AAR - Don't Forget to Turn Out the Light

[ShinX3]

Hi guys! I'm new to these boards but not the game and rogue-likes. Here's my AAR.

It's been a year or so since I picked up Angband, and I was concerned about my lack of practice and trying for a clean win from the beginning. I knew my lack of recent experience wouldn't have me on the ball enough to be completely safe. . .

My first few characters naturally died by being hit by veterans.. frozen by eyeballs.. Until my memories filtered back.. Then I made it to level fifteen with one guy, and I felt I had things down enough I might have a chance. I decided to not follow the high elf ranger route, despite the wisdom of keeping a distance from monsters because it was just too much of a pain to attack all the time that way. I considered my usual old paladin route, but decided to try something different me -- for once I'd try a pure warrior, and the slots saved on spellbooks would hold useful items instead. As a paladin the spells never were sufficient for me with the big baddies, it was hack and slash and potions, so a warrior really made the most sense. I did some quick calculations, and decided Dunadan was a no brainer.

All that was left was to turn AUTO-SCUM off, so that in the lower levels everything wasn't a death pit.

So off started Shinwa, the Dunadan Warrior on his first adventure. He was quite strong, fast, and none too smart or wise. But I had the happiness of knowing he was a credit to his family of Yeomen.

He did very well on the lower levels, his swift and furious blows with his first weapon, a rapier, did in monster after monster, and he graduated rather quickly to a katana with a number of plusses.

Well do I remember the first time he encounter Smeagol roaming around, and did him in without any troubles. Many and most of the uniques fell to his blows with far less trouble than I anticipated. Orc leaders, troll leaders, even summoners fell due to my wand of stone to mud. All I needed was good rock at my back and sides. The route of a pure warrior is very satisfying.

But it was not as if I did not have troubles. From orcs to trolls, cleaning pits and rising in experience, the treasure was just not of the quality I needed to proceed. The unique enemies dropped only good or excellent items, or pitiful daggers. For most of the game until.. the tragic end, I had two rings of resistance, an amulet, and a shield for the four elements. Try as I might, I never could get anything of multi-resistance till near the very end.

And the end was near.. one day a large shield of elevenkind was available on the black market, and Shinwa put on his crown of lordliness for the extra discount, sold off all the spare weapons he'd been hording except for the artifact collection (of course), and suddenly all was gravy. It even had chaos resistance thrown in as a hidden benefit.

Shinwa proceeded onwards, at level 34 he dared go down to level 44, a change of tactics, and as usual by around now I had the nagging sense of forboding I always get. Because here is where I usually die. Worse, my resistances were still mostly only covered in the basics. I had no disenchantment resistance, no poison resistance, no fear resistance, no confusion resistance.. the truth was.. resistance was bad.. and I was tired of hanging around on the mid-levels, teleporting away desperately whenever I ran into a pack of inertia or gravity hounds.

I had gone below my depth, down to level 44, because I was tired of getting lousy items and hoped for better resistance items and drops at these levels.

But I was feeling mighty confident besides because of my tactics. The wands of teleport away, staves of teleport (used rarely, too dangerous), scrolls of teleport level piled up, potions of speed, heroism, healing -- As long as I had a turn, I could avoid anything I noticed. And I could see the invisible.

The problem was.. The problem was.. I was not yet familiar with how bad poison had become. I didn't know.

I guess everyone finds out this way.

I went down the stairs, and like I always do when I first get into a big room, I turned on the light. That was the end. No chance to do anything at all.

I turned on the light, the Ancient Multi-hued dragon was sleeping. It woke up. It breathed gas. The death screen came up. I did a character dump.

I looked it up. Shinwa had over five hundred hit points. Poison, with no resistance, can do up to 800 damage.

Alright. It's over. I can't do a clean win with this guy, he's dead. So I start over again. Now I have to look up the minimum depth these poison breathers appear, so as to never go that low until I have resistance.

But he was a good warrior. He was really good. He had great potential. Now it's over.

[Djabanete]

Classic. Good to know that the old AMHD breath still happens once in a while.

[will_asher]

All that was left was to turn AUTO-SCUM off, so that in the lower levels everything wasn't a death pit.

But it was not as if I did not have troubles. From orcs to trolls, cleaning pits and rising in experience, the treasure was just not of the quality I needed to proceed. The unique enemies dropped only good or excellent items, or pitiful daggers. For most of the game until.. the tragic end, I had two rings of resistance, an amulet, and a shield for the four elements. Try as I might, I never could get anything of multi-resistance till near the very end.

I never play with auto-scum turned off. It's too boring and I never find the equipment I need without a bunch of stair scumming which makes it more boring. 'death pits' are easy to avoid if you have some way of detecting monsters (of course, with a warrior, you often don't have much detection).

I've tried a warrior a few times recently and it seemed like it was taking forever to find the stairs on my first dive when I go to dL3 and then have to find my way back up. I miss the detection spells a lot, but I intend to keep trying. Right now I'm taking turns between warrior and ranger until I get something good going.

EDIT: For example: just now I started a warrior, on my first dive to dL3, I had to explore the whole thing of dL2 and dL1 to find the stairs back up to the town. Then, after I got a scroll of WoR so there's no more problems looking for up stairs, it took me exploring almost the whole level to find the stairs down on dL2.

[Mondkalb]

Poor Shinwa, may he R.I.P.

Sitting at the table, staring at the monitor in disbelieve - jaws on the table - this are the moments when I sometimes hate Angband.

But I'm trying it again, over and over.


The Problem with finding stairs or even hidden doors to parts of the dungeon is what I hate most with warriors.

I prefer paladins who get at least the detection spells early enough (with some luck on the first trip). A dunadan paladin can easily get 3 blows at start with a main gauche. Enchanting this up to +9/+9 makes a good enough weapon (combined with !horoism or berserk strength) to kill Wormetongue ~ at dlevel 8 or so. He always drops excellent items, which is usually the first good stuff to find besides some luckily found dungeon spellbooks or DSMs laying on the ground.