My try with speed diving.

[Juutas]

I've never been a fan of fast diving, but decided to give it a go. Started a half-troll warrior. DL 2 found gloves of free action and dethanc, dived quickly downwards found Elesser. Ran through some lowlvl unique orcs and p's. Found a armor of resistance. Overall decent gear but no rblind and low stats. @clvl 28 found a potion of experience --> clvl 31. Dived to dlvl 38 with a few of ?deep descent, got surrounded by Z's and teleported straight into arms of W Adunaphel the Quiet. Got blinded, failed to activate Elessar and W with his escorts quickly pounded me into a pulp.

Definately going to try speed diving again, though I have to figure out when to stop diving to gain stats. Although I was a bit careless, should have just ran away when I saw the level feeling of 7-2.

[Philip]

I am quite certain that stopping diving to gain stats is not a reasonable strategy. I am not convinced it ever was, to be honest.

I suspect your problem was playing a half-troll warrior, one of the lowest stealth combinations in the game. While the monsters that killed you are always awake, more stealth is a necessity in general. Especially if you have no detection, like a warrior. Half-troll rogue is good, since your abilities end up complementing each other quite nicely. For newer players trying diving I would recommend rogues (half-troll/hobbit/kobold/high-elf mostly cover the bases) or mages (hobbit/gnome/elf, since XP penalty is nasty on a mage, and I would not recommend half-troll stealth to anyone who isn't particularly confident in their ability to play around low stealth.

[Juutas]

I've been playing since frogknows but got only 3 (2 save scummed) winners under my belt. I've always been a slow grind type player and my characters tend to die around clvl 20-30. This diving business if new to me but it is definately yelding better results than grinding. I guess it just takes time to learn new tactics. I think I'll go with a rogue next time.

[Grotug]

My best luck with super fast wins is with Half Troll Warrior. I like to play with forced descent on to help move things along. You can really crash dive to DL16 and if you get a 'thanc and FrAct early on then you pretty much can crash dive to DL28 without too much trouble. I think my best run with that combo was around 44k turns (maybe just under that). When crash diving with that HT/Warrior the DL40s tend to be a bit scary due to lack of detection against scary things like drolems. But if you keep moving quickly, not resting too much (not much need to, really) and not spending much time on each level, you often can get some great gear without a run in with a dreadful drolem.

One reason I like forced descent is it complements my playstyle of wanting to fight everything I can. Most of my gear in these sorts of games comes from drops, rather than vaults. Plus, it has the added bonus of not needing rNexus when fighting sauron and morgoth, since no one can teleport you off level as long as the boss you are fighting is alive, since forced descent prevents you from going up a level and endgame bosses prevent you from going down a level (only while they are alive, of course).

[Philip]

I don't think that moving fast in the early game constitutes (power) diving - the threats there are minor and the XP that is trivially available means that you will spend pretty much no time at dlvl > clvl*2, which I would take as something of a necessary condition for diving. Obviously a clear and unambiguous definition of diving is impossible to create, but it would be nice to have some form of consensus about what it means, since everyone seems to have a different idea of what it is.