A humble High Elf Ranger looking for advice

[Pete Mack]

Ooh, diagonal vault. There will be great loot. Stand at the entrance, and let the monsters come to you. Fight them or TO them depending on strength. You will get plenty of free tries to TO dangerous monsters because you have them on an extended knight's move.

Also: you need more CON, desperately. You are wearing essentially no +CON equipment, which is crazy.

[Jesus of Gondor]

Ooh, diagonal vault. There will be great loot. Stand at the entrance, and let the monsters come to you. Fight them or TO them depending on strength. You will get plenty of free tries to TO dangerous monsters because you have them on an extended knight's move.

Also: you need more CON, desperately. You are wearing essentially no +CON equipment, which is crazy.

Oh shit xD well... yeah my bad about the CON. but hell let's just hope for the best. I feel pretty safe with all the advice you guys gave me. specially you Pete! (y) i will take this vault on and show you a new dump! it's a promise!

PD: Yeah man. i'm crazy... but you only live once XDDDDDDDDD (YOLO)

[Grotug]

I would wear Caspanion for the con. Sure, you give up rchaos which is annoying if you get hallucinated, but the +3 con is a worthy trade off. The increases AC doesn’t hurt either.

[Jesus of Gondor]

OK guys! i'm back! and with awesome awesome news!!!! THAT VAULT WAS AMAZING!!! there were a lot of ACTION in that place! lot of murder! AND most importanly! with GREAAAAT i mean. GREAAAAT loot!!!

As i promised! here's the update of the Mighty Halion! http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=22068
Check him guys and tell me what you think!

I have to say it was a very tough fight.. but it was very epic... full of emotions, I killed Itangast, Saruman, Durin's Bane AND! Glaurung!! that last guy gave me a lot of trouble with his summons... Thank God for the glyphs of warding, resistance and haste self! that guy was summoning and breathing fire like crazy, creating lava in the process (ugh) luckily before i faced him i found a beatiful Blade of Chaos of Gondolin that gave me 5 blows and 500 damage against dragons. (yeah smite dragons.. powerfully) he was spitting me fire like crazy, chugging CCW and the few healing potions i had, i managed to get him stuck behind a glyph, shooting him down with amrod and then! NO AMMO!!! , i was getting starting to despair because i had nowhere to go (TS wasn't a option 'cause i TO a bunch of nasty monsters).

So i only had one option. Meleeing.

With all the shots he received he was more than half dead, but still very dangerous and the glyphs of warding were breaking before me. He strided to me with an all to familar intent (heh) so i sheathe Aglarang and pull out my Blade of Chaos. *sigh* i was in glyph when i had him face to face, i started to hack n slash him, clawing me, biting me, spitting fire to me, Halion was getting out of CCW and the healing potions were done for, all beated up with just 326HP, but he was also 10% dead. then it showed up "Glaurung flees in terror"

Halion said "You can suck my blade. Bitch of Dragons"

When he was fleeing he summoned a Death Drake *giggles*, i ignored him, stabbed Glaurung's head with my demonic Sword. And that was the end of the beast.


Killed the death drake in 3-4 rounds i don't remember.. and the rest of the vault was easy

Thank you for your support. This fight it's not over yet. i will be updating for you guys!

"Aurë Entuluva!"

[Evilpotatoe]

Try not to be too greedy

@Pete
you spoke of "low speed", but Halion already had +20 !
Do you aim for more, or just mean that falling from +20 to +15 would be too much of a waste ? (Covering resitances holes seems better than getting over +20 base to me)

"In any case, you don't actually need any more resists with Himring + Celegorm"

I'd agree that disenchant & sound are "luxury", but can't shards be lethal ?

Also, after fighting the cat lord, I surprisingly kept Holhenneth as a switch just for RBlind, since this disabled all my escape at once.
Is it the only dangerous enemy worth beeing that careful ? I didn't care much about it before. (EDIT : forgot about *destruction*. Guess its mandatory late ?)
(and I assume RConf is vital too at some depth, like 40/50 isn't it ?)


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


@Jesus
Are you sure a High Elf Ranger can actually be humble ? ^^
I just got back into Vanilla a few days ago, and created one... because it seemed to be, by far, the most OP char to me.
I killed Morgoth today, @CL48 (both 1st vanilla and 1st sub CL50 win for me) . This must be my 4th or 5th win of some *band, but by far the fastest/easiest).

My (noobie) advices would be :

• To abuse missiles, which are both extremely powerful and way safer than melee.
• Legendary stealth can be great too. I discovered I could plunder full vaults without a fight (uruk-sleepstabing doesn't count xD).
  This was extremely fun.
  I even sacrificed some resistances and speed to that, and kept a ring of the mouse 'til CL44 or so, and DL72, if not 80. Switched only for a +5 CON.
• Also, no matter my class, I often try to more or less max out STR as fast as I can, since it prevents overweight speed handicap.
  I might underrate DEX, but it seems quite secondary to me, even as a ranger.
  (I make more efforts on CON only later : it seems useless before CL30-35, since char got a bad HP base, rarely reach the "magic multiplier treshold", and encountered monsters are rarely *that* powerful)

Good luck killing the bad guys !
Did your epic fight end-up potionless, or "only" with few remaining CCW ?
In both cases, I think using the last healing is rarely a good option.

Personally, I tend to do the opposite mistake, and save healing a bit too much, or worse : yesterday, I went down to 99 "just to probe" Sauron, and ended up killing him... while I didn't have brought any potion of *healing* with me.
This worked fine, hey... cool, right ? But the move remained a completely stupid one (and I was aware of it !). He mana stormed me once or twice, and I had to use normal potions of healing, which gave him some turns to kill me.
I ended up with something like 28 *healing* (2 or 3 used against Morgoth) and 5 of Life (didn't use any)

Try not to be as foolish as I've been
DONT fight with low healing capacity ! Its not worth it.
killing uniques at lower depth will grant better rewards anyway. -- I always save Smeagol's excellent drop for DL40, for example ^^

[Derakon]

Shards is a niche resist. IIRC Huan is the only monster with a max-damage shards attack. Great Wyrms of Law/Balance can also breathe it for decent damage but not the damage cap (again IIRC). Nothing else comes close.

In general, any elemental resist is optional so long as you can feasibly avoid the monsters that use that element to deal heavy damage. Indeed, you don't really need any resists for the fight with Morgoth, so long as you can avoid his summons.

[Nick]

Shards is a niche resist. IIRC Huan is the only monster with a max-damage shards attack. Great Wyrms of Law/Balance can also breathe it for decent damage but not the damage cap (again IIRC). Nothing else comes close.

The Wyrms do breathe the cap (HP over 3000), as do gelugons and Kronos.

[Derakon]

...right, I never remember those guys because they weren't in the game when I was first learning the monster list. In my day it pretty much went from Erinyes to Marilith to Lesser Balrog to Greater Balrog and that was it! And the only unique P was Morgoth.

Thanks for the correction, Nick, you young whippersnapper. ;p

[Nick]

Thanks for the correction, Nick, you young whippersnapper. ;p

Have to take advantage on the rare occasions when the authority stumbles. And never mind, I'm about to level the playing field by changing all the monsters