Furthest I've gotten

[Raajaton]

I'll give it a shot tonight. I was leery about attempting to fight them as I seemed to recall at least one of them doing nether damage, which my current kit doesn't resist, but it looks like Witch-King only shoots nether balls for rather negligible damage.

Ungoliant's attack damage sounds a bit scary, but if he doesn't break the glyphs right away I may have a fighting chance. His health pool is a lot higher than anything I've fought so far though. I imagine it's going to take me quite a while to burn him down, as my damage is probably not as high as it could be yet.

[Mondkalb]

Ungoliant may breath poison, which can be double resisted but among other things she can invoke darkness storms regardless how much she is damaged.

I ususally carry rods of probing to reveal the abilities of monsters (in line of sight), but the priest has the spell from Goldy Insights. You should use it before you undertake any fights with uniques or deep monsters, just to be sure how much damage they can deal. (After you have cast it, "l"ook at the monster to see the details.)

[Oramin]

Incidentally, I took down Ungoliant yesterday with my Hobbit Rogue (L50, 1009 HP) without Darkness Resistance, so it *is* doable (albeit painful).

[Raajaton]

Fortunately I managed to clear the vault and take down Witch King and Ungoliant. Unfortunately I got no loot of worth off their corpses or the vault. At least I rid the dungeon of 2 more uniques.

I'm curious what I should do from here. I lack some crucial resists like chaos, nether, stun, and sound. I can swap some gear for a few of those resists, but I'll have to sacrifice a fair amount of stats to get it. I'm wonder if I should stay around the depth that I'm at and hope to get some drops, or keep diving in hopes of finding better stuff further down. My gut tells me that if I keep going much deeper I'm going to be out of my league.

[Derakon]

I'm curious what I should do from here. I lack some crucial resists like chaos, nether, stun, and sound.

None of these are remotely crucial.

[Raajaton]

I see. The one that bothers me the most personally is chaos. Those chaos breaths do a pretty significant amount of damage, as well as hallucinate which simply scares the bejeebus out of me. I guess to be fair I don't encounter chaos breathers all that often, and I can simply avoid them.

I assume the point you're trying to make is "play carefully and you can go as deep as you like."?

[Philip]

Yeah, from 70 down to 127 there is remarkably little increase in difficulty, yet much better stuff. I don't know many monsters scarier than Witch-King and Ungoliant. Otherwise, as for resists, I gave you a couple rough guidelines on those on your dump.

[Derakon]

I assume the point you're trying to make is "play carefully and you can go as deep as you like."?

That, and you shouldn't have a goal of marking every little checkbox on your character sheet, especially if that means sacrificing significant stat bonuses/speed/damage. A character with high stats and good damage output is vastly more capable than a character who's covered every angle of attack. Sure, the latter will take less damage from any given attack, but the former will take fewer attacks overall (due to killing enemies faster), and is fairly likely to have higher HP (due to higher CON score).

[Raajaton]

I'm starting to see that. Just tackled a rather sexy vault which netted me nenya, hammerhand, and tulkas. Wiped out glaurung, characoth, and qlzwhatever in the process. My damage output has increased signifcantly, and heal seems to make up for what I lack in resistance. I definitely see why people say dwarf priests are so sturdy.

The next vault had pazuzu (total pushover) and huan. Fortunately I picked up a decent law dsm shortly before my fight with him. I swapped it in before taking him on which helped tremendously since he seemed to breathe both sound and shards regularly - both of which I lacked at the time. Ancalagon was in there too but his breath attacks were still doing immense damage even through my resists and got scared so I saved him for another day.

I feel the need to give these recaps as this is my best character to date and I can't convince amy of my friends to play or care enough for me to share my experiences. I just need to tell someone, but I'll try to keep them brief.

Cross your fingers for little raaj - he's going deeper ...

[donalde]

Yeah, from 70 down to 127 there is remarkably little increase in difficulty, yet much better stuff. I don't know many monsters scarier than Witch-King and Ungoliant. Otherwise, as for resists, I gave you a couple rough guidelines on those on your dump.

Yeah, Withch-King and Ungoliath are scary. Maeglin is also quite scary, as he sometimes manages to sneak from behind and open paths to monsters for LoS. Qlzqqlzuup is scary, especially guarding on GV, like Castle Death or Hellpit.

[Mondkalb]

I feel the need to give these recaps as this is my best character to date and I can't convince amy of my friends to play or care enough for me to share my experiences. I just need to tell someone, but I'll try to keep them brief.

Cross your fingers for little raaj - he's going deeper ...

I can understand that very well. When I was approaching my first win I also came here to get some advice. I felt it in reach and didn't want to loose that chance.

Depending on class and equipment and of course on randomness in behavior, some of the uniques can turn out to be a real challenge.

The Terrasque, Ungoliant, The Mouth of Sauron, Sauron himself, or earlier Saruman are some of those. Also, some you wouldn't believe as hard as they turn out (depending on level), like Nar, Beorn, or The Cat Lord.

[scud]

The Terrasque, Ungoliant, The Mouth of Sauron, Sauron himself, or earlier Saruman are some of those. Also, some you wouldn't believe as hard as they turn out (depending on level), like Nar, Beorn, or The Cat Lord.

Killing Beorn is my personal benchmark for a 'viable' character; I'm not too bothered if I die pre-Beorn, but after that I'm emotionally invested.

The uniques that seem most OOD at their regular depth are the angels. Nasty buggers, they are.

