4th ever Angband char, found feanor

[BeastofFunk]

Hello all,

I grew up watching my dad play angband (he still hasnt won, though he got to morgoth once), and decided to give it a shot. After 3 fail characters (the furthest getting to dlvl15), i decided to try a HE ranger. 60 dlvls in i found feanor... and then later found ringil (some of you veterans will hate me for this).

Im told that if i lose, i will bring shame to my family. i have all resists and base 27 speed, as well as bard and some nice arrows. just killed tarrasque, maeglin, kronos, huan, and qzldslllap, currently on dlvl 90. of course, im playing like a frightened 4 year old trying to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, so my turn count is ridiculous. but a win is a win, and a win/loss ratio of 1:3 would be pretty nice to brag about

thoughts? also how do i get morgoth to fight me one-on-one?

[Derakon]

Morgoth can and will summon during the fight, so you'll have to be able to deal with summons. You'll have a few potential options:

* Banishment and Mass Banishment. The former destroys all non-unique monsters of a given species (e.g. 'Z' for zephyr hounds) on the level, the latter destroys all non-unique monsters of any species within a large radius of your character. Obviously useless against uniques. If you like you can take the time to kill all the uniques in the game aside from Morgoth, in which case he can't summon them (and will instead pull powerful undead, IIRC).

* If you're a priest or a paladin, you have Banish Evil. This teleports away all evil monsters in line-of-sight, including uniques (and thus including Morgoth). Morgoth of course will come barreling right back towards you, but the other summons won't. Useless against non-evil monsters but in practice you won't see any.

* Destruction + Teleport Other. This is my favored approach. First, you run off into a corner of the level and destruct it (making certain Morgoth isn't in range). This gives you a very broken-up battleground with lots of line-of-sight obstructions. If Morgoth summons, simply phase door away; this should take you out of line-of-sight of all enemies in the area. Because Morgoth is the fastest monster in the game and he bores through walls, he'll be the first to catch up to you. Teleport him away, then use destruction again. This is a very reliable technique since it hits uniques and non-uniques with no concern for line-of-sight, evilness, etc. The destructed area also means that if you need to heal, you can phase away first to buy some time.

Keep in mind that Morgoth drains charges with one of his melee hits, and drains all stats with another. Also, he can deal up to 600 damage with a single spell, and potentially upwards of around 800 if he gets absurdly lucky with melee (hitting near-max on each hit, plus crushing you with earthquakes twice). You've been hoarding healing all game, right? This is when you bust all that stuff out.

[BeastofFunk]

I did it! Here is the dump http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11396
Dispatched Sauron with ease, then went on to the big guy. Morgoth was fairly easy, only because he didn't seem to be trying.... First thing he does is summon a blue jelly and a white worm mass. I actually got angry at him for mocking me. Anyways, I got a little bit paranoid and instead of fighting him in a destructed zone i filled an entire room with runes. Actually worked out quite well because after he started wrecking up the place the only spaces not occupied by slabs of granite were covered by runes, so he couldn't summon properly for a while.

So that's it I guess. Now time to play it again with another class to make sure it wasn't pure, dumb luck (although feanor/ringil was pretty hilarious). I think the only reason I won this quickly is because every new monster/unique scared the heck out of me, and as a result I played the game ridiculously carefully. Probably will never win again. Thanks for the advice though! The banishment really helped. Also I had killed every single unique by then without hunting for them, thanks to qzzldfpp summoning them all to me in one go :P