[PosChengband] Leveling squishy classes (Spider)

[Exo]

Started playing PosChengband a few days ago but I'm struggling with leveling up Spiders.

My current plan is just to grind the Stronghold to clvl5 as they're too squishy to start with the bandit quest from the beginning.
Afterwards I do the Warg Quest and keep grinding the Stronghold more until i hit ~clvl16.
I'm not sure where to continue after this though. The Icky Caves seem to be too tough at this point. I tried leveling there but had to flee too often causing the stairs to crumble.
Killing Meng Huo is also not possible due to being too squishy to get to him.

I guess the only person with some experience on leveling up Spiders in particular is chris according to the ladder but if anybody else has any ideas/experience with this or similar scenarios feel free to reply

[wobbly]

Never really played a spider so most of this is guesswork. I'd try phase & shoot tactics with a large stack of ?phase doors. Unfortunately spiders can't use a bow. This means wands. In the new version frost bolt wands aren't easily available so you'll need the random shop. Get a stack of ?Teleport, make the journey to morivant. Use the spider's stealth & tele scrolls to collect gold. Use a staff of object detect to find stuff. Sell then purchase random wands till you get something decent. Another way might be lots of ?Phase, !Heroism & !csw. Melee-phase-heal-melee-phase.

Edit: Might also be worth trying the start hasty? or lucky and looking for good boots?

[Exo]

Yeh getting good boots seems to be a big part of trivializing the leveling process.
I did forget to uncheck "always generate unusually small levels" for the Icky Caves which explains why I got chased down by hounds so quickly haha.

Phasing away to quaff pots was my first go-to when getting stuck but at that point I usually don't have a big enough stack of healing pots (or money) since I have to burn through quite a lot of them in a short amount of time and the shops don't stock enough to begin with.

I guess I could try the Orc Caves or dive a few floors in Angband.
I'm still too new to PosChengband to know how much of a threat those places pose but there's only one way to find out

I'll try your suggestion of gambling for a better wand too to see if that helps and maybe play around with different starting personalities.

[wobbly]

Ok, I've found the time to try one out rather then talking out my spinneret. They are superb little device users, stealthy & fast, have inbuilt detect monsters but are a little fragile & lack much melee power.

I'll post a dump when I get further but my start so far. Stronghold -> Thieves quest -> Stronghold -> Buy wand of magic missiles -> Stronghold -> Buy stinking cloud & staff of id.

I'd suggest worrying less about leveling (this will come naturally with better wands/combat & protection rings) & just build a thieving kit. You already have detect monsters. You'll need detect traps/detect objects/id. You'll want ?teleports & !csw or !ccw (for blind/confusion). This way you can just detect/avoid/escape while looting the dungeon. If you see an easy target, pick it off. Hard target, avoid it.

P.S.: You don't need to grind to lvl 5 for thieves quest. It can be done straight away, but it's touch & go. It can be done easily with either a wand or enough basic consumables. Try out things like ?monster confusion, ?phase, !clw, !csw, ?bless, ?holy chant, !heroism. It's a little slow but you can even do it by throwing rocks & phasing away.

[Exo]

Relying more on wands definitely has helped a lot.
I'm currently running (crawling?) around with a few magic missile wands in my pack to use on enemies I need to soften up or don't wanna touch cause of stat drains etc.

My start is pretty much exactly like yours and I did manage to do the thieves quest from the get-go on my latest attempt but it cost me 3 !csw that I bought with the starting gold since there were no wands in my price-range for sale from what I remember.

Afterwards I went over to Morivant and started doing Angband up to dlvl15 so far which is working out pretty well. Most likely gonna dive down to dlvl23 and start doing some quests afterwards which I'm pretty sure is gonna be the end of me because I have no idea what the quests are going to throw at me .

-edit-

Ended up doing the Doom Quest 1 at clvl18 which was a big mistake since I had no idea what was waiting for me. One of my magic missile wands blew up in my face, got my strength drained to about 15 and barely got rid of the AVs leaving me at 8 HP; lesson learned.