A Total Newbie Guide by an Almost Total Newbie

[wobbly]

watched you play so going to comment. I have a brief/blunt style sometimes, don't take my comments too critically.

Alas, Var the Priest died at DL99 from a bile demon's poisonous breath.

Thank you all for the advice.

Last bullet set:

20) Always have two ways or more to reliably hurt enemies. I was OoD obsessed and ignoring ranged and melee damage cost me in time.

Teleport other. You don't need to fight things.

21) Resistances matter, having no rPois brought me low from 750+ HP to -25.

rbase - fire, cold, elec, acid, poison!

22) Never fight in any other state than fully healed if possible.

yes! The only thing more important than healing is tele-leveling.

23) Glyph of warding is your friend and can make things considerably easier even for an inept melee priest.

was cute & clever to watch this. Ultimately you could of skipped this. see comment to 20

24) Try always to face one enemy at a time.

agree. Other than thinking there is a more fun way to do this. get a win first, before reconsidering.

25) Do not ignore the merits of telepathy and See Invisible.

notice you had this on swap. Works, but better to have it not. You know?

26) Elemental immunities are true game changers and can make life much easier.

they can. Experts will tell you they are unnecessary. They are 1 less thing to think & worry about.

27) Prolific enemy summoning can be a real pain to deal with.

yeah.

28) Cones, breath weapons, spells that cause elemental damage can wreck equipment. Make sure to move out of the way.
29) Playing with company is invaluable

Insert random wisdom.

Edit: I'll add another that I mentioned on-line. Searching for the perfect gear setup when you are already Morgoth-ready. Good way to lose concentration & RIP.

[Holy_Rage]

Alas, Var the Priest died at DL99 from a bile demon's poisonous breath.

Thank you all for the advice.

Last bullet set:

20) Always have two ways or more to reliably hurt enemies. I was OoD obsessed and ignoring ranged and melee damage cost me in time.
21) Resistances matter, having no rPois brought me low from 750+ HP to -25.
22) Never fight in any other state than fully healed if possible.
23) Glyph of warding is your friend and can make things considerably easier even for an inept melee priest.
24) Try always to face one enemy at a time.
25) Do not ignore the merits of telepathy and See Invisible.
26) Elemental immunities are true game changers and can make life much easier.
27) Prolific enemy summoning can be a real pain to deal with.
28) Cones, breath weapons, spells that cause elemental damage can wreck equipment. Make sure to move out of the way.
29) Playing with company is invaluable

[Holy_Rage]

Quite a lot happened since the last bullet set. I managed to kill Sauron and I am getting ready to meet Morgoth... win or lose, another set of bullets shall be posted after the final battle.

Ladder dump

[Sky]

so, 300. unless you have a +2 blows item, that is.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

How much damage can you even do with a (+15,+15) shovel? 250?

MattB won Vanilla with a store bought shovel. He got up to over 400 damage per round, with about 8 blows per round. http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=16689

[krazyhades]

How much damage can you even do with a (+15,+15) shovel? 250?

With the right build in the right variant with the right shovel, you can do over 2,000.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=20095

[Sky]

How much damage can you even do with a (+15,+15) shovel? 250?

[Ingwe Ingweron]

4A) Uniques are now uniques, you don't need purple color. Of course, in the old days, Kavlax was looking like a baby MHD...

If you play using ASCII, playing with purple enabled is still important.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Pfft. You didn't even mention buying a lantern.

Or a shovel, just a shovel, no other weapon, just a bog, ordinary, store bought, shovel. Go forth and kill Morgoth with that shovel.

[Pete Mack]

@Monkeyface: speed also increases damage proportionally. At 2x speed, you do 2x damage per turn. In a dragon out fight, the figure of merit is :

Damage*ENERGY*((HPMAX-HPMIN)/HPMIN+1)
Where energy is the discounted speed (identical up to 24 or so, with rapidly diminishing returns after speed 30)
HPMIN is the minimum HP safe to have vs. your current enemy. For Morgoth, that's 600. You can normalize this by dividing by energy*damge for the current enemy.

