It was about time for me to finally get around to ascending a
character.
Merfolk crusaders were a particularly easy combination. They start
with spellcasting and an incredibly useful spellbook for the early to
mid game (fire brand for hydras, berserking for just about everything,
repel missiles for centaurs.) Additionally, the merfolk aptitude for
polearms is ridiculous and the ability to swim in water is incredibly
useful in a number of situations.
Morgue dumps are boring, so I'm going to eschew it entirely. Here are
the highlights of my game from the perspective of somebody who knows a
bit about Crawl, but has never played a character all the way through
to the end. I'm sorry for the length of this message, but I hope that
some of my thoughts might be useful for those who are still trying to
ascend their first.
Back in the 400b26 days, I played a number of AC-based characters and
so an EV-based one was a refreshing change of pace. Mostly, I just
had to pay much more attention to the game. An AC-based character
only tends to get whittled down a little bit at a time, but there was
a lot more luck and vigilance required for the kind of HP variation
that an EV-based character can have. There is also something mildly
unnerving about being a melee character in a robe, but I found that I
could go safely toe-to-toe with anything by the end of the game. The
light armor also meant that I could cast spells reliably, which helped
immensely the entire game. I have a hard time understanding how
hybrid classes could work well with heavy armor.
I normally forget to do anything with ranged weapons and so I made
sure to grab a blowgun this game. It wasn't amazing, but even normal
poisoned needles seemed incredibly useful for pulling monsters without
alerting their comrades or for tagging fleeing monsters with some
poison so that I didn't have to chase them. (Note to self: add
graphical indicator for poisoned monsters.) Curare was in short supply
and I didn't have a strong enough grasp about what monsters I should
be afraid of, so they remained unused.
The other new thing I tried this game was to train up traps and
doors. I'm not sure how useful it ended up being, but it was always a
good feeling when I was prevented from stepping on a Zot trap that I
didn't know about. To be honest, I don't think I stepped on one the
whole game.
In retrospect, I lugged around far more wands than I needed to the
entire game. I barely used them at all. One wand each of healing,
disintegration, and digging would have probably been sufficient.
Maybe cold and draining in there as well if I had to add more. These
ate up valuable inventory slots and I found my melee damage was
greater and more reliable. Wands might be useful for other kinds of
characters, but not this one.
I had no ring of poison resistance until after clearing the Hive,
Swamp, and Snake. As an EV character, clearing the hive without
poison resistance was pretty trivial. I found a swamp dragon in Lair
which provided me with a hide when dissected, that I then enchanted.
I used that to clear Snake, but it was clear that heavy armor as a
source of poison resistance was going to fail in Swamp, where every
time I stepped in even the shallowest water, I'd remove my armor. I
love the merfolk ability to swim in water, but it can have its
downsides. (Note to self: add inscription for "put back on this piece
of armor when back on (safe) dry land.") My poison resistance-less
strategy for Swamp was to just be very careful about the drakes and
dragons and to use an amulet of clarity. With judicious use of
stairs, it worked out better than expected.
I went with Okawaru, which ended up being a good choice. Might and
haste were indispensable the whole game. I got some nice early gifts
from Okawaru (+3 robe of resistance, boots of stealth, and the Knife
of Accuracy) Due to not putting enough points in spellcasting and
enchanting early on, I wasn't able to haste independent of Okawaru
until extremely late in the game. The best part for me was that the
tactical decision of when to use haste versus when to save the piety
so that haste would be available at a later point remained quite
interesting the whole game. Also, haste and might made it easy to
probe the difficulty of monsters that I hadn't seen before, which was
exceptionally handy for somebody like me.
