Grotug's ongoing DAR thread

[Grotug]

Pushing my luck....

Decided to take on WK of Angmar. Was having a good go of it after picking up two !Speeds, upgrades to my Dwarven shield (+2 to +4) and RoD (+11 to +15). 766vs Undead.

Been on the level longer than I should (TO'd Maeglin about 6+ times), but figured Angmar is a good target for XP. Did swap my "Trickery for "Sustainance while fighting him. I had him on the ropes when he commands me to go away:



Maeglin summons Vecna.

Still have 2 scrolls of Teleportation.

Teleported near the Witch King. WK of Angmar nets me 115K EXP. That may be a record for me for a single kill (S&M aside). WK drained 5k so 120k-5k = 115k).

The Forest Wight touches you. You lose 51k EXP. Okaayyyyy... It's a Forest Wight... Yeah, it gave Level 1 Frodo in the Barrow Downs some trouble, but I'm a CL41 High Elf Warrior! smh....

Been finding good bolts after good bolts. My worst bolts are seeker bolts +9,+8. Gonna use my HM bolts on Sauron and my HM shots on Morgy (have a decent buckland at home).

[Grotug]

Aaaaand I found The One in a large square cubby/compartment/maze vault. This is my second visit to DL99. Sauron is safely holed up behind some rubble in an oval room (turns out he isn't all that powerful after all; I was digging through rubble at CL1!) Hmm... should I wear it? Will Morgoth pop out of nowhere demanding it back?

The nutty thing is I overlooked it. I had cleared the bottom section of the vault save for one cubby... for no explicable reason. The only reason I went back is because I just quaffed an !*Enlightenment*. The description of the ring caught my attention (UnID'd rings at this stage of the game generally do....) so I went back to the coordinates and whaddya know.

I sorta want to wear it but I'm honestly a bit afraid to put it on my finger.

Here's a character dump; but I am standing on the ring so it will not be revealed in the dump! (I have yet to pick it up). http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=20344

[Pete Mack]

Always, always wear The One. You'll be a long time looking again, and you will regret not wearing it. Endgame characters can easily handle the aggravation, especially when there are only the two bosses left to kill. You can really use +5 speed in any case.

[Grotug]

Okay Pete. Fair points. puts on ring. Well, my base speed is now +26 (-2 for weight) up from +16 thanks to sandals of speed I wasn't wearing due to artifact sandals <+5> Speed that were granting <+4> CON. Should have +30 base speed by the time I'm done with this vault as there is a RoS that is probably better than the +10 one I'm currently wearing. Well, time to take down Gothmog.

Holy Hot Hippogriffs, I've never been this powerful before. Hello Nightwalker-oh, goodbye. Thought you were gonna hang around a little longer. Archlich? Good day....Goodbye! And when I say Goodbye, I mean 868 vs Undead, not TO. Only thing is I only have 1?Teleportation. This will make meleeing all the drainers difficult, and I don't have pStun in the event I end up in a swarm of plasma hounds. On the other hand, after I am finished looting this vault, I am going to put a whole lotta bolts in Sauron's bottom (my melee vs Sauron is relatively low, but still over 500). lol, I gained a level. All right, artifact slippers of speed <+11> That's the first time I put something on my feet that did more than +10 speed.

Fantastic! Artifact light [+22] +5 Tunneling. And just picked up an artifact amulet of tunneling, too, and AC is king when Aggravating, as is Tunneling for sculpting cheesy Knights Move of Diagonal Rain of Ranged Terror (hitherto known as KMoDRoRT). And found even more bolts of wounding! I am very glad I put on the one. This is fun . +215 AC . Bring on the Horned Reapers! Bring on the Pit Fiends!

Whoah, I just ?phased inside the vault. Need to heal up a bit before crush Cantoras.

Lol, so the Archlich I killed earlier? Nothing is known about its attack. Teehee.

[chknflyrice]

Umm... so I have said before that I have been playing on a much older version till recently but is The One no longer a drop off of Sauron? The last time I killed him I didn't see it so I thought it was a bug but here you are talking about getting it from somewhere else.

[Derakon]

Umm... so I have said before that I have been playing on a much older version till recently but is The One no longer a drop off of Sauron? The last time I killed him I didn't see it so I thought it was a bug but here you are talking about getting it from somewhere else.

Vanilla's never had guaranteed drops or even biased drops, but plenty of variants give Sauron and Smeagol enhanced chances of dropping the One Ring. I don't know of any variants that guarantee it though.

