Re: -Crawl- YAFVP Bronco the MiMo [Very Long]
- From: "erisdiscordia" <erik@xxxxxx>
- Date: 12 Jul 2006 02:23:33 -0700
sterjs@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I finally did it!
Congratulations! This game became a bit "my baby" as well as yours, so
I'm very happy to here it all ended with a YAFVP! Later YAVPs may
contain more difficult exploits, but there's something special about
the very first one.
Erik's posts also
help me quite a bit before I even started playing--I decided to
emphasize Auxiliary Unarmed and Evasion based on posts of his.
I'm a little rabid about Evasion, and Minotaurs have one of the
strongest cases for going heavy-armour. (They can't pick up the
otherwise easily acquired side benefit of good stealth, due to the
double-whammy of a bad stealth aptitude and a bad racial stealth skill
multiplier.) But it is pretty good stuff.
Also,
thanks for the great patch Darshan...without it the game would be
unplayable.
It was played before. I found it very unpleasant to play, but at least
one player is quite vocal about it having being fine to play even then.
So opinions do vary about this.
I also find it's made me a better player "for free" as the features
have increased. E.g. wakefulness-status highlighting of monsters (off
by default) makes me much more likely to avoid dangerous conflicts in
some cases where they're also not (yet) necessary, and that wasn't true
before. Another example: the ability to define no-travel zones has
prevented instadeaths in situations where, having faced an analagous
situation before that feature was added, I simply died.
I got the monkey off my back
If you really had it off your back, you wouldn't be talking about
trying a new character type later on in your post. :-)
3. Targetting and Macros. Learn them and love them. They make the game
much more enjoyable when you use them effectively and thus you are less
likely to make a careless mistake. Example: Set a Macro to Ea+ and it
will automatically target the nearest enemy with the first spell in
your rod. Another good use of macros is equipment swapping-- macros for
RgPm and RmPg swapped in my Amulet of Resist Mutation or Gourmand.
That's one case where I still use finger-macros and defining of
inventory letters to support them. (RRPP RPPR for mainline/swap
amulets, and RrPp RpPr for 2nd- and 3rd-best rings). I guess it's
because I consume a lot of prime macro real estate on macros not used
in every game (mainly spellcasting macros), just to keep things
consistent, so I don't have to think about them when switching games,
as I have a deep faith that thought is best saved for the big stuff.
Bronco the Swordmaster
Race : Minotaur Res.Fire : + + . See Invis. : .
Class : Monk Res.Cold : x . . Warding : .
1. Minotaurs are my favorite race for fighter characters.
They really are tough old birds. There are tougher ones, but they
require learning special lessons of their own (e.g. how to feed a
troll). Except for the matter of understanding the importance of their
horns, Minotaurs already work well with a general understanding of a
generic fighter, which is good, because there's already so much to
learn and know in Crawl.
2. I chose Monk as my starting class because they start with a solid
skill set--Fighting, Dodging and Unarmed were all skills I planned to
use for the entire game. I highly recommend MiMo's for players looking
for their first ascension.
Another nice thing about Monk (especially Minotaur Monk) is that you
can losslessly let the (combat) equipment that turns up define your
equipment choices, rather having to choose between taking advantage of
found equipment and taking advantage of starting skills.
Worship : Elyvilon Life Prot.: . . . Conserve : .
3. Hands down my favorite god. I would have died in Vault: 8 several
times without greater healing. In particular I remember being
surrounded by Stone and Frost Giants with no repel missiles and being
taken down to 27 Health. 2 Greater Healings and a speedy retreat
allowed me to continue my quest for the orb. Ely is a bit of a pain to
get going, but no other god grants an ability comparable to Greater
Healing in sheer ass-saving ability. Again, I highly recommend Ely for
those looking for their first victory--even spellcasters might want to
consider him, especially if they start with Sif Muna to obtain some
critical books first.
Nyra's right in that he's not the *only* good god. But he is very nice.
I moved to Crawl in part to avoid the temptations that often arrive in
roguelikes to do boring routines, with which I have a love/hate
relationship. Ely is kind of counter to that. "Collect and sac weapons"
is nothing compared to the "collect and sell every blasted thing" model
that I am, moth-like, drawn to follow in ADOM, though.
