Sniper - the fewest kills challenge

[Derakon]

Congratulations! That's a heck of an achievement, and I'm willing to spot you the two accidental kills.

[Lord Tom]

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=17066

Done!

I went straight from Sauron to Morgoth after a quick stop in the town. On returning to the dungeon to maybe scum a bit, I immediately found 29 mithril arrows of slay evil, +17/+19 and figured it was meant to be.

The battle was fairly long, many uniques summoned, had to destruct and TO Morgoth 3 times. Big wrinkle was running out of phase door scrolls about halfway through; big anxiety with 5% failure surrounded by nasty summons and the big P! I used all my healing and *healing* and 2 potions of life (4 remaining) and was down to my last scroll of banishment (started with 9). I also ran out of arrows and had to scavenge, though that wasn't such a big deal since he was almost dead at that point.

So, total body count was 4:
1 White Harpy
1 Mirkwood Spider
1 Sauron, the Sorceror
1 Morgoth, Lord of Darkness

Since the 2 unintentional kills were incident/didn't contribute anything, I think this is a decent proof-of-concept run, though obviously a perfect 2-kill run was not achieved.

Looking back, I'd divide this challenge into 3 phases:
Pre-detect-traps spell: very tedious and difficult; a lot of scumming for $ to buy detection scrolls of various types. Using a shovel +1 as primary weapon was key to easily dig $ out of walls. Intuition was somewhat useful in determining where to use precious detection scrolls (i.e. certain room types often have traps). Very early on it's useful to get xp from id'ing potions, etc, though it's minimal. Until a few speed potions and a source of sleep monster are found it's impossible to go far from stairs without some fast enemy (Grip/Fang, fruit bat, spider) eventually finding and killing you. And stealth is extremely important at all phases, though Grip/Fang are always awake.

Pre-experience potion: Once I could cast detect-traps, it was pretty easy to level up to cl 10 for detect items - which for Rogues shows the particular item type and is thus invaluable. At that point, I dove to stat-potion depth and scummed for potions, slowly descending to about 2000' to get augmentation potions. During this time, most xp was gained from when Wormtongue would occasionally show up. You need at least resist frost and free action to run around with him and let him create traps to disarm. You can manage without rPoison but you'll burn healing potions at a decent clip. Oh, and it's really annoying that his frost bolts will shatter your potions slowly - the one time I tried to outsmart him by dropping my potions off to the side I ended up falling down a trap door - doh!. Eventually he'll try to steal from you and disappear, or you'll set off some trap that makes you flee. When you get deeper, Harowen is actually great to harvest traps from if you can trap him in LOS behind a few sleeping minor enemies; he'll just sit there forever and casts create-traps much more frequently - if you can keep the intervening monsters from waking up! Oh, during this stage getting 2 rings of escaping was HUGE! Only the first ring has the negative spellcasting effect, which is manageable, and of course in this challenge @ doesn't care about being afraid of melee or poor at archery!

End-game: The first experience potion gets you to around cl 30, so at last you can cast useful spells and have some hp/sp! At that point, the game is much more similar to regular Angband, though obviously you still can't go killing things. I was surprised at this point how very equipment-poor I was; since going after every particular item was a risk, I really hadn't prioritized unknown-quality armor and weapons. Lots of desirable gear shows up in vaults, of course. These are very difficult to clear as a Rogue unless you have a scroll or two of Mass Banishment to burn. Group non-unique monsters can be very tedious to work around to grab items, and can often be dangerous obstacles preventing you from TO-ing a unique. Eventually, I would only go after a vault if there was a particular item of interest (usually un-id'd ring/amulet/rod or a potion of experience). If available I'd use a mass banishment scroll placed as well as possible; failing that I'd use a staff of banishment to at least clear the biggest/worst group monsters. Least effectively, I tried running a berserker around inside a vault until it'd killed most everything, but found that in the meantime someone else had grabbed most of the items... As for the boss fights, they were pretty similar to the usual, though the mass-summoning of uniques was hard and my cl was definitely lower than it'd be in a typical game. Fortunately, I found great gear and got to see that CONGRATULATIONS!!. :-)

[Lord Tom]

Sauron's dead! I cleaned out a few medium and large vaults and greatly upgraded my gear, along with leveling up to cl 37.