Mutation was a problem for me for most of the game. I had some nice
early mutations (slow metabolism) that were promptly cured by
identifying the only cure mutation potion in the game. By the time I
cleared Elf:7, I was left with teleportitis, deterioration, frailty,
and a fast metabolism. The amulet of resist mutation did not show up
until Vault:8 (which was right before Zot:5.) I had heard that Zot:5
with teleportitis could be a death sentence, so as a last ditch effort
I trolled the sparkling fountains in Snake:5 and Crypt:5 for cure
mutation. This only resulted in the additional mutational joy of map
rot and losing my temper in combat. The only upside to the
deterioration was that I had a nice randart ring of sustain abilities,
+Fire, and +3EV which got promptly inscribed with !* and never left my
finger. There was nothing in the dungeon to prevent teleportation and
no amulet of resist slowing to fix the anger problem.
I debated about whether or not to push into Zot with that fantastic
array of mutations and decided to just push onward and downward. The
mutations did not end up being my problem; it turned out that I was
just a little mentally unprepared for Zot. In terms of fighting
monsters one on one, I didn't have much trouble. However, even with
an amulet of conservation on, my armour and scrolls were continually
destroyed by those blasted draconians spitting acid and sticky fire.
Next time, I'll treat the first few levels of Zot more like Slime than
merely D:28.
I started slowly clearing out Zot:5, judiciously pulling monsters back
to the stairs and spending as little time on the level as possible.
Needless to say, it was only tempting fate, as I eventually teleported
into one of the adjacent rooms to the Orb. I saw it, but I was too
much of a coward to make a break for the orb into the midst of all
these unknown monsters. A quick scroll of teleport put me back near
the up stairs and I took a breather. The anger mutation wasn't
helping at all here either, as I felt like I needed to preemptively
cast haste, lest I go berserk and end up slowed at the end. Lots and
lots of glowing was had by me.
In the end, I had what I can only imagine is a classic teleportitis
victory. I randomly teleported by the orb again, hasted myself,
grabbed it, read my last scroll of teleport, somehow ended up by the
stairs, and ran as fast as I could back to level 1. The climb back up
was more flavor than challenge, but I'm not convinced that's a bad
thing. Lots of demons were summoned, but there was no reason to fight
them, especially when I was hasted the whole way.
I've played more Nethack than I care to admit, so here are the
comparisons that I feel compelled to make now that I have a little
more experience:
(1) The challenge and tension was high enough that I never quite felt
safe, even during the "breathers" of Elf:1-6 and Vault:1-7. I'm not
sure what I expected, but it was a stark comparison to Nethack, which
for me always has a boring easy stretch between the castle and killing
the wizard, even with Kelly Bailey's heck1d patch and a host of
bizarre conducts.
(2) This goes without saying, but the equipment decisions were a lot
more interesting in Crawl. These decisions only got harder as the
game went on, where the randarts made this a much more interesting
problem. Nethack always seems to be a question of "what do I do until
I find item $foo?" and Crawl seems to be more a question of "Which do
I pick between $bar, $baz, and $qux?"
(3) Along those same lines, I love that Crawl can nudge you down
different skill paths, depending on what it throws at you. In
Nethack, I know what I'll be wielding and wearing in the end game by
turn 1. It's quite bland, in comparison. For example, I was hoping
to use a shield this game, but the halberd of speed that an orc
provided me quite early on cemented my direction.
(4) I didn't expect this to be the case, but Zot:5 felt perceptibly
safer than the Astral Plane, because there was always a way to escape
it. In Nethack, you're stuck on the Astral Plane until the game ends
one way or another. This could also have been due to the fact that
Zot:5 felt like the inevitable conclusion to a slowly growing
difficulty level, whereas the Astral Plane always feels more like an
alarming kick in the teeth.
(5) If anything, I found Crawl to have a less interesting end game
than Nethack's. My feelings aren't necessarily about the challenge,
but about the memorability of the last few levels. Other than the orb
chamber of Zot:5, there's little that stands out. If I had my
druthers, I'd see Zot:1-4 have some Zot-only vaults and Zot-specific
uniques, similar to how Nethack concludes with the very distinctive
elemental planes and the Riders.
Morgue:
http://enne.walker.googlepages.com/morgue-Enne-20071225-092205.txt
-Enne
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