first YAWP in 13 years of playing (3.1.2v2, HE Warrior)

[mwotton]

Hi everyone - I'm Mark, I used to hang out on rgra back in the day.
Today, I'm delighted to present Tetahuec, dragonstomper and morgoth-decapitator extraordinaire!

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11563

Damage was pretty high from early on - managed to pick up some good damage rings, as well as hammerhand, cambeleg and the shield of the haradrim. Also rather lucky in getting fingolfin late, and boots of feanor as well as a +14 RoS - speed was rarely a problem late

Was a bit lucky at times - Hounds got me down to 1 HP at about clvl 30 (!?), and i was very fortunate to escape with my skin intact.

I did have to hang on to a couple of things i wish i didn't - Evenstar was providing nether, so couldn't lose it for the rather tasty elfstone of elessar, and both Bard and Umbar languished at home for the sake of Belthronding's disenchantment resist. Similarly, Thalkettoth hung around till the end, purely for shards. Hold life was pretty tricky for me - i eventually got sick of waiting at the suggested depths and just dived hard with a stack of restore life potions, which seems to have paid off.

Any suggestions on what i could have done better? I know 2.5 million turns is a fairly leisurely cruise, but I've lost a few promising level 50 warriors to Morgoth before, and couldn't bear to lose another. (No savescumming, obviously.)

apologies for the uneven capitalisation, it's 2:30am here and i couldn't be bothered fixing it.

but yay! first vanilla winner!

mark

[Raxmei]

It isn't strictly necessary to cover all resists. Shards for example have a damage cap of 500, few monsters breathe shards at all, and the side effect isn't crippling. Hold life is nice to have but by no means essential.

[Philip]

It isn't strictly necessary to cover all resists. Shards for example have a damage cap of 500, few monsters breathe shards at all, and the side effect isn't crippling. Hold life is nice to have but by no means essential.

Yes, but at least the damage reduction helps, not that I'd use thalketoth only for shard resist. Now, nether, that's one pointless resist, especially when the other option is the elfstone.

[Derakon]

Yeah, sorry about those "have X before going below Y depth" guidelines. They don't really correspond to reality in any useful fashion. If you can handle the monsters you're facing (or can avoid them!) then you're good to go. Killing monsters generally requires some combination of damage, speed, hitpoints, and resists -- but hitpoints can sub in for resists much more easily than resists can sub in for hitpoints. For the high elements (pretty much everything past poison), get the resist if you care about the side-effects, but otherwise don't worry about it too much.

For example, you had no real need to keep Belthronding around when not fighting disenchanters, of which there are few. A more powerful launcher would have served better for normal combat, and you could simply kill disenchanters with ranged combat, or swap in Belthronding for melee.

[Max Stats]

Hi everyone - I'm Mark, I used to hang out on rgra back in the day.
Today, I'm delighted to present Tetahuec, dragonstomper and morgoth-decapitator extraordinaire!

Congratulations, first of all. You will always remember your first win above all others. In fact, I still remember getting my first win in Moria all those years ago.

I did have to hang on to a couple of things i wish i didn't - Evenstar was providing nether, so couldn't lose it for the rather tasty elfstone of elessar, and both Bard and Umbar languished at home for the sake of Belthronding's disenchantment resist. Similarly, Thalkettoth hung around till the end, purely for shards. Hold life was pretty tricky for me - i eventually got sick of waiting at the suggested depths and just dived hard with a stack of restore life potions, which seems to have paid off.

Some regulars have pointed out that rNether doesn't reduce max damage as much as other resistances, so you might have been able to go without it, especially as a Warrior. Although I have to admit I play much like you, I like to have all resistances covered if possible.

Disenchantment isn't über-imporant either, at least not for damage reduction, but it is an annoyance for equipment. I like to have it if I can, but if you are careful you can do without it. I find myself without rShards a lot. Just make sure you carry lots of healing.

Hold Life isn't a deal breaker. I often keep exploring while drained, although I carry RLL if I can. Once I hit CL50, I squelch RLL altogether. At that point, EXP only makes a difference on the scoreboard. You made the right decision to dive when you got tired of waiting. The longer you hang around, the more chances you have to get bored and make a fatal mistake.

I have one suggestion for your post, to go to the ladder and upload your character there (if you still have the dump). Once you have it uploaded, copy the URL for your entry. Come back and edit your winner post, delete the character dump, and insert the link to your ladder character into it. I think you will have to Go Advanced while you are editing to do it. Around the middle of the bottom row of formatting icons is a little globe. If you click it and paste the URL of your ladder entry, it will make a link to your character on the ladder. This makes winner posts much easier to read.

If you don't have your dump anymore, you can still edit your post, select the text of your character dump, and click the little '#' icon. This will make it into a code block so the info in the dump is easier to read.

Congrats again, and hopefully it doesn't take 13 more years for your next win!