Not sure if I've ever found Boots of Feanor before, but with them and Ringil, speed is pretty much taken care of. I didn't know that Cloaks of Elvenkind could give telepathy but that was a very nice surprise, especially when Sauron dropped the Crown of Numenor (which has nice bonuses but no telepathy).

Sadly, there was another civilian casualty; I tapped twice on a door in a vault I thought was empty (a huge one I mass banished right from the middle, lost over 400hp reading the scroll!) and Ringil sliced a Mirkwood spider in one round. Stupid non-telepathy-detectable arachnids!

T'was nice, also, to return to the town and visit Father Christmas! Nice easter egg!

The Sauron fight was pretty easy; got him to 6 bars using Ringil and 2 Runes of Protection; he only summoned fairly wimpy greater undead once. I phased away then and switched to the bow; he added another greater undead and greater dragons and demons summons. The only unique in the bunch, amazingly, was Scatha, though Khamul, Witch-King, Gothmog, Lungorthin and Balrog of Moria were all elsewhere on the level prior to the battle.

I got him to one bar with the bow and splash damage via acid balls, at which point he'd closed in on me so I finished him with Ringil.

The battle went pretty easy on consumables, too, only a few healing, one *healing*, one potion of restore mana. I'm actually lucky he didn't go crazy with summons since I forgot my banish scrolls back at home...doh....

My only question before taking on Morgoth is if I should scum around for good pebbles/shots; the sling of buckland in my home is clearly better than Belthronding damage-wise, but no good ammo has come along. My melee damage with Ringil is only 320ish, pretty weak for endgame.

[MattB]

Well, Sauron won the 1st round. I had him down to his last bar at one point, but had to teleport him and destruct when things got too hot with uniques & greater undead. Eventually, he in most unsportmanlike fashion teleported me off the level.

Having all the uniques alive certainly made things interesting, it was kind of a who's-who: Gothmog, Lungorthin, Drauglin, Witch-King, Khamul, Kronos, Ancalagon, Feagwaith, Vecna, Saruman, Glaurung, Smaug and even Grip and Fang all put in appearances. The non-uniques weren't much of a factor, though I read a banish scroll to get rid of some D's at one point.

Sadly, I used all my !healing, half my !*healing* and 3 my 5 ?*destruction*, along with blowing up several wands of annihilation and drain life using lesser recharging, so I'll have to retool before trying again.

Ouch. Bad luck. Grindy, grindy time?

[Lord Tom]

Well, Sauron won the 1st round. I had him down to his last bar at one point, but had to teleport him and destruct when things got too hot with uniques & greater undead. Eventually, he in most unsportmanlike fashion teleported me off the level.

Having all the uniques alive certainly made things interesting, it was kind of a who's-who: Gothmog, Lungorthin, Drauglin, Witch-King, Khamul, Kronos, Ancalagon, Feagwaith, Vecna, Saruman, Glaurung, Smaug and even Grip and Fang all put in appearances. The non-uniques weren't much of a factor, though I read a banish scroll to get rid of some D's at one point.

Sadly, I used all my !healing, half my !*healing* and 3 my 5 ?*destruction*, along with blowing up several wands of annihilation and drain life using lesser recharging, so I'll have to retool before trying again.

[MattB]

I'm pretty sure I could kill Sauron at this point using drain life/annihilation/heavy xbow, but I'm only cl 31

...wow!
glhf

[Lord Tom]

Hobbit vs Gnome for me really came down to the hit dice (having hp margin of error above Morgoth's mana storms will be important, given the legions of uniques that will be dropping in) and my longstanding inability to keep Hobbits of any class alive. They're so appealing b/c I love LOTR, but they just...always...die.

Free FA has been nice to have since without it Wormtongue will occasionally slow you. The free-id on wands/staves is not essential but very nice since anything you'd id-by-use you'd need to be sure you're not going to kill anything.

On paper it does seem Hobbits would be pretty good as well; assuming you can level to the mid-30's with a good Con you should have plenty of HP as a rogue, Mage may be iffy. Stealth really does seem to be the key factor above all others.

With my current attempt I'm down on dl 98 now; I'm pretty sure I could kill Sauron at this point using drain life/annihilation/heavy xbow, but I'm only cl 31 after 2 potions of experience, hoping to get 1 or 2 more before I give it a try.