[Grotug]

Towards the end Sauron summoned big Ds twice. I didn't heed them, though, since I had plenty of health and immunities. I used up all my acid arrows blasting him a couple times in Knight's Move of Diagonal Rain of Ranged Terror (or KMoDRoRT for short) and one Holy Might arrow. Only needed two !healings and about 4 or so !CCW and a smattering of !CLW. Which is good, since I need to save them for the big boss. Killed a lot of uniques on my over to him from the vault. The One is so powerful that aggravating is actually helpful to gain Character Levels quickly. I finally found more wands of TO but dropped all my wands and my staves of teleportation. Have 4 rods of TO which should be plenty for the final fight. Will get as many ranged shots in on Morgoth as I can before meleeing him. I don't have slay evil so my melee weapon is not great for Sauron or Morgoth.

Now for the matter of dispatching all these dragons. I'd like to kill them all without TOing any of them. We'll see if I can pull it off.

Character Dump: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=20344

Looks like it only took 100 turns to kill Sauron. Killed a decent amount of higher Uniques on DL99:

31492 4950' Killed Khamûl, the Black Easterling
31492 4950' Reached level 40
31493 4950' Found the Whip of Manin (LOST)
31498 4950' Found the Quarterstaff 'Dradron' (LOST)
32133 4950' Killed Grip, Farmer Maggot's Dog
32435 4950' Killed Adunaphel the Quiet
32436 4950' Killed Tselakus, the Dreadlord
32473 4950' Found the Maul 'Dalad' (LOST)
32733 4950' Found the Shovel 'Olvana' (LOST)
33242 4950' Killed The Witch-King of Angmar
33242 4950' Reached level 41
33242 4950' Found the Pair of Steel Shod Boots 'Gelin'
33257 4950' Found the Scimitar of Elivien (LOST)
33359 4950' Killed Maeglin, the Traitor of Gondolin
34342 4950' Found the Lochaber Axe of Falad
36646 4950' Found the Ring of Power (The One Ring)
36884 4950' Killed Gothmog, the High Captain of Balrogs
36884 4950' Reached level 42
36889 4950' Found the Dagger of Marin
37055 4950' Killed Scatha the Worm
37128 4950' Found the Elfstone of Turith
37138 4950' Found the Flail 'Gorliond'
37160 4950' Found the Pair of Ethereal Slippers of Erost
37211 4950' Found the Star of Andirnedi
37272 4950' Killed Cantoras, the Skeletal Lord
37280 4950' Found the Pike 'Ostir'
37283 4950' Found the Iron Crown of Nimang
37532 4950' Killed Omarax, the Eye Tyrant
37698 4950' Killed Sméagol
38450 4950' Killed Carcharoth, the Jaws of Thirst
38540 4950' Killed The Balrog of Moria
38762 4950' Killed Lungorthin, the Balrog of White Fire
38783 4950' Found the Phial of Teithote
38881 4950' Killed Atlas, the Titan
38881 4950' Found the Studded Leather Armour 'Fortar'
38894 4950' Reached level 43
39018 4950' Killed Sauron, the Sorcerer

So frickin powerful! And did I mention AC is King? Yes it is. I'm currently Berserk bringing my AC down to 208. So you saw the dragons I was going up against. The baddest dragons in the game (save for Anglican). I did use 1 !*Healing* since I was taking them in a line and the Balance breathed Chaos on me when I was down to like 436HP. He changed the damaged Swamp Wyrm into a Dracolisk which I quickly dispatched. These Dragons barely get in any damage in melee. Most of it was breathing on me. Wow, not a single healing potion dropped (nevermind, one pot of healing dropped). Still have a fleeing Dracolisk and GWofManyColors to kill, though. Killing those dragons gave me over 322K EXP.

Just went back to see that Atlas dropped me the Maul of Morona. Heals 500 hit points on activation. Does over 900 dam to Undead (better than my Undead/Dragon slayer which has pConf). And 724 to demons, too. No slay evil, though. I guess I'm gonna give up pConf in favor of better Undead damage and occasional healing.

My saving throw is 90% now. Does 100% saving throw mean monsters can't cast spells? Cause that would be insane against Morgoth.

Ooohh, realized I forgot to see what Sauron dropped me while I was picking up that arrow of Holy Might: Zweihander (+17, +17) of extra attacks <+2> for 624 dam/round! 742 if I wear my ring of dam (+15), but it's pretty hard to get to 20 base speed without my RoS. Could swap out Chaos DSM for a DSM of Speed <+4>.

