Latanc the Belegost (Sil-q)

**wobbly** · November 29, 2017, 16:25

So figured I'd write some stuff before I completely forget the run. Latanc started as a simple Belegost bruiser. I'd being playing a lot of trick builds & getting punished, so I just wanted to simply mindlessly thump my way through a game of Sil. The removal of artistry in sil-q is a good change I think, Belegosts struggle to spend much on smithing before the 1st forge & it was nice to just build some simple armour & head on. The leathers got replaced by mail before Lug/Balcmeg but it's still nice not to have to hunt the floor for enough to deal with the early game.

Mostly just built up raw melee/evasion. You'll see I never get a 2nd ability from either tree till:

13,466 800 ft (Heavy Armour Use)
16,701 650 ft (Strength)

This I think is simplest for Belegost (for everything actually, but Belegosts especially). That crummy dex means, well, even towards the end I had issues where I was missing a lot. You want few tricks, much raw grunt.

1st time fighting Lug since he gained cruel blow (last time I just filled him with arrows). The plan was to have indomitable before he arrived, you can see I was just short. He's scary to melee but in heavy armour with good con I could just punch through in a corridor. I'm sure he's a terror fighting in the open with you stumbling all over the place. In a corridor it's like vanilla's Umber Hulk. Eventually you're going to stumble the right direction. I've since done similar with an Edain. It was sketchy (you probably need luck), but I still came out on top.

9,256 750 ft (Keen Senses)
9,473 750 ft (Listen)

This was me realizing I was stumbling round the late game with only 1 light (lantern+shadow cloak). I still think Listen is one of the most undervalued abilities in Sil. Sil's equivalence to telepathy.

Anyways eventually found my 2nd forge at 750'. I'd been going up & down stairs fairly freely, just not caring about smithing. Grabbed a few floor lights. Even with listen: light, light, more light is always very strong. Also a dwarf mask (my 1st form of fire resistance all game). I didn't really decide to go artifact smith till Maeglain showed up.

This run reaffirmed my feeling that people build smiths in the reverse order to what makes for a smooth game. From:

13,767 900 ft Found The Galvorn Armour of Maeglin

I was stumbling over forges continuously. More then I could actually use, I made junk at a couple then simply dumped all the annoying smithing gear from my inventory with a fair amount of time still on the clock. Trying to put all your pts in smithing & only building up melee/evasion after you get the shiny stuff is a recipe for pain & frustration. Getting enough melee/evasion to enjoy the game & only putting spare pts in smithing, you can see I still got some pretty nice shinys. Of course I've seen more impressive stuff on other smiths, but this is still nice gear without sacrificing the 20/20 melee/evasion.

I had a thought while playing this about taking a 9lb flaming hammer to Morgy. Saithnar dropped just before I could build it. So I'll have to save that for another run.

Thanks to Quirk for taking the time to develop a version of Sil. Was fun to play with some new mechanics.

**Gwarl** · November 29, 2017, 19:00

Not convinced that angband.live is the problem with the dumps. It could equally well be Sil-Q or more likely the ladder itself. Isn't the result a bunch of 'unknown variant' messages?

**wobbly** · November 29, 2017, 19:07

Originally posted by Gwarl

Not convinced that angband.live is the problem with the dumps. It could equally well be Sil-Q or more likely the ladder itself. Isn't the result a bunch of 'unknown variant' messages?

Pretty much. See Tyrael & Quirks comments here.

State of the update - Angband Forums

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?p=126565#post126565