YAWP 3.5.0: first Warrior win!

[Bogatyr]

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=16903

Well Grok about whom I posted a little while ago beat the big "P" just now! The final battle was no cakewalk, despite hoarded !Healing, !*Healing*, !Life, ?Banishment, ?Mass Banishment, ?Destruction, !Speed. In fact I burned through all the !Healing (15 or so), about 5 ?Destruction, several ?Mass Banishment, and was using ?Phase Door way more than I thought I'd need, in fact I wish I'd come down with 80 instead of just 40 ?PD. I used Aule because it averaged 500 vs. evil vs. Ringil's 450, and I made up for it with !Speed, but in retrospect maybe it would have been marginally better to use Ringil and avoid the occasional need to quaff the !speed. I had sustain for str, dex, con, but not int, wis and they started getting quite low, do you die if a stat gets too low I wonder?

I was thinking of waiting for a more damage dealing weapon but was feeling antsy and wanted to take Morgoth on. Woohoo! My first warrior win. It sure is nice having a boatload of hitpoints, and having "infinite" amounts of main attack available. Big HP gives you some nice cushion in many situations. But I miss the infinite no-fail utility spells of the mage, I think I'll go back to mages, perhaps with a human to try to gain faster. The faster leveling of the half-troll warrior (compared to high-elf mage) was really noticeable.

I had missed the eye tyrant among uniques, so he showed up a bunch.

[Derakon]

Congrats on the victory!

I probably would have gone with Ringil for the final fight, and then still drunk !Speed. +10 speed isn't valueless just because you outspeed Morgoth, and the extra safety margin is helpful especially when there are summons in the area. But Aule is also a fine weapon.

To your question: no, you can't die simply because your stats are too low. Still, WIS can have a decent effect on your saving throw (and INT on your device skill, though you shouldn't rely on devices in the final fight, not as a warrior anyway). It can be worth hoarding Mushrooms of Restoring for the final fight. Though with your stock of healing items, you could just as easily have drunk !Life instead. It's not like you'll need them after you kill Morgoth!

[Jax]

congrats on win. any win on this game is respectable as it takes so long and is very difficult.

so much hp :O! and that PDSM :O! not a fan of so little dmg going in to the last fight, i definitely prefer more than that, sometimes MUCH more than that if possible, usually from archery but if you have the sustain then it doesnt matter

gj

[Bogatyr]

congrats on win. any win on this game is respectable as it takes so long and is very difficult.

so much hp :O! and that PDSM :O! not a fan of so little dmg going in to the last fight, i definitely prefer more than that, sometimes MUCH more than that if possible, usually from archery but if you have the sustain then it doesnt matter

gj

Thanks!
Oh yeah I was in heaven with the PDSM, it basically put an end to juggling resist swaps (just missing nexus and nether, Dal-i-Thialon took care of neither and I needed it anyway for the +dex to get 6 swings with Aule). Eol was sweet: immune/fire without needing a weapon/ring swap. I can't see how people use bow against M, as he summons SO MUCH he always had a crowd around him, you can never have enough consumable banishes to deal with that. Also I was using the *destruction*/PD approach and maneuvering position so he never had a distant line of sight of me. When he did he used practically every single turn to do massive summons, so I wanted to stop that. Yes with that relatively low damage it seemed like it took forever to knock down his stars. But with enough HP it meant I could stand and melee for several turns without needing to touch any consumables.

Random musings:

Mid-game was longest. Spent a few weeks there. Start of game was pretty simple as I found Telepathy early on (an otherwise poor) a weapon. But once I found enough speed in the late mid-game it was pretty much sealed: with telepathy you can prepare and choose your encounters and with enough speed you can pillar dance just about anything except the one or two wall-walking or wall-eating uniques, and for them I just melee them in an ASC. Interesting that hardest resist was pBlindness, I had to stick with a True Sight lantern over artifact lanterns for the pBlind for a long time. pBlind for melee wasn't such a big thing with ESP, but for ?PD escape it was important not to get and stay blind.

pConfusion was also rare, I had to swap for a long time with pConfuse vs. ESP before I found Rohirrim then Isildur. Clearing vaults took a long time but was not too scary. Basic approach: open a room, if a tough opponent then ?PD out of the vault to move to a prepared safe pillar and waited then pillar danced. Speed items were fairly common (in vaults) once I got deep enough. I think speed is more common in 3.5 than in earlier variants.

Warriors sure gain levels (especially high levels) fast compared to mages. In part I supposed to the lower multiplier but also because warriors can take on more oppoents more easily when they get buff enough. I was clev 50 before I knew it.

Crap stealth with the half-troll was annoying a little but I eventually embraced it. Plowing through crowds was not an issue as long as they didn't have powerful distance attacks: one eye on the HP and one eye on the monster list to make sure nothing really scary showed up, and Grok would mow them down in no time. With ESP and speed Grok could escape an undesirable crowd and prepare a fighting zone them lure them in a few at a time.

Best inventment was a rod of identify in the BM for like 25K, which came reasonably early.

Juggling inventory for all the required utility rods was a pain. I kept 2 slots of arrows at all times but with the exception of a unique Q I never used archery much at all throughout the entire game except as a mop-up and when a few times I got caught in a long hallway. I didn't use archery at all against Morgoth.

Rods of detect came quite late so I had to keep -Treasure, -Doors/Stairs, -TrapDetect around most of the game. It's a pain burning so many slots for the basic utilities (light, illumination, detect).