Inventory:
Hand weapons
e - a +8,+7 orcish scimitar of slicing (weapon) (1348 gold)
4. This weapon was much maligned in the pre-YAFVP thread. Although it
was suboptimal,
I am a bit skewed by a long string of challenge games, that often
revolved around optimizing what was left to optimize after ignoring
things made impossible by the challenge conditions. A suboptimal weapon
(and a very good one at that) can still win the game, as many YAVPs
including yours have proved. I'm just awfully conservative is all.
BTW there is an important, well-argued weapon-enchantment philosophy
counter to mine that was presented by Rubinstein a while back. I'll try
to summarize it here, and hopefully do it justice.
* If you die today, an optimal weapon won't help you tomorrow.
* A better weapon today will prevent you from dying today.
Thus he doesn't wait for that "weapon of dreams" to show up, but
immediately starts enchanting the first decent one (in terms of what's
realistic early on) to show up, simply accepting the loss as a
necessary and useful one once that weapon of dreams *does* show up.
There's a third point in his favor which might be too munchkiny for his
taste, but occurs quickly to me every time I think about his approach,
so I'll mention it:
* The soft limit on weapon enchantment makes life harder on those
aiming for top enchantments on one weapon than on those aiming for
merely-good enchantments on multiple weapons.
my auxiliary unarmed attacks and rings of slaying
overshadowed my weapon's base and ego characteristics.
You were lucky. There's no shame in good luck (though I'm biased here
because, if there were shame in it, I'd have to have left half my YAVPs
unYAVPed), but... you were lucky. When slaying equipment luck fails,
other things need to provide... like the base weapon. But not limited
to it -- see nyra's comments on Might from Okawaru.
I killed all but
the toughest monsters in the game in about 1-3 turns at the end. In the
future, I will be more patient when looking for my endgame weapon
instead of settling for the first adequate weapon. I found two +0
katanas in the Lair after the scimitar was already at +7,+7.
Ooh. That's kind of early, even for Rubinstein, I think. :-) Wish he
were here to comment.
I used
about 9 more scrolls to get it to +8,+7...if I had known how hard it is
to get to +9,+9, I would have just enchanted and vorpalized a katana
from scratch(13/+4/130% is much better than my scimitar's 11/+1/140%).
It's even better than that: you also get minor bonuses for wielding a
hand-and-a-half weapon (that katana) 2-handed. (And yes, getting both
that benefit and punching is cheesy, and yes, the alpha of the new
version has removed that. Sniff.)
Armour
o - a +2 pair of gloves (worn) (138 gold)
V - a +2 cloak (worn) (135 gold)
W - a +2 dragon armour (worn) (1467 gold)
Z - a +2 pair of boots of running (worn) (245 gold)
5. I noticed the Dragon Armour in a shop for 1200 gold early on and
that motivated my decision to go the light heavy armour
route--otherwise I would have stuck with a pure dodging route and gone
with a robe of resistance or(preferably) an elven scale mail of fire
resistance if I could find one.
Note that Elven metal armours are best considered "heavy light", and
give the best benefits when treated rather similarly to light heavy
armours -- train both skills, ignore stealth. Concretely, elven metal
armours have combat penalties like to their heavy-armour counterparts,
and Armour skill can reduce these -- even in some cases making Armour
effectively a cheaper source of points of EV here than Dodging is!
Furthermore, even light armour gets bonus AC from high Armour skill.
That's irrelevant for ye olde robes of resistance (+1, so +1 more at
level 15), but rather important when Armour skill has 6 points of base
AC to mess around with from Elven Chain. Also interesting is the fact
that the training/not-training of Stealth is based on armour's weight
in AUM, not on its light/heavy classification, so elven metal armours
block training of Stealth -- perfect for a Minotaur.
A - a +6,+5 ring of slaying (right hand) (1050 gold)
9. I found this on D: 16 along with my first attack rod! I wore it for
the entire game except for the slime pits when I swapped it out for the
=of Robustness.
Hey! You didn't mention you had *that*! :-D
D - the amulet of Ug Pitihim (567 gold)
(You found it on level 6 of the Slime Pits)
This amulet protects the armour and weaponry of its wearer from
corrosion
caused by acids, although not infallibly so.
