Death Sword advices

[Narsil]

First of all, I really like the concept of that race, especially absorbing brands and resists from weapons. I've just reached 30xl and I wonder what should I do now. I'm still missing some essential resistances, so grinding seems to be good idea, but I don't know where to grind. I've cleared basic dungeons (Stronghold, Labirynth, Orc Cave), but almost died in Camelot (goddamn Knights of the Round Table). Where should I grind? Do you have any other tips for playing DS?

[Fnord]

I'm assuming that you're talking about Posch.

The best advice I can give you is to really consider whether a death sword matches your play style.

They are a really really excessively grindy class. The have the advantage that it's possible to become virtually unbeatable, but the path there can be really really long. And this is even more true in 4.x with the reduced high resistance effectivity.

There's a couple reasons for this. The first obstacle you'll encounter is confusion resist. As you may know, it is impossible to go to certain depths without it. Buf confusion resist on weapons is rare, and you need a load of them to get it.

But then it gets worse: The big DS killer is Disenchantment. It is inredibly rare on weapons - and you, as a sword, can be disenchanted. That means you can actually lose essences, +hit, +dam and more - and (at least last I played them) the fast growing requirements of essences to reincrease them do not get lowered.

Thus, the endgame for deathswords consists of grinding for (incredibly rare) weapons with rDis while avoiding all monsters that can disenchant. Which at the depth you'll want to use are anything but rare.

But that's not all: Consider how many weapons with +speed you find. As you probably know, lots of speed are essential for a chance at winning, but speed is not common on weapons.

To make that matter worse, Death Swords are not allowed to reforge. So finding any awesome artifact that's not a weapon... grats, you got more gold now.

See my comments on http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=16284 (which is a bit outdated, but to my knowledge only got worse since then). For comparison, here's the dump and comments of the currently best DS on the ladder post 4.0 (who made it to 50 but apparently gave up in frustration).

[krazyhades]

As Fnord points out, deathswords can really take it out of you. They take a ton of lucky drops to fully come together, and nothing will drive you more insane than having a disenchanter unluckily hit your rDis essences! Or a giant's thrown boulder destroying multiple !*Healing* potions because of your lack of rShards.

(rip nikheizen's will to play pcb for many months after those happened to his DS)

And yes again as Fnord points out, death swords were nerfed a bunch by chris after he decided they had too much lategame power. For example, he definitely nerfed their odds of getting increased die size when they level or kill uniques.

Still, they can be done, but it does take a heck of a lot of patience and saves against insanity.

IIRC nikheizen made a patch that adds a "Hall of Blades" with lots of weapon drops and weapon-type monsters specifically for playing around with a deathsword. Depending on your comfort with building the code yourself, you may want to seek out his patch? Though I'm not sure how much easier it makes things or not, it was more his experiment in adding a dungeon and guardian.

[Narsil]

Yeah, sorry, I forgot this is variants subforum, not Poschengband subforum.


I'm still alive, but without fear resistance and confusion resistance gameplay tends to be very annoying. I have mixed feelings - as I say, Death Sword itself is awesome, but I don't have nearly enough patience for endless grinding. Sadly, I have no idea how to apply such patches.

[Djabanete]

Well if you just want to have fun on your own terms and don't mind changing the rules of the game, you can do so without being any kind of programmer. The edit files are easy to change. You can assign R_Dis, R_Fear, and/or R_Conf to some kind of ego weapon that you frequently find, thus upping the chance that your character will soon resist those things at a level you find adequate.

I'm sure there are more elegant solutions, but this is as much as I know.

Edit: It's been a while, but the path is something like [Game folder]/user/lib/edit or [Game folder]/user/edit, and then you poke around until you find a text file that contains ego types. Then you use existing syntax as a model.