Re: YASD - Crawl 0.4.3 - Spriggan Enchanter

On Dec 23, 2:20 am, Stefan O'Rear <stefa...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2008-12-23, RathNarcow...@xxxxxxxxx <RathNarcow...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I've only recently gotten into Crawl; before this I played mainly
ADOM.

How do you like it?

It's great; it feels very well balanced. Nothing like my first
Slash'EM character (killed by a hobbit with Grayswandir on DL:4)

I've had a lot of early deaths (and one corrupted character
file that was looking like he was going to go pretty far), but this
one was different.  I lost control over my Hill Giant minion and
missed the message that it had happened.

You can expect this in the future; with very rare exceptions, there
is no such thing as a permanent ally in Crawl.

I know. My character's typical combat style was to enslave the
strongest thing around and have it kill as much as it could, then
finish off the rest with a bolt or two from my RoS. If there were
still a large number of monsters around I'd enslave another one when
mine died - that's why so many of my kills were "collateral damage".

That said, moving too quickly and missing messages is a very common
cause of death in Crawl.  (You do know about autotravel and
autoexplore, right?  They will autostop when anything dangerous
happens, greatly reducing the danger of this sort of death.)

Yes; they're very useful - one of my favorite features actually.

I was one-shotted in the ensuing turn.  Log:

 Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup version 0.4.3 (crawl-ref) character file.

3092 Crawler the Infuser (level 9, -10/44 HPs)
             Began as a Spriggan Enchanter on Dec 22, 2008.
             Was a Follower of Sif Muna.
             Mangled by a hill giant (23 damage)
             ... on Level 11 of the Dungeon on Dec 23, 2008.

That's not a oneshot, that's getting hit by one of the toughest melee
enemies in the early game while at 1/3 health.

It only hit me once - if I hadn't grossly misused that turn my
character would still be alive. It feels comparable to getting turned
to stone in NetHack for eating a cockatrice egg instead of the food in
an adjacent (keyboard-wise) slot.

Hand weapons
 D - the +3,+6 sabre "Oteaso" (weapon)
   (You took it off an orc wizard on level 10 of the Dungeon)
   It protects you from negative energy.
   It enhances your eyesight.
   It makes you much more stealthy.

Nice sabre.

Thanks :)

 E - the +6,+0 sling of Eternal Vigilance
   (You found it on level 11 of the Dungeon)
   It affects your AC (+3).
   It affects your intelligence (+2).
   It protects you from fire.
   It lets you blink.
 I - a +0,+2 sling
 M - a +3,+1 elven dagger of speed
Missiles
 y - 137 +0 stones

Sling and you devoted a lot of inventory weight to ammo, but no sling
skill.  Afraid of jellies?  (You could just get an offensive level 1
spell for them, like Summon Small Mammals from Callings).

I'd only just found that randart sling when I died. Early on I used a
large stash of darts I found around level 2 of the dungeon. I
actually found my Dagger of Speed well before the +0/+2 sling.
Combined with the ability to simply enslave monsters and let them kill
each other, I'd rarely had the incentive to equip a sling over the
dagger.

Books
 c - a book of Charms
 h - a book of War Chants
 o - a book of Geomancy
 B - a book of Callings
 K - a book of Wizardry
 O - a book of Practical Magic
 R - a book of Enchantments
 S - a book of Practical Magic

You don't need to carry all those books with you, they weigh quite a bit.

Okay, but where should I stash them? In the Temple?


   Skills:
 - Level 3 Short Blades
 + Level 4 Darts
 + Level 1 Throwing
 + Level 8 Dodging
 + Level 7 Stealth
 - Level 1 Traps & Doors
 + Level 4 Spellcasting
 + Level 12 Enchantments
 + Level 6 Evocations

You had 8 spell levels left.
You knew the following spells:

 Your Spells              Type           Power          Success
Level
a - Corona                Ench           #######...     Excellent   1
b - Enslavement           Ench           #######...     Excellent   4
c - Regeneration          Ench/Necr      #####.....     Excellent   3

Very unusual choice of spells and skills there.  The usual MO for a spriggan
enchanter is to train Ensorcelled Hibernation and Stabbing and oneshot
everything in the dungeon with a nice dagger.  Anything specific you had
in mind with this?

My general plan was to walk through the dungeon doing as little
fighting of my own as possible.

I like the effect of Enslavement (despite the obvious downsides). I
picked up Regeneration because I had no healing potions at one point,
and I didn't want to be caught at low health. It saved me once.
I was going to learn the following spells from the books I owned:
Magic Mapping from the book of Wizardry,
Remove Curse from Practical Magic
A moderate-level summon for use when there were no monsters left to
enslave.
Possibly also Repel Missiles, though I usually just had a minion to
block for me.

On Dec 23, 8:25 am, David Ploog <pl...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 22 Dec 2008, RathNarcow...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I've only recently gotten into Crawl; before this I played mainly
ADOM. I've had a lot of early deaths (and one corrupted character
file that was looking like he was going to go pretty far), but this
one was different. I lost control over my Hill Giant minion and
missed the message that it had happened.

In some sense, a fun way to go :) Just picture your couple-of-inches
Spriggan with the towering giant in tow. Of course, the moment that guy
hits, you're toast.

Do you use branding of allies? In the ASCII version, they're shown with a
green background. This makes status changes very easy to spot as you see
it without having to check that message.

Yes, I do. I hit a key I didn't mean to before I got the chance to
look around.

Perhaps you just haven't been expecting the amount of violence (respect
the giants from now on) or the temporary nature (as sorear says, almost
all allies are temporary - for lasting ally fun, play a HOPr of Beogh).

You're right, I wasn't expecting it to hit so hard, even though it
wasn't my first Giant minion. I should have seen it coming - the
other one took down 8 orcs (I ran into a 4x5 room full of them) before
he died.

I hope you don't mind dying. It's quite natural in Crawl (I don't assume
it to be rare in ADOm either :)

David

ADOM has its fair share of deaths as well - it's not that I wasn't
expecting to die eventually, I'm sure I would have met my end one way
or another. It's just frustrating to lose a promising character to
such a simple mistake as not re-casting a spell.

.