[Grotug]

Foolish. TO'd M away a couple times in hopes I could find a couple more !Speed and to kill more things so that I wouldn't drop back to CL43 as I'd like to fight him at CL44 if I can. Prolly coulda finished this in under 40k turns, but as it is, M falls in 40,249 turns. First win with Randarts (though, unfortunately, there will not be a forthcoming song). No ?banishments, nor ?*destructions used. 1 ?Teleport. 3 !healings, 1 *healing, about 17 or so !CCW and 19 !CLW and one zap of my only rod of healing. 11 {Holy Mights, a !Heroism I quaffed on the floor while fighting M as well as 2 ?Holy Prayers I read where I found them (one before the fight, but they last awhile, so I was getting its bonus while fighting M) and 2 !Berskerer potions I brought with me.

I didn't do any tunneling and fought M in okay terrain, but not ideal terrain. No employment of KMoDRoRT.

Little after M sport: Forgot Huan breathed sound. Figured if I don't go too far below 500HP I'll be okay. 497HP, yeah I'll be fine. My turn ends; regenerate to 504. Huan breathes sound.

[Pete Mack]

40250 turns is impressively fast in any case. Nice win. Do try another variant soon. Or a different class...

[chknflyrice]

Vanilla's never had guaranteed drops or even biased drops, but plenty of variants give Sauron and Smeagol enhanced chances of dropping the One Ring. I don't know of any variants that guarantee it though.

I swear Sauron used to always drop the ring and Wormtongue always droped his boots.... can anyone verify? I have only played Angband never a variant.

Nice game Grotug. Impressive that you got there and got it done in so few turns.

[Grotug]

I'd like to try PosChengBand but I can't get it running on my Mac. I suppose I could try Sil again. This was only my second RandArt game passed DL30 so I'd like to play some more randart games, too.

The Qzzlpplzzlp unique stopped summoning monsters. I guess I've killed all the uniques. Weird that he stopped summoning anything, though. It's all he knows how to do!

[Grotug]

Playing Hobbit Ranger again. RandArts, latest Nightly. Now, as I recall, in the normal v 4.0.5 Paladin gets magic mapping fairly late in the game (starts being usable around DL50). Now I see my Hobbit Ranger gets it in book 1 at the paltry cost of 4 mana. This seems extremely OP. What am I missing? I think I get it: it's a very small range spell.

And I died due to impatience so I am back at HE Warrior. After my first trip to the dungeon, when I returned I forgot to buy arrows and was out of gold so I went to DL1 to get a little gold and started in a room with FrAct gloves and soon after found 3 potions of speed.

If you have any doubts to the efficacy of AC, Brodda dropped me Mithril Plate Mail [60, +3] on DL11. Shortly after I had an encounter with Cirith Ungol after picking up a helm of wisdom [7, +7]. Total AC 119.



Here we can see he missed me 21 times and hit me 3. That's a 12.5% connect rate. For the entire fight he hit me 10 times and missed me 72 times. That's a connect rate of 12.2%. It's very rare I have so much AC so early and can have long drawn out fights like this. I'm only doing 27.5 dam/round. At his worse he missed me 16 times in a row. At his best he had one occasion where he hit me twice in a row.

[chknflyrice]

I am an advocate of buying armor from the store if I have the money and there is nothing else to be purchased. Even if you only buy base items at lower levels with squishy characters it really helps tremendously imo. That was a large AC boost and against a unique so it stands to reason that a slightly lower AC against every day creatures would help the same.

When this game gave you more gold for putting less points into stats I used to give the very minimum to my character to get that extra gold to give that boost to the early game.

[Derakon]

I am an advocate of buying armor from the store if I have the money and there is nothing else to be purchased. Even if you only buy base items at lower levels with squishy characters it really helps tremendously imo. That was a large AC boost and against a unique so it stands to reason that a slightly lower AC against every day creatures would help the same.

When this game gave you more gold for putting less points into stats I used to give the very minimum to my character to get that extra gold to give that boost to the early game.

This only makes sense IMO if you have trouble with the very early game. By the time you've finished your first dive you'll have accumulated more armor than you can buy anyway, and most characters will have enough survivability by some metric that they don't need that early armor. Even if they do have trouble with survivability they'll be better-served by investing in better ranged weapons (and ?Phase), to kill things before they get into melee. Early game monsters can't hurt you if they're not next to you.

Sacrificing stats for gold in particular is hurting your midgame by requiring you to get more stat potions. Since the midgame tends to be more difficult than the early game, I don't think it makes sense for most characters to do that.

EDIT: put a different way, there is almost always something more important to buy than armor in the early game. Phase Door and CLW in particular are great ways to "soak up" any spare cash.

[Pete Mack]

@Derakon-- I agree it's a losing play except in ironman, when you only have one chance to buy the necessities. For early money, there's almost always something more important to get than AC: archery, escapes, healing... Better to avoid heavy hitters early, and get the AC when it comes to you naturally.