The toughest uniques as you approach Sauron (who I think is himself underpowered) are the three Big Cs. The most disappointing are definitely the last two balrogs. If I were Morgy I'd review my security arrangements.

[Raajaton]

R.I.P. Raaj the Dwarf Priest. Another victim of yet another unbelievably stupid death.

Things had been going well. I had recently found the second ring of power (Narya) in addition to the one I already had (Nenya). I finally overcame my fear and decided to take on Ancalagon. After luring him into my man-made tunnel of death he proved to be quite easy. After painstakingly searching through the corpses of he and his pals I stumble upon the coveted Soulkeeper chest! I take on Mouth of Sauron on this level as well, who I had heard some frightening things about. He dies fairly easily as well - fortunately he rarely made use of his Mana Storm spell, which if used more frequently may have made it a little more challenging. Things are starting to go too well.

I find the next set of stairs and descend down to dlvl 90. I'm getting extremely excited, as this is my first trip down to the last 10 levels of the dungeon. Upon entering the level, I'm greeted with the message of "Omens of death haunt this place." Until recently this would have sent me shivering to the nearest staircase, but instead I feel gitty with anticipation at all the potential loot I may find, and uniques I can kill.

Already I can see Gabriel and a host of Archons and Archangels are sharing the room with me, but are still asleep. I cast Detection and can see that Polyphemus is also close by. I cast Clairvoyance and I find a rather large vault on this level with many promising looking items. I move into this next room and build another summoner death tunnel and cast Orb of Draining to lure our angelic friends to me. I make short work of them all without any notable drops. Oh well, one less unique to deal with. I move over to greet Polyphemus. Other than turning the general area into a giant pile of rubble he proved to be nothing more than a teddy bear and gets easily dispatched.

Now I'm ready to move towards the vault. There is a long, straight, narrow corridor with the vault about 15 tiles south with no other rooms nearby. I cast Detection and see this vault is harboring Vecna and Maeglin. The vault is broken up in such a way that the larger portion closer to the entrance was filled with mostly low level demons and other trivial fodder. Our unique friends were in a narrow corridor in the rear of the vault which required a bit of digging to get to. "This is perfect!" I thought to myself. I can build another zig-zag death trap lined with Glyphs of Warding straight down from this corridor, take care of majority of the small fry monsters first, and then re-prepare myself before having to take on the big boys.

Here's where the stupidity shows up. At this point I have been playing for a few straight hours, and I'm having a discussion with my roommate. If there's one lesson I've learned throughout playing Angband, it's that at this point I should have taken a break. I had been at it for a significant stretch, and now my attention was somewhat divided. However, I was happy with the planning I had done and figured that if by the time I was ready to dig out Vecna and Maeglin I was still engrossed in conversation I would stop there. On to the embarrassment, and the end of this lengthy post as well as Raaj the Dwarf Priest.

I begin clearing through the horde of non-consequential monsters. One of them casts Teleport Other on me, warping me back to the long, narrow corridor I started from. ESP is showing me a pack of Nether Hounds a ways down this corridor, but not too close to me yet - or so I thought at the time. Now had I been paying closer attention and actually thinking about every action as I normally do, I probably would have activated my Celeborn chest piece and simply deleted all Z's from the level. Aside from currently being my only source of disenchant resistance, I keep that item on me at all times for the sole purpose of removing troublesome hound packs. Let's also note that although I have nether resist on one of my swap chest pieces, it's not the chest piece I'm currently wearing.

"Get on with it!" you say. "What did you do?" Well, I did the dumbest possible thing that anybody can do in this situation. I hold my movement key heading back towards the vault. "I see where this is going, but you should have been fine. You have health warnings set up right?" Nope. I have never bothered to set them up, as I found that I pay closer attention to my actions when the game doesn't warn me when my health gets low. In a few short strides that happened near instantly since I was leaning on the key, all of those Nether Hounds breathed. Suddenly, in a nanosecond I go from 980 health to -12. Panic. Dismay. Sudden laughter? I think I'm losing my mind. My roommate asks what happened, as I started laughing during a decidedly unfunny story he was telling me. I tell him I just died. He gives me his condolences and asks if I need a minute alone. I took it.

Unfortunately I forgot to do a character dump at the death screen. I stared at the ASCII gravestone for a few minutes before closing the game and heading off to bed. Oh well, it was a hell of a run. By far my best to date. I won't give up though. Raaj the Dwarf Priest may be nothing more than a legend now, but others will follow in his wake. Perhaps a Hobbit Rogue ...

[academic.sam]

Oh, man. I feel for you. I was following your narrative and enjoying it. Not stepping away from keyboard at a moment of danger has been many an undoing of my characters.

However, bad news for you is it is this kind of things that get you hooked on to this wonderful game.

I almost had a similar fate yesterday when my mage at DL96 was walking towards a juicy pit and didn't notice mouth of Sauron has gotten LOS on me. Took two steps and all of a sudden my mage with 820hp was down to 195. Luckily, I noticed the red @ and 'low hitpint! LOW HITPOINT!". Another single step and I would have died. After years of playing I've finally learnted to just stop and stare at it for a bit before doing anything stupid. In this case I just teleported him away and the mage is alive and kicking at DL99.

[Mondkalb]

That very moment, when you realize, that you have done something stupid, is terrible.

Playing for too long, playing while tired, being distracted, pushing down a direction key, too much self-confidence, and other stupid reasons ...
All of them are responsible for many dead characters. ^^

But at least, now you know, that you can do it. You were nearly there. Next time it will probably go better.