Which spells will I use as a High-Elf Ranger?

[Nemesis]

Sorry for asking such a n00by question, and even though I've won Quickband that game ends when you've beaten Saruman, so I never got to play an endgame character, fighting endgame monsters.

As my playing style is rather careful I'll probably ask lots of questions, but right now I was thinking of spells. Rangers seems to have lots of offensive spells, but as my character is also good at shooting and rather strong in melee, which spells should I learn? I'm not only asking about attack spells, I'm also unsure about the other ones.

Also, will my character be able to learn all spells in all books if I get it to level 50 and max my intelligence, or do I have to be picky conserve the free spells slots in my mind?

My Ranger is at level 24 right now and wandering about looking for items granting paralysis, blind and confusion resistance. I usually hang around in the levels right before zephyr country (i.e. dlvl ~17), I know it is very wimpy, but I was actually diving way deeper than my character level earlier but the item destruction caused by the hounds just took all fun away. I'll probably start exploring more risky places again as soon as I resist conf/blind/para and get some artifact/acidproof armour. Are these demands unrealistic, do I really have to venture into zephyr country before finding what I'm looking for?

Thanks in advance for your advice!

[Pete Mack]

No, you don't need to be stingy in learning spells as a ranger, though there are a lot of spells that are worthless. (No need to carry Raal's, and there's only one good spell in Wrath of God.)

All the other books are good, although book two is useful primarily for teleport self spell and not much else.

As for your other question:
Yes. 1000' is much better for rings of free action.
After that, you really really want to get to stat gain at 1500'. A dl 24 HE ranger will have no trouble either evading or killing Zs. (Stay away from Nexus Z. Scrambling STR and WIS is pretty much fatal.)

[Sirridan]

You'll use detect monsters a lot, and using that can help you avoid hounds.

Just run from them unless you can find a way to get them one at a time, and can kill them in one shot.

[Nemesis]

No, you don't need to be stingy in learning spells as a ranger, though there are a lot of spells that are worthless. (No need to carry Raal's, and there's only one good spell in Wrath of God.)

Teleport Self and Trap/Door Destruction is actually the only ones I've bothered to learn from that book. Trap/Door Destruction seems good when it comes to chests, but are chests worse in Vanilla than NPP/Quickband? In those variants chests almost always had one or more really nice things in them, but now they seem to mostly contain rubbish?

I'm still confused when it comes to attack spells, by the way. Is Magic Missile worth using or should I stick to my bow?

As for your other question:
Yes. 1000' is much better for rings of free action.
After that, you really really want to get to stat gain at 1500'. A dl 24 HE ranger will have no trouble either evading or killing Zs. (Stay away from Nexus Z. Scrambling STR and WIS is pretty much fatal.)

I'm not really sure I'd like to find a Ring of Free Action as I'm very content with the rings I'm wearing now.

One is a Ring of Slaying (+5,+5) which I plan on swapping for my Ring of Strength +2 as soon as I find another STR/DEX potion or two to give me another melee blow.

The other ring is Delving, and I can't imagine living without that one! Well, as I'm grinding at pretty safe places right now I could perhaps do without it for time being, but I'd like to dive again and then tunneling is invaulable when it comes to my playing style. Nothing beats starting the level by detecting and then figuring out how to dig the best tunnel to avoid the baddies and get the goodies! Maybe I could put it away when I have lots of mana and can cast Stone to Mud with 5% fail, but not until then!

I'm currently wielding a Cutlass of Extra Attacks (1d8) (+13,+9) (2), do you think there are any realistic chances I'll find a decent Defender weapon? I've managed to find a couple of Blessed weapons that provided resistance to paralysis, but they did far less damage than my Cutlass.

I hope you don't find my questions too annoying!

[Pete Mack]

Not at all.
You are a ranger. So long as you have FA covered, you can go hunt dangerous monsters much deeper with your bow. If you want to do melee, keep the +2 attacks weapon as a swap. The loot is exponentially better at 1500'.

