AAR: easy warrior win

[Sky]

for once, i decided to not grind endlessly and just go win.

human warrior, 6 points STR, 6 DEX, 8 CON. selling enabled, randarts.

i did DL1 twice, then went down to DL6 (i was shooting for DL10, but ran into a bunch of OOD ogres, level feeling 9- ). when i recalled back, i found a ideal room with some blue worm mass, and grinded to CL13.
then i again recalled and on DL10 i found a red worm mass, and grinded to CL21, easy enough with a human warrior. must have taken me .. maybe 10 minutes. i was listening to a youtube video about bronze age cultures while doing this.

then i started going down, pretty uneventful, although i found two -9 levels, one with boots of speed +5, one with a weapon of gondolin which did less damage than a basic dagger. i did most of my low levels with a dagger of fire bought from the store. my first artifact was a pendant that gave me pConf pFear at CL23.

then at DL34 i killed Azog who dropped my first endgame weapon: a 4x +14 crossbow with *Fire, and 3 useful resists.
this gave me 52 damage with basic bolts, and i managed to waltz through most of the game with it.

i converted almost all my money into stat potions (resting at DL1) and always carried 15 Phase, 30+ CCW, and 40+ bolts. I then bought a ring of speed +6 from the BM and went for the lower levels.

once i got down to native stat levels, i went rather rapidly down to DL70, and from there the artifacts came pouring in. my last weapon (without slay evil) did 600 vs morgoth, also thanks to a ring of damage +12 and artifact gauntlets (+10,+15). I got lucky with the spread of resistances and had everything covered except chaos (which would have cost me HLife and a whole lot of damage to have).

i took on Morgoth with 3 Heal, 14 *Heal, 7 Life, a stack of 30 TS, 1 rune, 3 MBan (of which i used 1), and 10 Banish (of which i used 1).

best artifacts i found:
the Short Sword of Istaraman (7d7) (+13,+20) <+4, +5, +1>
---------------------------------------------------------
+4 strength.
+5 constitution.
+1 tunneling.
+1 light.
Slays animals.
Branded with weak poison.
Provides resistance to light, shards.
Provides protection from fear.
Cannot be harmed by acid.
Grants the ability to see invisible things. Prevents paralysis. Sustains your
life force.

When activated, it restores all your stats and your experience points.
Takes 139 to 187 turns to recharge.
Your chance of success is 93.6%


Min Level 56, Max Level 127, Generation chance 2, Power 350, 6.4 lbs
Random sword of power 350.

rod of restoration built in, VERY useful. 600 dmg vs any.

the Pair of Leather Boots 'Siruin' [2,+17] <+13>
------------------------------------------------
+13 speed.
Cannot be harmed by acid, fire.

When activated, it increases your AC and to-hit bonus for 1d48+24 turns.
Takes 65 to 72 turns to recharge.
Your chance of success is 83.0%


Min Level 50, Max Level 127, Generation chance 12, Power 302, 2.0 lbs
Random boots of power 302.

boots of speed + heroism


the Pair of Ethereal Slippers of Arrin [0,+19] <+5, +10>
--------------------------------------------------------
+5 dexterity.
+10 speed.
Cannot be harmed by acid, fire.
Prevents paralysis.


Min Level 48, Max Level 127, Generation chance 22, Power 287, 0.0 lbs
Random boots of power 287.

these almost doubled my damage output, although i discarded them later on when i had 18/170 DEX.


the Set of Alchemist's Gloves 'Eluil' (+10,+15) [0,+9]
------------------------------------------------------
Highly protective gloves designed for an alchemist's elemental magics.

Provides resistance to cold.
Cannot be harmed by acid, fire.


Min Level 31, Max Level 90, Generation chance 37, Power 150, 0.4 lbs
Random gloves of power 150.

gloves of whopass


i'm sorry to say i did NOT find this beauty here:
the Chaos Dragon Scale Mail of Aerelon (-2) [40,+19] <+4, +11, +1>
------------------------------------------------------------------
+4 constitution.
+11 speed.
+1 light.
Provides resistance to poison, sound, shards, nexus, chaos, disenchantment.
Provides protection from fear.

When activated, it creates a large lightning ball with damage 250.
Takes 114 to 140 turns to recharge.
Your chance of success is 93.0%


Min Level 83, Max Level 127, Generation chance 4, Power 571, 24.0 lbs
Random dragon armor of power 571.

but then, i didn't really try.


i really missed the susCON that Dunedain have, as morgoth was constantly reducing my CON from 18/190 to *not 190* and i had to resort to !Life a couple times to restore it, not having saved any mushrooms of Vigour. I also had only 1 rod of restoration (found on DL100 just seconds before the fight, and zapped to test it, i thought it was gonna be !Speed), and i could not find a shield of Preservation that i could slot in my gear ..

buying potions of Speed religiously from the BM really did give me an advantage in just about every major fight. i left all the uniques until later when they were easy, i only once took on two ringwraiths together because i had a huge stack of bolts and it was an ideal situation.

[Sky]

i made a new character, dunedain warrior. DL3, found a blue worm mass ... oh well, if you insist ..

time to listen to two Sigfried Song songs https://www.youtube.com/user/sigmo2nd/videos and i was already CL17.

[Sky]

and i just found a Mordekainen's on DL8.

[Sky]

boots of speed +2 and ring of damage +8 dropped by two minor mobs on DL22

[Sky]

i'm at DL50 already.

