A middle-game crisis

[Derakon]

Drolems are not and have never been native to 2000'; you could have seen them earlier or later and were never truly safe anywhere anyway.

In any event, they've been moved deeper into the dungeon, I believe, and they're incredibly rare monsters anyway. I don't think my characters ever see more than 2 or 3 of them in a given game. And they're pretty slow to wake, to boot. I think the "It breathes. You die." thing has been really overstated.

[Lord Tom]

Drolems are level 44 in 3.5, which is what I recall from the old days, though as you say they're rare and have the FORCE_SLEEP flag.

I'm curious though if others have any particular transition depth at which they really like to have rPoison, or if people just use detection/evasion to the extent it's irrelevant? I'd always tried for free action by 1000', rPoison by 2000' but I'm curious if that's considered obsolete.

[Timo Pietilä]

Drolems are level 44 in 3.5, which is what I recall from the old days, though as you say they're rare and have the FORCE_SLEEP flag.

Unless this has been changed FORCE_SLEEP doesn't really have anything to do with sleep. It is/was a flag that prevented monsters to use their spells (including breaths) before player have got at least one turn onto level.

[Zireael]

Since no one's mentioned it, I'll give a shout out to the drolem as another gas-breather capable of InstaDeath that starts showing up once you're past 2000 feet. It's invisible to telepathy to boot.

Before I got on the forums and adopted the detection-heavy/diving techniques, I would never go down past 2000 without permanent resist poison in place. Too many games ended with "It breathes gas. You die."

It's not drolems, it's some sort of hounds. Forgot which ones breathe gas.

[Raajaton]

Air hounds? TBH I'm not sure I've ever been killed by Air hounds. They don't do that much damage even unresisted, unless you happen to walk into the middle of a large room that's filled with a packs of them. If you are using detection properly you should be able to either kill them 1 at a time or get away from them before they can manage to kill you.