My best game every so far...over

[Wraitheist]

My level 36 Priest is rocking along, hovering around '2600. Found all of the dungeon books, I'm decked out mostly in artifacts, and playing it safe. Then, I take a > and the RNG strikes:

The Plasma hound breathes plasma.
You have been stunned.
The Plasma hound breathes plasma. <3x>
You have been heavily stunned.
The Plasma hound breathes plasma.
You have been knocked out.
The Plasma hound breathes plasma. <2x>
It breathes plasma. <5x>
The Plasma hound breathes plasma.
The Plasma hound resists.
It breathes plasma.
The Plasma hound resists.
You die.

My heart sank a little more every time I pressed the space bar at a <more> prompt. I cannot believe I made it so far only to be killed with no chance of escape. Man this game is brutal, lol.

[Pete Mack]

This is one of the dangers of slow diving, if you don't have a "lock". If you are diving fast, it still happens, but in a much smaller fraction of games...

Still, it's very bad luck indeed--you can try playing NPP, where you always will go down stairs in a safe nook. However, NPP has other dangers to make up for it. Such as:

The 14 Headed Hydra Breathes Gravity!
....

If you do try NPP, try playing Rogue or Brigand. Monster Traps and Slinging are fun...

[Wraitheist]

What do you mean by "'lock"?

[Nick]

What do you mean by "'lock"?

RBlind, RConf, RSound - if you have those, you can't be stopped from reading scrolls or spellcasting.

[roustk]

RBlind, RConf, RSound - if you have those, you can't be stopped from reading scrolls or spellcasting.

Am I remembering right that GMMs and other melee stunners are always dangerous?

[Wraitheist]

Ah, I see.

[awldune]

When I mentioned RSound in the other thread, this is what I had in mind.

Better luck next time!

[Wraitheist]

Yeah, can't say you didn't warn me. However, most of the lists of "recommended depths" I've seen suggest having poison resist by 1900 or so and don't mention anything about rSound until much later. I thought I was doing the right thing, hehe.

Anyway, it looks like hounds of one type or another are going to be my most-feared enemy at just about every level. I lose countless characters around 1000' to fire/water/light hounds. I lost my last cleric in stat gain depth to gravity hounds, and now my best character so far to plasma hounds. I can't look at my dog the same way any more.

[Pete Mack]

Anyway, it looks like hounds of one type or another are going to be my most-feared enemy at just about every level. I lose countless characters around 1000' to fire/water/light hounds. I lost my last cleric in stat gain depth to gravity hounds, and now my best character so far to plasma hounds. I can't look at my dog the same way any more.

This is one more reason to get to 1500' faster. The less time spent messing with water and air hounds, the better. At 1500', there's a higher proportion of 'd', which are a lot more valuable to kill.

[Zikke]

You mean nobody else named their dog Dwar?

[aeneas]

Am I remembering right that GMMs and other melee stunners are always dangerous?

I believe you are. I wouldn't know for sure, as I haven't let a GMM get anywhere near a character of mine for a long time. That's one of those things (Greater Titans are another) that should make your spidey sense ring like a bell in a hammer factory.

Also, it's very hard to say at what level you should have certain things. One thing is sure though: you either need to go so slow that bad luck can't kill you or you need to go so fast that it is unlikely to. If you do the second you never stop because you lack a resist. You plow on and assume you'll get it before you need it.

My ranger just got FA from Thorongil at around 1700'. I'll admit that that makes me nervous, but it's not an unusual depth for me to get FA at, and I don't lose a lot of characters to paralysis. But I detect like mad when I don't have it, and I run the other way if I see something that can paralyze me. Poison is the same way, but Angband has been made easier in this respect. 1900 is the old barrier- now you can hang at 2000' fairly safely till you get the ring. But I tend to have just dived through the 30s so 2000' is deadly to me for other reasons (lack of Con mainly). So I keep going at least until I can get stat potions from many group monsters, something that starts to be true around the late 40s.

[bpleshek]

you can try playing NPP, where you always will go down stairs in a safe nook. However, NPP has other dangers to make up for it. Such as:

The 14 Headed Hydra Breathes Gravity!
....

Can you explain what you mean here, please?

Thanks,

Brian

[aeneas]

Can you explain what you mean here, please?

In NPP you always come down at the end of a corridor... you're pretty much always safe on the first turn in a level. I think it has to be that way because of the AI. Coming down in the middle of a pack of hounds would be certain death in a lot of cases.

Also NPP has insane Hydras, including hydras that breathe gravity for a lot more damage than hounds do (this is just a function of hp, I think, but still... ouch). The 0.3.x (?) series has hydra _pits_, and god help you if you get too close to one. Of course you won't, but they can interdict whole levels, and force an unwanted recall, if you play with small levels on and connected stairs off.

Beyond that a few of the NPP bigbads are much worse. Vecna in NPP is really frightening. Sauron is a larger pain (if you search I have a thread around here expressing surprise at not being able to destruct Sauron's summons). Morgy is a lot harder. And the new NPP also has some things named after various Angband persons that are ridiculous both in their ferocity and in what they apparently drop- I've never gone after them because I don't play in such a way that I could survive an encounter with them, but since you seem to have complete monster knowledge of them I've gotten a hint by detecting them. I don't know if they always have the same stats, but if I recall correctly I once came down on a level with Leon Marrick and got scared... very scared. The enormous promised drop was not at all tempting.

I think NPP's initial idea was to remove a few annoying things from V, though it wound up going a bit farther than that, IMHO. I really like the 0.3.x series. The 0.4.x series is really different- it's a true variant, though closer to V than many variants. You might as well try both if you're interested in variants that are V-like but have significantly different play.

[Tregonsee]

Am I remembering right that GMMs and other melee stunners are always dangerous?

What are GMMs?

[Kosonen]

What are GMMs?

Grand Master Mystics. Bad News without rStun.