[Monkey Face]

A few comments:

10) Speed - Damage - HPs = the holy triumvirate of Angband. It's better to kill fast than enter bouts of endurance. They only need to win once, you can't afford a single defeat.

Speed is primarily to keep the opponent from getting multiple turns against you without you having a chance to respond.

11) Use Detection as much as possible and try going where treasure shows, not clear every single level room.
12) Detection - Telepathy - Clairvoyance = for the discerningly cautious player. Sense Evil and Detection afterwards at regular intervals. There is a certain helm artifact that allows you to Detect without being a spellcaster. For the poorer fellow newbie, Rods of Treasure Detection and Mushrooms of Second Sight.

Detection is primarily to detect monsters and enabling you to stay away from the ones you don't want to fight. Treasure detection is significantly less important.

14) Establishing Line of Sight can be a blessing and a cause of utter doom at the same time. Make sure that the creature facing you is not a caster or has breath/ranged abilities. If so, when in doubt, seek to break LoS at all costs.

Line of sight (LOS) is very important if you are using ranged attacks. The ideal situation is when the monster is in your line of sight but you are not in theirs. This will allow you free shots. It's especially useful for monsters that don't chase you such as Q's. The way to do this is to be two spaces away from a corner while the enemy is at the last spot around the corner. (Search the forums for hockey stick for more details.)

14)18) If playing a caster, keep two copies of each spellbook on your @. The weight is well worth finding yourself without the tools of your trade.

Once your dexterity is high enough that you can't be stolen from, you don't need to worry about keeping extra copies of the dungeon only books (the ones after the first 4). They can't be burned. If you have fire immunity and high dexterity you don't need extras of any of them.

[luneya]

Pfft. You didn't even mention buying a lantern.

A newbie couldn't possibly know about the classic "1. Buy Lantern 2. Kill Morgoth." That joke is from the 2.x era. In 3.x, the general store stopped carrying lanterns.

Plasma hounds, which WILL get you if you use teleport self regularly after CL 50.

I'll never forget my first encounter with those guys. I was playing something like a half-troll warrior, and had been able to kick the ass of all the low-level hounds at their initial depths; the plasmas were the first high-level hounds I ever saw. "Another pack of hounds? Kill them first so they don't wake up something dangerous with their beaths." *Wades into melee* *Immediately disintegrated by a half-dozen plasma breaths*

14) Establishing Line of Sight can be a blessing and a cause of utter doom at the same time. Make sure that the creature facing you is not a caster or has breath/ranged abilities. If so, when in doubt, seek to break LoS at all costs.

Another important reason for tracking whether your foes have ranged attacks is phase door. In a battle that you deem worth fighting against melee monsters, phase door (either the spell or a large stack of scrolls) is a good way to keep from being surrounded; it's a semi-reliable way to buy yourself time to quaff lower-level healing potions without having your gains immediately reversed by fresh monster attacks, thus letting you conserve rarer potions for more desperate situations; and it can be combined with recall for a risky-but-feasible desperation escape if you've been so foolish as to get into trouble without a better option. If the foes have ranged attacks, none of this is possible. Especially not in cases where the ranged attack is worse than the melee (high-level hounds, dragons, etc.). But it's still true that most of the monsters (especially in the early-to-midgame) are melee-only, so it's worth always carrying that big stack of phase door scrolls, at least until you've reached a level as a caster-class where the mana cost of the spell is trivial and the fail-rate is zero/minimal.

17) My house, my castle, my pantry. Stocking the right stuff as you find them is apparently crucial. Sources of Banishment, *Destruction*, *Healing* are clearly a must for the discerning hoarder.

