Early Christmas present

[Nivra]

Forced descent still leaves you with a lot of "extra" levels; I'd guess you can afford to skip upwards of, oh, 33% of the dungeon and still be able to put together a reasonable endgame character. But yes, you can't just simply drop to the bottom of the dungeon and then replay levels over and over again.

Well, yes. But if you have forced descent on, and you're too far down, you don't really have an option to slow down much. You're going to continually run into sticky situations and have to keep diving. Obviously, if you're a little OOD, it's no big deal, but we're talking fairly aggressive diving, and trying that with Forced Descent will just cause a snowball effect since you can't ever pause your diving at a certain range(e.g. 60-63) in order to catch up.

[Carnivean]

but we're talking fairly aggressive diving

For a Forced Descent game the advice I gave would be fairly aggressive diving, leaving you open to the possibility of getting in over your head. For a normal game it's a lot slower than others have recommended.

[Egavactip]

Well, I am happy to report, if for no other reason than to salve my own ego, that my losing streak with high elf mages is over. Tonight I won with my 14th-in-a-row go at it, with WizardBoy13.

His journey was sped along by finding a potion of experience at 200 ft, which catapulted him up to around level 27. Smeagol was not expecting this.

I didn't find Kelek's until very late in the game, which slowed me a little bit. I also had a general shortage of high-quality artifacts--shields, gauntlets and cloaks were in short supply--but I was able to find some nice non-artifact items to make up for it. My final kit had resistances against everything but sound and stun, and a serenity swap for that if I needed it. My helm had immunity from fire, which is always super convenient for a mage. I was able to get my constitution up to 18/***, which was not the case for any of my previous mage characters, and the hit points were nice. I never find much to help my strength score, though.

I also never found a light source that would map the whole level, so i was rather dependent upon finding enlightenment potions or else explore the hard way.

After I defeated Sauron, I went back up to the town to refill consumables, then back down again. I tried to set up a defensive area against Morgoth and waited and waited but he never showed. Finally i realized I was still only on dl99. Chagrined, I conjured some stairs and went down to dl100.

In DL100 I set up some defenses and waited and waited and waited, but Morgoth never came. What was it with this stupid game? Finally, I realized he must be trapped in a vault somewhere (I did not have the level mapped, remember), so I had to go "rescue" Morgoth so that he could try to kill me. An odd situation.

Morgoth indeed was trapped in a very large, very open vault, so I went in and "freed" him. I left the vault but soon found myself back in and most of the combat took place in the vault. About 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through, I found myself in an excellent fighting position, thanks to some falling stuff. People could only get at me through one direction, so I just mana stormed Morgoth continuously, occasionally banishing to make sure critters behind me wouldn't breathe too much on me. Worked like a charm.

I took a screen shot of that position, not too long before the win.

Anyway, yay, i got that monkey off my back!

Here's the character on the ladder: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=18674

[Carnivean]

Congratulations.

[Pete Mack]

Congrats. Lucky find or no, mage is still the hardest class by a good bit.