| Originally posted by PapillonReel I'm guessing its fire since it can burn up her books and such, but, as I said, I don't really know much about this game going in. |
Way to completely cockblock my reveal, dude. But it's good to know that I've been explaining things well enough that you guys can connect the dots! I'd recommend everyone play one or two of their own games by now if you haven't already.
Anyway!
Welcome back to Let's Play Angband. This entry is brought to you by the recommendation to not pay much for a good meal. Let's just say that I was luckier than my friend who ordered the scallops. Next week we're taking him to another, better seafood restaurant in order to make up for my mistake. This other place also makes better martinis.
We also drew this on the table [Editor's note: Possibly NSFW]. That was the best part of the evening, and I hope our server enjoyed it!
Okay, so where were we? Oh yeah, Viki had just gotten an EXCELLENT! level feeling. That usually means there's an artifact around, and she's been having a good run lately, so why not? Maybe she'll get lucky again!
Well, this is a good start. Maybe. This is another monster pit, but this one is fully of delightfully (mostly) sedentary monsters; (j)ellies and (m)ounds. All Viki has to do is stand back and reap the benefits of spamming Orb of Draining. Needless to say, it's a very boring fight; Viki closes the door and rests to restore mana, spams draining all over the room, closes door, repeat. It takes a few thousand turns to finish all of these guys off, probably. I wasn't counting.
I've teased it for a while, but now I'm going to talk about how Viki is going to fight hounds, at least in some situations. Right now it looks like she's in a pretty bad place, and she kind of is, all out in the open and exposed. But Angband has an interesting property; walls don't always block splash damage from area of effect spells, and Viki can shoot around them in highly improbable ways. Viki could target any of the circled tiles (or monsters) for desirable effect.
Right now hounds are weak enough, and Draining is strong enough, to actually take out a good portion of a group or at least leave them weakened enough to make them easy to pick off. This will change later on but for now Viki's not in any real danger.
But she will always be taking advantage of these corners, because monsters won't take advantage of them in the same way Viki does, for whatever reason. In particular they can only target her directly, and not open squares.
Hounds defeated, Viki picks up a few more rods of LIGHTNING BOLTS and cruises around the dungeon until she sees this:
Looks like there's a unique monster afoot. She's not up for fighting one right now, even if it would be easy, because "excellent" feelings can very often indicate a seriously out of depth (5+ floors) unique creature.
This is one of the cutest little monsters you've ever seen. It's truly invisible, and is mostly a pain in the ass because it will block you from escaping down what looks like a perfectly ordinary tunnel. It gives decent experience for Viki's level, too.
Viki loops around to the northwest corner of the dungeon and meets up with the theorized unique monster, who probably won't be as bad as all that. The usual 3-5 shots of Draining ensue, and I'm sure that you can guess the result.
See? Not so bad. Now it's time to mop up all of the remnants of his forces of darkness, which are really not all that hot. Honestly, these unique monsters are really, really boring to fight as a priest. But that's better than them being brutal and deadly.
Having gone through mopup, Viki has a load of treasure to choose from, and identifies a super-choice item! This thing will fetch much bucks back in the town, especially with her new beauty queen cap.
Ufthak was also kind enough to drop this for Viki. She's going to hold onto this bad boy forever, or at least until there's a serious mana emergency. This is going to be a great tool for getting out of sticky situations; if Viki fires off one too many Draining spells, she can always drink this for a quick teleport, or can use it if there's nowhere to run to rest and she needs to carve a hole through a mob.
Alright, that's enough treasure! Back to town!
Viki sells off the sword of Slay Giant for a cool 3000 Gold Standard, and drops off the wands of LIGHTNING BOLT for nearly 2/3rds of that. This gives her a chance to pick up a potion of restore strength (her strength was sapped somewhere along the way, it looks like) and pick up those Gauntlets of Slaying mentioned in the last update. These are just armor that will augment Viki's attack, and she needs every little extra bit of it she can get.
Unfortunately, they're not weapons, so you can't enchant extra bonuses on top of them. (+2, +3) is weak, but Viki will take what she can get.
By the way, at this point, Viki has just broken two million turns! Go Viki!
For those keeping score, this is a good time to brush up on which resistances Viki is running right now. Acid and cold are actually the two least useful for her, which is kind of sad, but plenty of time to pick up the other ones. And Viki has a free source of fire resist sitting at home, just in case.
Back to the dungeon! And it's a boring dungeon floor, so there's not really a whole hell of a lot that happens.
Viki's terrible luck with darts continues, though.
This is about the most beautiful situation Viki could ever wish for. She can scoot straight across into the west gap in this room and shoot Draining to her heart's content into the right chamber where all the Trolls are, and since they have to come out single-file, they're not going to be able to move fast enough to escape her vicious wrath.
