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I played Moria and old versions of Angband ages ago (I think I won both but seem to have lost the records) but hadn't played for years. I came back recently and got hooked again. After a number of silly deaths I finally learnt and 3.14 the Gnome Mage was the result.
First, thanks to everyone who posts here. I read over the forums to educate myself and appreciate all the questions and answers available. Most surprising fact I learned: High resists are weird, inconsistent and possibly of minimal benefit. Nether, for example, caps at 550 and resistance may only reduce that to 471. Very scary when you are a gnome mage and struggling to get to 500HP.
As you might infer from my character dump, I was well prepared for the final battle. After all the build up it was straightforward. Following advice gleaned from the forums I destructed an area and waited for Morgoth. In hindsight I would have been better finding a big open room and having it out - in fact I ended up using stone to mud to clear some space. This was because the final battle consisted of little more than shoot (annihilation wand, chaos strike) and scoot (phase door). I needed wide open sight lines in order to keep blasting away. My cautious approach to preparation meant that I'd already killed all the uniques by the time the battle began (even poor Farmer Maggot, who I didn't mean to kill, but notice from my history that I must have stepped on him when I was back in town putting on my final kit). So my tactics were straight forward: Summon=>Banish; Mana storm=>*Heal*; Everything else=>let him have it.
The most dangerous moment came when I was down to 3SP (but full health) when he summoned a bunch of undead. I chugged a potion of restore mana and banished them on the next turn but it could have been dicey if they all decided to mana storm me on that turn.
Sauron, on the other hand, was much more difficult because I only had 605HP when I took him on. After his first summon I realised the problem: damage from banishment plus mana storm (595) meant that banishing anything could leave me open to instakill. I decided that use of teleport self (could I really find myself in a more dangerous situation than facing Sauron and some greater undead?) followed by the construction of an anti-summoning corridor was the best tactic.
All in all, a tense game that got a bit tedious at the end as I was just searching for CON items (it was kind of funny that most of the game was "detect, detect, detect" on a hot key while the end was "banish, banish, banish" - should have put it on a hot key) - Gauntlets of Eol were the key as they allowed me to keep 18/200 INT and swap out other stuff to get my CON up.
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