It affects your dexterity (+2).
It makes you susceptible to fire.
It insulates you from electricity.
It protects you from magic.
10. This was a very serendipitous discovery. Without it I would have
had to wear Storm Dragon Armour into Zot, because I had no other source
of electricity resistance and I can hardly imagine how nasty those
electric golems are without it. With this equipped, electric golems
were a piece of cake.
It's possible to take them on without it, but it's also scary and slow.
Magical staves
d - a rod of destruction [fire] (250 gold)
(You acquired it on level 27 of the Dungeon)
12. I hardly used this... the inaccuracy, magma, cold rod was superior.
Inaccuracy is inaccurate, magma is ineffecient, and cold is widely
resisted, although the combination of three radically different spells
on one rod does make it easy to find at least one decent choice at any
given moment.
[warding]
1050 gold. I read the scroll and the rest is history. IMO, this is the
best rod in the game. Deflect Missiles is incredibly useful and without
it the Slime Pits(Acid Blobs) and Zot would have been a pain in the
ass.
Never thought about it that way, but you've got a point -- there's lots
of ways to get more hurtage, but there's only one rod of warding.
In a similar vein, the detection rod is also nice, if you're not able
or willing to pick up some divinations. It won't cast Deflect Missiles
for ya, though. :-)
Orbs of Power
S - the Orb of Zot (250000 gold)
16. Zot was surprisingly easy. I was reduced to 50% hitpoints twice,
but greater healing fixed me up in a jiffy. I used Detect Monsters and
Traps liberally along with deflect missiles. It didn't hurt that I was
playing very carefully for fear of losing my character except one point
when I slaughtered several dragons and orb guardians using only
auxiliary unarmed attacks because I forgot to unequip my rod of
warding. Even then I only fell to 184 HP.
I gave quite conservative advice, so I figured you'd wonder what the
fuss was all about. I also figured you'd appreciate the
conservativeness if things started going to hell in a handbasket, as
they sometimes do down there. :-)
Wielding something silly is a wonderful chance to see just how much aux
unarmed is doing all on its lonesome. It can do quite a lot -- I had a
YAVP at one point where, just to be silly, I wielded the Orb and
clumsily bashed with it, doing most of the damage through aux unarmed.
Killed some pretty nasty stuff that way.
Miscellaneous
j - a silver rune of Zot (10000 gold)
17. By far the toughest rune to get. I very nearly died here even with
Ely's help. I exhausted most of my piety(lost even medium healing, not
to mention Restoration and Greater Healing) and all of my scrolls of
blinking just to make it out a lot. Ranged attackers were killing me
because I was forced to wear Storm Dragon Armour and I did not yet have
even repel missiles. Stone, Frost and Fire Giants+Yaktaur Captains
nearly had me R.I.P.--at one point I was down to 27 HP.
I've got 12 or 13 YAVPs and I'm *still* scared of Vaults:8. Sometimes
it's a cakewalk, but that only makes it easier to die on the many other
times when it isn't. V8 is one of my reasons for loving evasion --
having the Poor Man's Deflect Missiles on your side when things are
flying at you from all sides really eases the pain.
t - a decaying rune of Zot (10000 gold)
18. Trivial...I was never in danger here. I used unarmed for the Hydras
and wore a +2 Leather Armour of Poison Resistance the whole way. Too
bad I did this after the snake pits or I would have found the katanas
early enough to make use of them.
Swamp's difficulty varies a lot with character type. Overspecialized
axe maniacs can find it just awful if they don't luck into a flaming
axe.
The patch has changed it a lot, too. Navigating that place pre-patch
was a world of pain.
N - a slimy rune of Zot (10000 gold)
19. I played very cautiously and always focused on killing the floating
eyes here because I lost perhaps my 3rd or 4th best character ever to
an acid blob ambush.
I tend to poo-pah them, even though I know I shouldn't. I'm gradually
getting better, though.
Deflect missiles carried the day here and I
improved my skills quite with all the high XP monsters.
Omitted words -- euphoric late-night YAVP? (No malice intended -- I've
done it many a time myself.)