Yes. Also be sure to stockpile speed potions (keeping either a staff of speed or a tithe of the total stock on hand for emergencies). If you're a caster, stockpile mana potions similarly. Likewise any attacking consumables that you might need for the endgame (wands of annihilation for mage, holy might arrows for ranger, etc.). But don't bother stockpiling the latter unless you're in a class that needs it; on rare occasions, a warrior who finds a really good launcher and a stack of suitable holy might projectiles will take on Morgoth at range, but until you find that lucky launcher, assume that you're prepping for a melee battle.

Don't be tempted to stockpile huge supplies of weapons (or if you do, make these the first things to toss when you run out of space). Store one weapon of the category "I can't wield this effectively yet, but it will be much better than my current item once I max str and dex" (and, in the early game, possibly an additional midgame weapon or two, for swapping purposes while in the stat-gain phase), and toss anything that's not as good. Storing swap equipment in other categories can be useful as a way to get around the "I found this great artifact but can't equip it without leaving a resistance hole" problem, but unless you are playing mage or ranger, your melee weapon is your primary killing machine, and any abilities that it may have that don't increase its actual damage are irrelevant. Thus, there is no reason to ever store a half dozen different ego weapons.

19) Save often when playing online. Pray all the time (applies to both online and offline mode!)

Praying probably won't help. But it can't hurt either, unless you start playing NetHack instead of Angband. So I guess it's worth a shot.

[Holy_Rage]

Thank you all for your feedback. This is meant to be a work in progress by someone who is slowly making their way down the depths of Angband for the first time and is chronicling their findings. My conclusions could be utterly wrong for all I know and that is very much a possibility. But it's fun discovering things and balancing priorities when you simply don't know a pip about what's going on around you.

Otherwise, the advice sounds great. Anyway, on to the next bullet set:

10) Speed - Damage - HPs = the holy triumvirate of Angband. It's better to kill fast than enter bouts of endurance. They only need to win once, you can't afford a single defeat.
11) Use Detection as much as possible and try going where treasure shows, not clear every single level room.
12) Detection - Telepathy - Clairvoyance = for the discerningly cautious player. Sense Evil and Detection afterwards at regular intervals. There is a certain helm artifact that allows you to Detect without being a spellcaster. For the poorer fellow newbie, Rods of Treasure Detection and Mushrooms of Second Sight.
13) Do not ignore or underestimate {A}ctivated abilities. They will save you more than once. Detection, lighting rooms and corridors, breath weapons, powerful bolt and ball attacks.
14) Establishing Line of Sight can be a blessing and a cause of utter doom at the same time. Make sure that the creature facing you is not a caster or has breath/ranged abilities. If so, when in doubt, seek to break LoS at all costs.
15) There are things out there that will kill you in one or two rounds. Max.
16) There is no need to burn all your resources on a tough Unique, when you could be clearing entire vaults in a cheaper and safer way.
17) My house, my castle, my pantry. Stocking the right stuff as you find them is apparently crucial. Sources of Banishment, *Destruction*, *Healing* are clearly a must for the discerning hoarder.
18) If playing a caster, keep two copies of each spellbook on your @. The weight is well worth finding yourself without the tools of your trade.
19) Save often when playing online. Pray all the time (applies to both online and offline mode!)

At CL 36/DL 49 now! See you soon for the next bullet set (hopefully!)

Ladder Link

[Sideways]

2) Traps are currently either harmless or mildly annoying, shouldn't be an issue

Holy_Rage wrote this guide shortly after having a CL33/DL42 character insta-killed by a summoning trap.

@ walked into trap - AMHD appeared - having +10 speed, the AMHD got the move - AMHD breathed - dead @.

[Estie]

ad 5) potions of cure wounds have a minor nutrition value; if no food and eating a mushroom of purging, drink a few till recall kicks in.

ad 6) I use colour code for hp reminder.

ad7) base resists are vital, but only relatively late; I prefer free action, see invis, even poison resistance if I can get it over rbase early on. rings/amulets of resist base elements - squelch as found; there are plenty better options.

@debo: lanterns cost a thousand bucks now; truly the shopkeepers have learned to rip @s off.