Help - stagnated Dwarf Priest

[drquicksilver]

After my very successful mage I decided to try a dwarven priest which used to be my favourite when I played Angband many years ago.

After a good start in which OOD helped me very carefully clear out an insect nest and a jelly pit and level rapidly from clvl 5 to 18, I find myself really slowing down around 2000'. There are a lot of monsters which are a real pain to kill with my low melee damage and orb, e.g. berserkers, hydra, trees. Teleport other is limited (wands keep getting destroyed) and not many sources of slow monster (my old rod got destroyed although I just found another). "Portal" is an annoying range spell, it is too long range if you just want to hop around a monster and pepper it with spells. Base speed would help a lot but I've found nothing except the +2 boots I'm wearing and Til-i-arc; also no source of ESP yet. I had been using Turmil for the +4 to wisdom but when I found Thengel I thought I could afford to go back to Til-i-arc for the speed.

Am I doing something obviously wrong or I am I going to have to hang around 2000' until I find significantly better eq?

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=23687

[Sky]

go up 5 DL and you should be fine. kill stuff with Orb Of Draining (that longbow is pretty good too). you need some potions of DEX before you can melee stuff properly.

[archolewa]

Priests tend to stagnate right around here. Skys advice is good, but you could also prioritize stealth granting gear (though not above free action and the basic resists). Getting your stealth up can go a long way at these depths, because it will let you pick your battles more. You know, walk past the trees and pound some orcs.

I generally prefer getting my stealth high and either descending or staying where I am when I hit a wall. Though I will go up if I'm really overwhelmed.

That being said, I tend to play races with a higher stealth, so not sure how many sacrifices you'd have to make to get your stealth up to a good level.

[Sphara]

I'm thinking shield of elvenkind & cloak of Aman is better duo here than shield of preservation & Thorongil. At least it would fill your resistance holes. You'd have to chain-cast Sense Invisible, though to get SInv. Shouldn't be a problem with that amount of MP.

[Sky]

yes but keep the shield of preservation, those things are great.

[drquicksilver]

Thanks all for the help. I did considerably better by slowing down a bit, hanging around 2000' and ended up maxing STR/WIS/CON, finding Lotharang for much better melee output and then another source of poison resist so I could switch in Arvedui. It turned out there was quite a lot of scope for tactical improvements - I got better at using anti-summoning corridors and glyphs of warding, did much better against mystics/ranger chieftains/patriarchs/demons; hydras I realised I had arrows of frost which killed them in 2-4 shots. Gorgons remained a pain and I just skipped them (skipped two 'n' nests for that reason).

I never did get past +2/+4 base speed and eventually I got to clvl 40 and died at 2500' by Portal'ing backwards and forwards repeatedly between two rooms, one with a gruop of gravity hounds breathing on me and the other containing Eol and an ancient dragon he had summoned. After a few repeats I stopped portal'ing and used teleport other on the D but by then I was low HP and Eol killed me next round. Would have been smarter to use Banish Evil.

I'll share my thoughts on the new spellbooks in a separate post.

[archolewa]

Yeah by cl 40 (and almost certainly before then), you do *not* want to teleport yourself to get out of danger. You want to either teleport your enemy, or destruct them. Teleporting yourself puts you at the mercy of the RNG, and that never ends well.