Viki also finally finds one of those center chambers with a door on it, delighting me to no end. Alright, it's back to town for her!
Here's what Viki's inventory (but not equipment) looks like at this point. She's not carrying around an extra copy of the book with Draining in it (Chants and Blessings), so she goes to pick up another edition. Potions of Healing, by the way, restore around 300 HP and cure all cut damage, stunning, and poison. It's similar to the spell of the same name Viki can cast, but it won't cost 10+ mana to drink one.
She offloads a couple Rods of Light as well, she doesn't need to be carrying that many around. Also, with her weapon picked up, it's time to go ahead and learn some more spells - but not in the books she's holding right now. That's right! It's time for Viki to finally start toting around Ethereal Openings.
Blink, believe it or not, is actually a useful spell with that short range. Viki will use it for the "shoot and scoot" discussed back when Gon was fighting Smeagol, for those of us who can think back to March-ish.
So equipped, Viki heads back down into the dungeon with an intrinsic (-1) Slow penalty from all the junk she's carrying. Balancing her items around in town is going to become a fun little game for her from now on, to make sure that she unloads what she's not using and keeps emergency supplies.
Meet Earth Hounds. These are also not very dangerous; their attacks can't break anything, but they can give Viki lots of nasty cuts that will cause her to leak HP and will require a little bit of magic to heal. Otherwise they're very similar to the Electric Hounds - Viki will try and stay in a safe location from their breath attacks but otherwise just unload Draining into the middle of them. No strategy really required here!
Okay, now this is a bad situation for Viki. There are light hounds down that tunnel and there's nothing she can really do to fight them in cramped quarters like this; as soon as she could get a bead on one for Draining, it would just breathe all over her. Theoretically, yes, she could go in and get her melee combat on, but as you might imagine, being blinded will lower her (already bad) to-hit significantly.
So for now, she runs.
She also runs out of ID scrolls, and starts relying on pseudo-id again, grabbing items and toting them around for a few hundred turns before dropping them if no feeling crops up. Anything "good" gets carried back up; after all, this is a level with a good feeling, and no way is Viki going to pass up an artifact or ego item.
Carrying around enough junk to load her down even more, Viki warps back up to town. It looks like in the dungeon she picked up a wand of Fire Bolts, the fraternal twin of LIGHTNING BOLT, and some otherwise ordinary junk.
The Black Market is also carrying a Potion of Wisdom today. Too bad it's 20000 Federal Reserves out of Viki's range. So it's back to the (boring) dungeon, where Viki gets bitten by a monster and made into a real klutz and then almost gets the dreaded "-more- You have died." message. Quick thinking is all that saves her, along with a nearby room.
Here's another strategy Viki's going to be using to fight hounds a lot. She'll try and lure them through a tunnel into a (hopefully unconnected) room, and then wait until they start funneling in to fight her. Because the new pack monster AI, this doesn't work the other way around; Viki will actually have to use a different tactic if the monsters are hanging out in the closed room and she's in a hallway.
But as they drift in, Viki can shoot them with ranged attacks of any kind before they ever have a chance to get close to her and use breath attacks, because, again, of the really great line of sight hacks that the game uses. She can even target the opening to the room and just shoot Draining there, and hope for the best - this works more often than you'd think.
Viki also almost dies for the first time in a very long time after an encounter with another group of hounds. I'm going to have to start playing more carefully; if she'd gotten blinded just one more time, this run would be over.
In fact, this indicates that it's a good time to leave the dungeon. This time the Black Market is hosting potions of Intelligence and Constitution, neither of which Viki can afford, of course. This is getting a bit frustrating; if she missed a potion of Strength I'd have so many frowns. With little else to do other than balance her inventory out in minor ways, it's back down into boring, dank places for Viki.
Viki gets covered in fire and immediately teleports the fuck out of there. She's not ready to face off against the dreaded Fire Hound yet; those are monsters best dealt with one at a time, because if fire gets spammed all over her, she will lose her spellbooks, scrolls, staves, and everything else. Fire hounds are the most dangerous creature for Viki to fight right now, because their melee attacks are also branded with fire; engaging them at any range means she might lose her scrolls of Recall or any number of books. Having to waste a turn lighting a room gives them that much more chance.
Viki does, however, find an Amulet of Wisdom (+1) and swaps her amulet of Resist Acid for it. She's not going to need acid resistance until the early 20s, actually, and the extra points of mana that come with it are going to be useful for fighting hounds. For now.
Viki also picks these up, and heads back to town to sell all of this junk off. For the record, Boots of Stealth are the lamest ego item yet, netting Viki only a paltry 1000 dolla bill dolla bill.
What a great place to stop!
NEXT TIME: A unique monster that isn't evil? Say it ain't so! Also, Viki shoots LIGHTNING BOLTs.