping armor around, and going through the same process again several times.
I didn't have anything to worry about as long as I didn't lose my concentration and do anything stupid; however, I almost did this on DL 99 when I decided to clear out a huge vault. I didn't pay attention to a multi-hued D, which turned out to be a Great Wyrm of Many Colors instead of an ordinary AMHD. I didn't have the Resistance spell up and let it breathe me down from 820 to 329 HP in one breath, then made another move before realizing what had happened.
I don't know if I actually moved out of LOS or just got lucky. Anyway, that was a lesson that luckily didn't have to get learned the hard way.
The final battle was pretty much standard mage fare: staying out of melee, lots of mana storms, and occasional restore mana and various healing potions. When Morgoth summoned, I would usually teleport and then Banish whatever he summoned, then sit and wait for him to come back to me. For some reason, I decided to take out Vecna on the side, who was the only other unique left alive when I got to DL 100.
Now that I have winners in the latest version with a mage and a priest (the only characters I typically play) I have to decide what to do now. My choices so far come down to:
1. Play again as something different, probably a Warrior.
2. Play another game, like Dragon Age: Origins--after all, I recently upgraded to a Core I7 with 6GB of RAM and dual NVidia graphics cards, and here I am playing a 20-year-old game using little ASCII characters.
3. Put aside gaming altogether and do something useful.
Note: These choices are listed in order of descending probability. This brings up one last idea: We now have Game Turns, Player Turns, and Active Turns to give us different ideas of how long we are wasting playing this game. How about keeping track of real time spent as well? Check the time of day upon loading or starting a character, then when saving check the time again and increase a "real-time" counter by the difference and store this in the save file. Or is this something we are really better off not knowing?
Oh, yeah, don't want to forget the character dump.
Playing a priest spoiled me because of the ability to heal-self so easily. Mages have limited healing ability, but they make up for it with easy early ID, plentiful haste-self, and awesome offense. Tough monsters with no resistances can be a problem for a mid-level character, but once you have Meteor Swarm you finally have a tough, non-resistible spell. Later, Chaos Bolt becomes a great weapon against uniques, who can't be polymorphed as a side effect. And, of course, Mana storm is great when you need to deal out damage fast and SP are not an object.
This character didn't get great equipment quite as early as the last one did. I had to deal with a few holes in my resists around DL 40. I tried not to let that slow me down too much (even though I am somewhat slow to begin with), because I didn't want to get into the you-can't-go-deeper-until-you-have-good-equipment-but-you-can't-get-good-equipment-until-you-go-deeper catch-22.
Eventually my character found a good equipment set. Every time I would find a new piece of equipment that gave me different resists, I would go through a long process of swapping equipment around to see if I could keep my resists covered but make less of a sacrifice in either stats or speed. I went through this several times, coming up with a lot of innovative combinations, even wielding Calris for awhile (which is actually quite a nice weapon once you enchant it to-hit quite a bit and get rid of the curse). I finally settled on what became my character's final outfit, which covered all resists, gave ESP, and yielded +39 speed; not bad for never finding Ringil or Feanor. I did have to give up 80 HP because of having only 18/190 CON, but thought that was an OK compromise for getting everything else. I imagine the other townspeople got quite a chuckle at the sight of this character outside his house furiously wielding and unwielding weapons and swapping armor around, and going through the same process again several times.
I didn't have anything to worry about as long as I didn't lose my concentration and do anything stupid; however, I almost did this on DL 99 when I decided to clear out a huge vault. I didn't pay attention to a multi-hued D, which turned out to be a Great Wyrm of Many Colors instead of an ordinary AMHD. I didn't have the Resistance spell up and let it breathe me down from 820 to 329 HP in one breath, then made another move before realizing what had happened.
I don't know if I actually moved out of LOS or just got lucky. Anyway, that was a lesson that luckily didn't have to get learned the hard way.The final battle was pretty much standard mage fare: staying out of melee, lots of mana storms, and occasional restore mana and various healing potions. When Morgoth summoned, I would usually teleport and then Banish whatever he summoned, then sit and wait for him to come back to me. For some reason, I decided to take out Vecna on the side, who was the only other unique left alive when I got to DL 100.
Now that I have winners in the latest version with a mage and a priest (the only characters I typically play) I have to decide what to do now. My choices so far come down to:
1. Play again as something different, probably a Warrior.
2. Play another game, like Dragon Age: Origins--after all, I recently upgraded to a Core I7 with 6GB of RAM and dual NVidia graphics cards, and here I am playing a 20-year-old game using little ASCII characters.
3. Put aside gaming altogether and do something useful.
Note: These choices are listed in order of descending probability. This brings up one last idea: We now have Game Turns, Player Turns, and Active Turns to give us different ideas of how long we are wasting playing this game. How about keeping track of real time spent as well? Check the time of day upon loading or starting a character, then when saving check the time again and increase a "real-time" counter by the difference and store this in the save file. Or is this something we are really better off not knowing?
Oh, yeah, don't want to forget the character dump.