[will_asher]

You're probably not going to find a defender or blessed weapon that's better for damage than that cutlass, but if a weapon is your only source of free action it's definetly worth keeping as a swap. A free action swap will be good enough to let you dive deeper safely as long as you detect often and know which monsters can paralyze you.

And a ring of free action (if you find it) would be far more valuable than delving until you find a non-ring non-swap source of free action.
It's unlikely to find Rblind or Rconfuse until a bit deeper.

As for magic missile, it's pretty much worthless to a ranger with a long bow.

[Nemesis]

You'll use detect monsters a lot, and using that can help you avoid hounds.

Just run from them unless you can find a way to get them one at a time, and can kill them in one shot.

That's what I usually do, I turned off Pack AI before starting the game, so if I wait behind a corner they all walk right into the jaws of death!

When it comes to detection, I do it all the time and as I spend lots of time zig-zag tunneling through the levels it's hard for monsters to follow me or hit me with their breath attacks. But still, I really dislike zephyr country! Your armour is still degraded now and then and I really hate when you lose a Potion of Speed to Cold Hounds or Scroll of Teleport Level to Fire Hounds.

Sure, I could drop those things on the ground before engaging the hounds (or not engage them at all, but as they never sleep it's hard at times), but no matter if you see the hounds as dangerous or just annoying, one can't deny that they can make the game a lot more tedious!

Here's a situation that defenitivly was dangerous and not annoying: It happened when I still dived, I was at dlvl 20 and rather low level myself (I'm a High Elf) and entered the level in a dark room, right next to a druid. I cast Light and the next thing I know is that the room is full of Air Hounds! Many of them also breath that very round! ***LOW HITPOINT WARNING***, the Air Hound breathes poison, ***LOW HITPOINT WARNING*** the Air Hound breathes poison -more- and so on. After entering the level at full health, all I had done was casting Light! Therefore, I was luckily standing on the staircase and got away.

[Pete Mack]

You are still alive after a guaranteed escape, therefore going into a room of air hounds in the dark on descent isn't a big deal.

If you want to avoid this kind of thing, you need better loot and stats... which are available starting with stat gain.

Below 1450' with SI and FA, diving is always the right strategy. Your character gets stronger something like 30x faster at 1500' and below, compared to 1450' and above.

[Nemesis]

You are still alive after a guaranteed escape, therefore going into a room of air hounds in the dark on descent isn't a big deal.

If you want to avoid this kind of thing, you need better loot and stats... which are available starting with stat gain.

Below 1450' with SI and FA, diving is always the right strategy. Your character gets stronger something like 30x faster at 1500' and below, compared to 1450' and above.

Ok, I'll start diving again as soon as I find FA. I know that you can avoid paralyzers too, but I already have the Illusionist and the Homonculus to stay away from. I like diving though as long as I don't risk instadeath or frequent item destruction/stat drain though, I dived a lot when I played Quickband. There, I found rconf, rblind and FA ridiculously early in the game and as I had a ready supply of Teleport Level, all I had to worry about was monsters hitting really, really hard (and maybe hallucination, maybe that hinders you from casting spells too?).

However, I like Vanilla so far. What I liked with NPP was the lots of options you had in town, I liked that NPP rewarded a safer playing style than Vanilla. However, those shooting runes drew me nuts! The quests were also very annoying as your max depth decided which quests you'd get and that made it impossible to dive if you also wanted to do quests. Therefore, I like Vanilla more, even though I'm not that into its anti-grinding/pro diving design.

As I said, I like diving, but I also think there should be a safe route of slowly growing strong while just collecting money and xp on easy levels. I like when risking your life seldom is required, but instead a shortcut to glory (or death). That creates such a great atmosphere, where you dive deep and almost die, say "home, sweet home!" when your at town, safe againt. Then you promise yourself to never take risk again, until you get bored and once again risk your life diving to OOD places. But that's just me, I guess I'm attracted to the psychology of safety vs temptation.

Btw, this Ranger is my first Vanilla character (if we don't count a couple of infant mortalities). In NPP I also only had one serious character, a Dunadan Paladin who never died, I just got bored of NPP and quit playing. So I guess I really grow fond of my characters, role play them and avoid deaths at all costs.

