How to Keep Your Mage Alive

[noxincane]

Mages are sexy.

I cast level 3 eroticism.


Anyways I usually just get some good weps and swords and scum rats/and those w things till I am at least level 5. (making sure I have lots of food and lighting) Then I stay on level 1,2 and 3 scumming lots of items and selling them till I have about 2-3.5k and Then I buy great armour with lots of +speed. Then I run around slaying and leveling up around level 1-5 till I am level 13-14.

[neilc]

I tend to play gnome mages, and have several house rules which contradict the advice of the OP.

- First off, I limit what I can purchase from stores. I can only buy food, light sources, and restore potions. Anything else, I need to find in the dungeon.
- Second, I always fully explore each level. I also ensure that to the best of my knowledge, I have killed all monsters which started on that level. The only exceptions to this are particularly difficult uniques, or monsters >5 levels out of depth.

Clearly, this means that I need to take it slow and steady. In this, the advice from the OP which resonates most strongly? To always have multiple methods of escape, and never wait until the last moment before making that escape.

I've been relatively successful, particularly recently. If my character reaches CL3, I generally expect that character to survive to ~CL25. I've had very few deaths in levels in between. The most dangerous area for me is the area between DL20 and DL30 - it seems to always be the biggest challenge to all my characters.

My best is a character which died at Morgoths hands - first time I'd encountered him, and I learned from it... hopefully I'll be ready for him next time. I'm pretty sure now that I have seen all possible opponents. My current char is at DL65 and going strong.

[Inquisitivephysicsguy]

I'm sorry about abandoning this thread for so long, I've been preoccupied with an REU recently...

Well, for those of you who are asking about how to do Morgy in...
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WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
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I've found that keeping plenty of Healing potions, Life potions, and *Healing* potions helps. For wizards, your maximum health is so low that the distinction between all three of these potions is blurred. My Mage had his HP around ~650 or so. If Morgy get really angry at you (he did this to me about 6 times throughout the slaying process) he might use his mana storm in combination with a few other attacks. If this happens then he can do on the order of 400 HP's of dmg. At one point in the slaying process, I was being careless and let my hp fall to 380. Then I proceeded to attack, his next attack brought me to 6 HP... I was lucky that I wasn't killed for being stupid. (I could've sworn that the highest dmg possible w/ max boosts was 350).

I prepared for my encounter with Sauron by finding (Life-Pot+*Healing*-Pot = 20). When I finished him off, I had about 2 or 3 left.
So for Morgy, I decided to find about 40 of these, then went after him...
If you always heal yourself if your HP falls below 400, you should be fine...

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END SPOILER

I've never actually tried a speed ascension with a Wizard, now that I know how to keep one alive, what works for a fairly sturdy wizard will also keep a weak-as-a-kitten wizard alive too, since I see now that in the dungeon there really isn't much of a distinction. The resists are the key...


I'm considering moving on to harder Rogue-likes. Trying to keep a wizard alive in Angband is fairly straight-forward compared to some of them.... at least it seems that way.