Good luck!

[Philip]

What is the best Race for this kind of challenge? I know you're using gnomes, presumably for the combo of stealth, device, DEX, INT, save, and Free Action. A Hobbit has a bit less XP penalty (110% vs. 125%), a bit more stealth, a bit less device, a bit more DEX, a bit more save, and no FA. Most importantly though, a hobbit has one less base hit-dice, so they're squishier.

I'm going to try both, and see where I get. I'm also going to try both with Mage/Rogue. Hopefully something will work out okay.

[Lord Tom]

YES! Snuck a potion of experience out of a medium-sized vault around dl 66. Feagwaith & Baphomet were both in compartments accessible by doors but telepathy, stealth and hasting gave me just enough time to get the potion just a few turns before Baphomet woke up.

That bumped me from level 18 to 29, now I have 418hp, the resistance and escape dungeon books & telepathy. I'll probably try to find 2 or 3 more ! experience before diving to dl 98!

One side-note is that Harowen is MUCH easier to farm traps off of than Wormtongue, provided some other monster(s) blocking him. I lucked into a setup where Harowen got stuck behind 5 sleeping novice adventurers, so I dug myself a mini-room and he pretty much just cast create-traps constantly until the adventurers all woke up - I just stood there detecting and disarming and got maybe 750xp. Bummer I'd ditched my wand of sleep monster! Obviously, though, trap-farming is out now that I found the ! experience.

[Lord Tom]

Yes, Detect Items is a level 10 spell for rogues, and it shows exactly what each item is (but doesn't id artifacts or anything). So getting to level 10 was a huge milestone, and with this challenge that spell has been huge for tracking down stat potions.

I've got Con max'd and the others all in the mid-18/xx's, have heroic stealth, 3 TO wands, regen, rPois and about 190 hp. I'm waiting for Wormtongue to show himself again and I can hopefully get my cl to the high teens or even 20 just by continually disarming his traps.

I'd still love to find telepathy, and a ring of escaping or two would be amazing for this challenge, but none have surfaced...speed is only +2 and no repeatable source of haste...

[Philip]

Detect objects tells you what the object is? In that case, that alone might be worth it. The higher XP could also be nice. And it takes way too long to get any reasonable spells anyway.

I think the major selling points of the mage early are - dtrapdoorstair at clvl 3, dmonster at clvl 1 and teleport at clvl 7. Those are vital without connected stairs, with you can probably get away with not having them.

[Lord Tom]

I tried. A whole lot of times, actually. It's just too hard not to fall afoul of the maggot dogs or a bat, or whatever, it seems, even with monster detection. Also, since doors don't give XP, and traps are tough to find until clvl 3 (which I never got legitimately), gaining XP is almost impossible. With effort, scrolls of detect traps get you to level 2. Perhaps with connected stairs it would be easier.

It is MUCH easier with connected stairs!

I did think about mage but shied away due to lower hp and detect items. I think the key equalizing point in this challenge is getting the first potion of experience; until then (I think they're level 65) @ will have severely low cl for the dl. (I'm currently cl13 scumming at dl40). A mage would have to take a lot more risks just going after "items" which could be anything (Glaive of Pain?! Drat!!) rather than homing in on unidentified potions.

[MattB]

Just given it a few goes - went for hobbit rogue due to the combination of stealth/hit dice/CON.
Just been killed by, believe it or not, a cutpurse!

[clouded]

Play an Android in poschengband, your level is based on the total cost of all the items you have equipped. Mindcrafters naturally get spells by leveling up.

My strat:

1) pick Android Mindcrafter
2) scum the entrance of Camelot until you find a bunch of ego items, equip them and level up to CL30
3) begin scumming the dragon caves for more items
4) don't kill town monsters
5) reach CL50
6) get 1,000,000 gold and teleport to DL99 using the trump tower
7) kill Oberon
8) kill the Serpent of Chaos

easy.

[Philip]

I tried. A whole lot of times, actually. It's just too hard not to fall afoul of the maggot dogs or a bat, or whatever, it seems, even with monster detection. Also, since doors don't give XP, and traps are tough to find until clvl 3 (which I never got legitimately), gaining XP is almost impossible. With effort, scrolls of detect traps get you to level 2. Perhaps with connected stairs it would be easier.