T - a serpentine rune of Zot (10000 gold)
20. I am a bit of an odd duck. I usually do the Snake Pits as my first
branch. I was already pretty buff at this point with the rings of
slaying and evasion and I cut through the Nagas in 1-3 turns each. If I
ever got in trouble, I used medium healing and I was out of it.
Snake is hardly odd at all as a first branch (outside the Lair of
course). It's got a fairly predictable set of dangers, and if you've
got solutions for poison spit and grey snakes -- which is often
achievable early -- they're not very large dangers either.
That said, I often skip Snake until reaching the bottom of the Lair,
simply to avoid thinking about having to return and finish off the Lair
later on. Simplicity again. Death Yaks often trump simplicity, though.
You have 14662 experience left.
Skills:
+ Level 20 Fighting
* Level 27 Long Blades
21. I planned to use Long Blades from the start because they work well
with auxiliary unarmed. However, if I had found a good 1 or 1.5 handed
weapon early on I would have gone with it. Do Maces, Polearms or Axes
have good weapons to go with Unarmed?
Axes have two nice hand-and-a-halfers. Maces have none. Polearms have
plenty (but are much maligned, perhaps unjustly). But you forgot
staves! Staves, from an unarmed standpoint, have *only*
hand-and-a-halfers. They are also much maligned, and again, perhaps
unjustly. Staves are I believe 7/6/120, which really isn't all that
horrid for a hand-and-a-halfer. (Though they don't get the 2-handed
bonus, and they block shields... FWthat'sW.) They have no
"executioner's staff", but there's no "staffalchion" either, which is
important when getting gifts from Okie or Trog. Staves of speed are
surprisingly easy to get yourself gifted, and are... good. But I'm
digressing, sorry.
- Level 5 Spellcasting
- Level 7 Enchantments
- Level 7 Divinations
- Level 12 Invocations
25. Just high enough to use Greater Healing at "Very Good".
Very Good is bad enough to have two failures in a row often enough to
be dangerous. You were a little lucky here. Though getting past Very
Good is more important (and more feasible) for relying on
translocations than for relying on Greater Healing.
Your Spells Type Success
Level
a - Detect Creatures Divination Great 2
b - Detect Traps Divination Great 2
26. Isn't it odd that the two best spells in the game are simple
detection spells? I used these extensively in Slime Pits and Zot.
At best they're the second and third best. The very most powerful spell
is Selective Amnesia. :-)
Errrr... "best spells" is a pretty big can of worms. :-D
Your vision is a little blurry.
YOWZA!
28. From an orb of fire because I had the electric resistance amulet
swapped in.
I can hardly imagine a more graphic example of what I meant when I
called electric golems "strategically dangerous due to pinning" or
somesuch.
At that point the game was in hand, but I equipped the
artifact ring of sustain abilities for the trip back--I wasn't about to
lose a second straight powerhouse character to stupidity.
Normally I'd be worried to wear antiport in your situation, but you
seem to forget little things less than I do -- I'd find myself wasting
turns in a crisis trying to port with it still on.
Last Messages
Are you sure you want to leave the Dungeon?
[Y]es or [N]o only, please.
Are you sure you want to leave the Dungeon?
You have escaped!
What Elethiomel said. :-)
Vanquished Creatures
2 ancient liches
29. Those are pretty scary if you don't get to them quickly, but with
two rings of slaying I dropped them in 2 hits or so.
I think they can go invisible... always scary when no convenient source
has shown up, and you can't use a corridor to pin them to a certain
line of fire (like, indeed, in Zot:5, where they're common!).
An orb of fire (Zot:5)
30. Not as scary as advertised.
Wait until you meet them with less slaying on your side and say that
again. :-)
A royal jelly (Slime:6)
31. WTF. Why so high in the kill list? It went down in 3 turns without
even damaging me.
Heh. You'll *love* Geryon (guardian of the gates of Hell), then. Those
two are in permanent showdown for the Most In-Game Overhyped Creature.
AKA the Wimp title.
3 curse skulls
33. Bolt of inaccuracy took care of them... but I have a healthy
respect for them as they've killed promising characters before.
I think the two facts are connected. Congratulations on that,
specifically.
e.
.
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