[Pete Mack]

I still don't understand why you bother with farming worm masses. It's not like it's hard to reach CL 20 with a warrior just going about your usual business. You'll find plenty f orrcs, trolls, and dragons to get you there in no time.

[Sky]

i can dedicate 8 minutes to levelling up.

[Grotug]

Yeah, I'm very puzzled on the wormmass business, hah. I'm super jelly of those gloves. When I find gloves that do (+8) I'm super stoked. Never found ones that did more than +10, and they were standarts (can't remember the name of them).

It would be fun to make a video of my early game with the uniques. Love using wands of lottery on them. Recently been getting a lot of big earthquakes with them. Not really helpful, but kind of amusing.

[Pete Mack]

But leveling up in itself isn't worth all that much. Sure, HP and better accuracy are nice, but CLW and Heroism have roughly the same effect. Much better to be searching for loot (or just finding stairs down.)
It only takes roughly 20 minutes to reach CL 20 if you just dive. And you get better stuff and much more gold.

i can dedicate 8 minutes to levelling up.

[Sky]

we've discussed this before, and the only argument against grinding is that, as a player, you use up valuable attention span. i still go lower and fight bigger mobs and find better gear, i simply have more XP than the other player. worm masses can easily get you to those key spells you need to be able to take on the bigger monsters, be it additional shots, low fail TO, acid bolt, etc.

grinding for gear isn't different either. incidentally, i dived to DL45 and had to bail out so many times, i decided to go back up to DL35, and i probably won't go down until i have pConf, simply because the confusion stunlock is making me use up my CCW and Speed.

i can still find enough gear at DL35 to, potentially, finish the game, i just need patience.

[Grotug]

It took me awhile to get on board the dive train. In my limited experience, I am finding more good artifacts with Randarts than with Standarts. It's been awhile since I had a game where I got punished for diving (I play forced descent, so what happens sometimes I find I'm too deep too fast and keep running into things I can't handle, so then I have to leave the level, which means I just go deeper!) I'm on DL67, not diving super fast (I'm actually more powerful than I need to be for this level) but I'm at 46,092 standard turns. Funny thing, the scariest thing for me right now aren't vampires, Arch-Liches, lesser balrogs or Arien. No... it's water hounds.. I'm doing 450+ dam a round to most things and I just banished a bunch of water hounds entering a large room because I didn't want to lose any of my staves of speed or _?teleportations etc on my way to a !*healing*. Seems kinda silly. They're DL20 but man they sure do wreck your gear even when I am CL40.

I find with HT/Warrior, I am pretty bored if I am not diving very quickly in the beginning. I am completely reckless down to DL16. If I dive too fast, though, the midgame can be very scary, starting around DL38, if I don't find the gear I need. In my current game I didn't find rPois until I had like 700HP. I wasn't even really worried about it, though. I had decent enough speed. I actually killed a great swamp wyrm without rPois cause I held onto two !rPois. That was pretty fun killing him in a small vault.

ninja edit: one more thing about diving really quickly in early game. One, it's fun, because I find myself in all sorts of situations I have to be creative to survive. 2. Since I'm diving quickly, very little is invested in the game. If I die, I don't care. I get to do it again, and the early game is a lot of fun. Sometimes it's frustrating if I found a good early item and then died because I was diving too recklessly, but enough deaths in Angband (especially early ones) has taught me not to care too much.

[PowerWyrm]

No idea what changed recently, but randarts with +15 speed, +5 to all stats, 7-8 high resists, +2 shots/might/blows, +15 todam... etc... are way too common. I'm sure I've never seen any of these before 4.0. Of course, some of the standard ones are really good, but with randarts, you're almost guaranteed to find a Feanor, Thorin, Grond... for every equipment slot. You just need to scum long enough to generate them.

[Sky]

well, there's the *random* in randart. i'm no longer playing that dune warrior because the randart set turned out to be garbage; 3 instances of ESP only, on the crown of morgoth, the one ring, and one non-endgame weapon. all the cloaks were basically Elven cloaks (+1 speed, maybe rFire rElect, +3 search +3 stealth), all the big damage weapons did not have slay evil or even acid brand, highest boots speed value was +8 with no bonuses or +6 with +3 STR, the rings of power were useless, with no decent activation, only one with CON bonus, no +DAM, no usable +SPD.

randarts have alreayd been nerfed once this year. try some build from last year, and you'll see just about every other artifact is a powerhouse; high values (i.e. +17 speed), stat values coupled with other stats (+7 SPD, +7 DEX), high damage bonuses on weird artifacts (+10 DMG Phial) or even sets with three +blows or +shots items. or that famous 6X +30 bow.

shame the saves are not compatible

[PowerWyrm]

i'm no longer playing that dune warrior because the randart set turned out to be garbage

Why? You can win the game even without arts... Get a MoD or scythe of slicing of slay evil, that's probably better than any arts you could get with a warrior. For armor, just get a dwarven DSM (balance or power if you're lucky), dwarven shield, etc...

[kandrc]

randarts have alreayd been nerfed once this year.

Randarts were not nerfed. There was a bug that was causing randarts to get many, many ineffectual curses and superpowers to compensate. It was ridiculous. I posted in AAR with a priest with (IIRC) 9 blows and 2000 damage per round. That bug was fixed. It really wasn't fun at all.