Were you like that too with your first successful characters? Is fear of death something common among newbies that goes away with experience?

[Pete Mack]

Were you like that too with your first successful characters? Is fear of death something common among newbies that goes away with experience?

Yes. Messing around with water, fire, and air hounds is a negative sum game.
Anything* that keeps you from stat gain is going to kill you in the long run.

*Except possibly lack of FA

[Nemesis]

Yes. Messing around with water, fire, and air hounds is a negative sum game.
Anything* that keeps you from stat gain is going to kill you in the long run.

*Except possibly lack of FA

I really want FA! Luckily I don't have to be angry at myself for selling the ones I had, one was a Quarterstaff which gave me one swing for 15 damage and +3 in the for me useless WIS stat. Being a rather heavy quarterstaff, it would have been annoying to have it as a swap too.

What kind of weapon would you say is good enough to settle for when I start my trek towards statgain? Remember that I'm much less experienced with the game than you, but as I won that Quickband game it isn't my first time I fight the monsters around statgain depth. Also, I read quite a lot at these forums and open monster.txt when I'm unsure, so I'm not totally fresh.

[Pete Mack]

It doesn't matter what source of FA you have so long as it exists. A quarterstaff (1 blow) is fine. The point is that you will be carrying a swap weapon--even a dagger (+7,+7)--for when you need melee. For really big one-on-one fights, you'll be using archery anyway. (For groups of trolls and orcs, you will want a swap weapon and a stack of rods of light.)

You have to think of two extreme situations, with almost nothing in between:
* what you can handle when all you are trying to do is escape (like ghouls and ghasts and other paralyzers)
* What you can handle when you really have an opportunity for advancement (rooms full of orcs and trolls, and individual monsters with big drops or big EXP.)

Don't assume that you will be wearing the same gear in both situations.

[Nemesis]

I just found my first Artifact Weapon, Spear of Orome. It gives me 4+ to speed, intelligence and infravision and does almost as much damage as that Cutlass of Extra Attacks (if we count +4 to speed as 40% more damage, it does more damage!).

I'm really happy I found it, it feels like I'll be using this weapon for some time before I find anything better, and even then I'll probably miss the speed bonus. As my race/class is High Elf Ranger, I'm already quite stealthy and I also have boots and a cloak, and together they give me +4 to stealth. I guess I'll be a ninja now, the sleeping monsters'll never know what hit them!

Only thing that worries me is the RNG. I was thinking of sneaking into Zephyr Country and just avoid anything capable of paralyzing, but now I don't want to do it even with a swap item! Is there any chance I'll find something that's not a weapon that grants FA before Zephyr Country? Which items are most likely to be FA ego items (or artifacts) at this point of the game? What should I pick up and identify? I also happen to have some 90 000 to spend, I mostly use my money to buy stat potions from the black market, but is it possible for free action stuff to show up there as well?

Finally, I've seen blessed (or was it holy avenger?) weapons granting FA, is it possible that my spear gives FA, but I need *Identify* to notice it? I know the chances are slim, but hoping's no crime!

[Pete Mack]

You are right back where this discussion started: rings of FA. The other possibilities are gloves and boots.
As for Orome: the *ID* spell was removed in 3.1.x. And no: Orome doesn't have FA.

If you aren't willing to risk paralysis, you should rank FA higher than just about any other feature. There are a number of ways to cut down on the risks of paralysis, but FA even as a swap is the best.

Otherwise:
* detect often
* wear ESP
* carry rods of light and use them in hallways
* use magic mapping

Edit:
Orome is a huge boost in power. If you have memorized all the paralyzers, you can use it as a primary weapon and keep a poor FA weapon as a swap. Otherwise, a Ring of FA is hugely valuable, much more than delving or even slaying.

[Sirridan]

Thankfully patalysis doesn't stack up in newer versions, I've survived walking into a ghoul pack like a moron before. Also oddly enough its easier to avoid and/or safely kill hounds with pack ai on since they wait in rooms and most of the time you can go around them or teleport self away.