More newbie mage questions

[fmackenz]

My first mage died, by the way. CL 35 or so... (best I've ever done without backing up a save file). He died to a vrock that I 'ran' in to until dead. Just stupid.

Anyway, here are some generic questions:

Do you bother clearing Jelly pits? I have just been ignoring them.
Do you ever use wonder?
Do you ever use polymorph?
Does Confuse/Sleep/Slow monster just become useless below level 30?
Which begs the question, by the time you get Mass Sleep, do you cast it?

[Narvius]

1. Nope.
2. Early-found wands only, and once to get the XP.
3. Once, I found a rod early, so no.
4. I only use sleep + lightning beam for orcs.
5. Never got so far.

[Zikke]

1. Nope.
2. Early-found wands only, and once to get the XP.
3. Once, I found a rod early, so no.
4. I only use sleep + lightning beam for orcs.
5. Never got so far.

I agree with all this, except that I sometimes used Polymorph when I encountered a Colossus or something else horribly slow but annoying to kill. But you don't need to ever use it.

Edit: and I never use mass sleep, confuse, etc. at all. At that level you need to either kill what's in front of you, or get the hell outta there. The things you can't just kill outright are usually immune to that stuff anyway.

[RogerN]

Do you bother clearing Jelly pits? I have just been ignoring them.
Do you ever use wonder?
Do you ever use polymorph?
Does Confuse/Sleep/Slow monster just become useless below level 30?
Which begs the question, by the time you get Mass Sleep, do you cast it?

1. Jellies are best ignored, whether in large groups or alone. They give lousy XP and they don't drop any gold or items. Don't waste your time with them.

2. The only thing wonder is good for is a last-ditch effort to save your life when you're probably going to die anyway, or as a lazy way to kill groups of weak monsters which are not a threat to you. Don't use it against a tough monster unless you can escape quickly in the event that it casts haste monster.

3. Polymorph is mostly useless, but sometimes I'll keep a wand if I don't yet have teleport other. Polymorph is useless against uniques, fails frequently on other monsters, and occasionally turns a monster into something even worse. But once in a blue moon it comes in handy... so don't trash it until you need extra inventory space.

4. I usually don't bother with these because they fail too often, at least in vanilla. But like polymorph these spells can sometimes save you when you're out of other options. I use confusion and slow monster frequently in SAngband, but in that variant the spells use less mana and seem to work more frequently.

5. No, I don't bother. If you want to kill the monsters then putting them to sleep rarely helps because they all wake up while you're killing the first couple. If you want to run away then there are much better ways of doing that, especially since a few monsters will inevitably resist being put to sleep. If the monsters have dangerous ranged attacks then you shouldn't risk being in LOS of a group of them in the first place.

I suppose if you wanted to just grab some treasure on the floor without fighting them all then mass sleep could help...

[Slick]

Mass Sleep can really help you stop breeders (or packs if you get surrounded) who got out of control. Yes, by the time you can cast it, there are other methods also, but stopping a whole room of them so you can kill them with other means saves time. Yes, you can bail out somewhat easily too, but if you need/want to clear the particular level, Mass Sleep can really help.

[aeneas]

I agree with the above posts, but it would never occur to me to ask those questions... it's best to ignore things that aren't useful. Nothing in your post is even worth thinking about as a clvl 35 mage (if at all).

The main thing is to learn from every death. What you should learn from that one is that holding movement/attack keys down is a very bad idea. You will never win if you don't cure yourself of that habit- I was in the same boat at one point, and I lost a few characters who should have won to holding down keys...

EDIT: the wand of wonder can be useful for killing some uniques.. the spell really isn't