equipment help

[Gockel]

Hey there!!

finally made it beyond dlvl 40 for the first time and at the moment i'm a bit confused about which equipment to wield/keep as swap and about the question if further diving could be healthy or not... the specific questions are posted with the dump which is here:

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11169

would be great if anyone of you could help me out with some advice!

thanks!

[Derakon]

G'day.

Aglarang is an excellent weapon. Try out that Ring of Acid in your home; it will brand your weapon with acid, tripling its dice damage against monsters that don't resist. In Aglarang's case, that means going from 8d4 (average 20) to 24d4 (average 60) -- 200 more damage/round!

Robes of Permanence are nice, but usually stat drain isn't that much of an issue, and you already have its resists covered elsewhere. Arvedui would give you nexus resistance, which prevents nexus stat swapping. Rohirrim might be helpful for extra blows if you ditch the Ring of Strength. Both are better than Permanence IMO.

By this point, shouldn't you be able to cast Haste Self from spellbook 4? That'd make it worth carrying.

Your attack rods are worthless. Use your crossbow instead; it'll deal more damage and doesn't use up inventory slots. That rod of Slow Monster in your home is also useless.

Personally I would carry more scrolls of Word of Recall. Generally I stock up 5 when in town, so I have three to spare for elemental damage.

Wear the Caesti of Power. You have another source of Free Action.

[Gockel]

ow... didn't know that ring of acid affects my weapon. sounds nice!

guess i'll use rohirrim as nexus is already covered by the boots of stability.

haste self works but with 50% fail rate, so i didn't consider it worth using. but i guess it might be worth a try. shall fetch it soon...

i was thinking about the caestus of power, actually i didn't wear it because i wanted to keep my spell points high. but again, i guess that's stupid...

guess i'll keep my lightning rods, quite liked them against hound packs, but i'll ditch the acid one.

thx for the help! particulary the bit about the ring of acid sounds great!! will try it out immediately!

oh, and the only effect of heavy armour (the weight of your armour is encumbering your movement) is a decrease of speed, right? didn't know if there's anything else, so i simply avoided it until now...

[PowerDiver]

oh, and the only effect of heavy armour (the weight of your armour is encumbering your movement) is a decrease of speed, right? didn't know if there's anything else, so i simply avoided it until now...

No, that message means something else. Every pound of armor past some threshold costs you 1 point of mana.

Weight in general can slow you down, so it can be better to use light armor for that reason, but you do not get any messages about that.

[Gockel]

ah, ok... i knew about the general weight but had no idea about the armor encumbrance, which made me avoid it generally...
but i guess i can live with a little mana loss for wearing arvedui or rohirrim.
thx for your help!

[Derakon]

Oh, right, forgot that wearing the caestus of power will nuke your SP. It's been awhile since I played a mage-type. In that case it's up to you whether or not the extra killing power is worth the loss of spellcasting capacity.

[Pete Mack]

50% fail rate for haste self is still excellent, so long as you have enough SP. (More than 2x enough to cast it once).
Of course, you need to cast it before the monster wakes up or comes in LOS.

[Gockel]

sounds convincing... took the book with me now although my sp aren't really high.

but things got much more complicated during the last 2 hours. don't know if i'm just damn lucky or if this is normal (as i've never been so deep in the dungeon) but as you can see in my dump i found pretty many new weapons, armours, a ring of ice etc... i'm tired so i won't start thinking about my possibilities until tomorrow, but still i'd be thankful for any opinions...

oh and one more question:
how does branding work exactly? if i used that ring of ice as well, would it add once more the double amount of the dice damage (ending up with 40d4 against non-acid/frost-resistant creatures when i use aglarang)?
or does just one brand work at a time as the average-damage-calculation seems to state?

guess i won't do it in any case, i prefer to keep my hp highwith the ROC, i'd just like to know in order to be able to interprete the damage-calculation better.

thx for your help!

[Derakon]

You only get one brand at a time, but you get the best brand of the set available to you. If you're fighting an evil undead monster that's vulnerable to flame, and your weapon has a firebrand (x3), slays evil (x2), and *slays* undead (x5), then you get the x5 multiplier.

[Gockel]

thx again for your help, everyone!

at the moment i have 2 issues (maybe i have many more, but these are the ones i can see )

like timo said, i have no permanent source of poison resistance. but as i haven't found any ring of poison resistance yet i can't switch to the solution you suggested...
so i guess i'll simply try to proceed (carefully) until i find a more suitable source of res poison than rilia... or do you think that would be plain suicide? i'm a bit bored with the idea of using rilia as my primary weapon and i'm just as bored with the idea of scumming the current depths for poison res...

my second issue (not so big):
should i continue using arvedui for nexus res or does anyone thing thalkettoth's +3 speed bonus would make up for that... i tend strongly towards keeping res nexus but +3 speed (which would finally get me over +10 together with aglarang's +5 and thror's +3) is tempting.

[Derakon]

You can cast resist poison when you need it. Just make certain you don't get surprised by poison breathers -- cast detect monsters frequently.

As for Thalkettoth vs. Arvedui, again, you can detect nexus breathers, and there aren't very many of them. I'd go with Thalkettoth, personally.

[Gockel]

ha! just had a little breakthrough!
finally got my poison resistance + a permanent source of esp and a robe of the magi which effectively doubled my sp to 100 finally...the only thing that hurts a bit is removing my nice ring of acid, aglarang was funnier with it...

anyway tomorrow i'll build up my new equipment set and then it's time to dive a bit...
thx again for all the help! don't think i would've made it so far without it... now i feel confident (which probably won't be healthy ), the only thing i'm a bit afraid of is the fact that from now on i won't know my enemies at all. 'll have to hope for all of them to sleep peacefully in order to probe them...

[buzzkill]

Hah, I've been there. Haste sooner, not later. Avoid un-probed uniques, and read the flavorful descriptions of non-unique enemies. They occasionally contain useful info.

[Gockel]

will do! until now i used the exp points reward as a first indicator of wether to fight or to run, but obviously it's not the best idea...
i realized that when i fought uvartha (??? the horseman, first of the ringwraiths), he was a pleasant surprise: by far the highest exp reward i had seen until then, but ridiculously easy to kill...
the first encounter with the opposite phenomenon might become more interesting and far less pleasant...

[Timo Pietilä]

will do! until now i used the exp points reward as a first indicator of wether to fight or to run, but obviously it's not the best idea...
i realized that when i fought uvartha (??? the horseman, first of the ringwraiths), he was a pleasant surprise: by far the highest exp reward i had seen until then, but ridiculously easy to kill...
the first encounter with the opposite phenomenon might become more interesting and far less pleasant...

Some basic survival skills:

Inability to kill monsters kills you.
Side-effects kills you.
Damage kills you.
Double-moves kills you.
Surprises kills you.
Getting cornered kills you.

So: Plan your gear to have method of delivering as much damage as possible, resist high damage and have high HP, resist side-effects, have speed and detection and have way to avoid or get away from danger. Last one isn't necessary gear, it is more a skill. Just do not get surrounded, avoid groups of pass-wall monsters, do not wake them up if you can possibly avoid it, keep your retreat route planned ahead. If that fails, then use a "escape method", teleports of all kinds, *destruction* things like that.

Fighting one monster at the time is better than fighting eight. Use specialized things when appropriate. Learn to use swaps.

When you have high stealth having an item that aggravates with you but not on you is beneficial. You can then decide when to wake things up and which monsters to wake up. Hammerhand is especially good at that.