This is Paghuim. Paghuim is a Draconian, and he is also a Conjurer.
Draconians are probably the first race I've played so far that requires some explanation. Draconians begin their adventure as, essentially, teenagers. Their scales are uniformly a dull brown, and they possess no real exceptional qualities other than an inability to wear most body armor and a free tailslap attack. The former is an active detriment, the latter is situational at best.
So are Draconians just straight-up bad? No, in fact they're considered one of the easier races to play as. The trick is getting them to Level 7, where they "mature". Their scales take on a definitive color, they gain affinity for certain elements, and many gain a breath weapon. Draconians are one of the cooler races, for certain.
We'll try to avoid melee combat for the most part, but it won't be completely escapable, as our magic reserves are rather low for a spellcaster right now. Right now we've got only a single spell memorized, Magic Dart.
Magic Dart is fine for what it is, which is a guaranteed small bit of damage. But it's just not going to be enough for most situations.
Let's take a peek at our spellbook, shall we?
We'll be learning all of these before too long. Searing Ray will be our go-to for handling short range threats for quite some time, and Iskenderun's Mystic Blast is essentially a much more powerful version of Magic Dart. Dazzling Spray inflicts a blinding status that is very useful, as well as being our only crowd-clearer for right now.
The only one we plan to forego is Fulminant Prism, it's a bit too situational for me to be comfortable devoting 4 spell levels to it. Spell levels are how we memorize spells from our book, higher level spells cost more of them, and how many we have is tied to both our level and our experience in the Spellcasting skill. If we want to have a diverse selection of spells available, we need to train that up.
But we have to get to that point first, yes?
We pop Level 2 and memorize Searing Ray. Dazzling Spray and Mystic Blast soon follow but...
This thing spawned on Dungeon 3. Three potions of Curing, two of Resistance, and one of Heal Wounds were not enough to get me through this fight, and I had no real escape options.
The early game is really the only point where DCSS can occasionally feel unfair, and this is unfortunately one of those situations.
We'll try again in just a moment, so no worries. It's certainly frustrating though.
He has hacked, slashed, blasted, seared, fried, and zapped his way through four floors of The Dungeon, and has just defeated the summoner Eustachio, a rival spellcaster.
Somewhere along the way, Saghuin has become a man. His scales have taken on a forest green, and he is now quite naturally attuned to the element of Poison. Furthermore, he can spit noxious fumes at any time.
It's been a long day, but he's alive, and more powerful than ever.
I'd like to do more of an update, but I'm really tired, upset at other stuff, and don't feel well.
When we last left our hero, he'd defeated the summoner Eustachio and moved on to the next floor of the dungeon.
Let's continue, shall we?
This is our spell set as it stands right now. It's pretty decent and we can cast most of these with a fairly high success rate.
Magic Dart, Searing Ray, and Dazzling Spray I explained already, Iskenderun's Mystic Blast is essentially a more powerful Magic Dart that can sometimes explode.
Necrophages are annoying ghoulish creatures that can cause some nasty status effects, luckily we finish this one off without a problem.
We happen upon a weapon shop and pick up a quarterstaff. It's not magically branded like I'd hoped, but it does have the Protection brand, essentially giving us some free armor.
ohoho
This turned out to be The Book of War-Chants (the Skald's starting spellbook), most of these spells are not super useful for us, but we memorize Shroud of Golubria and Repel Missiles
Both are decent defensive spells. For now, they're good fallback options, but in the long term our goal is going to be to obliterate anything before it can touch us, making stuff like this most likely a temporary investment.
a suitably destructive Ecumenical Temple entrance
Bet you thought we'd swear ourselves to Sif Muna didn't you? Nope! Vehumet is the God of Destructive Magic specifically, and for an all-out offensive style, he is the best choice.
Vehumet gifts you knowledge of spells one at a time, if you don't learn a spell before he gives you a new one, it's gone. Given our limited number of spell slots, we have to choose carefully.
a jewelry shop. We'll be back for that amulet, bare minimum. The Gormand enchantment lets you eat corpse chunks even if you're not Hungry or below, meaning you can feast all you like until your Engorged. In most places, it essentially disables the food clock, and is highly desirable for a caster such as ourselves.
While exploring a sewer, Vehumet offers to teach us Sting.
We politely decline to do so, because Sting, while a good spell, is just not worth wasting a spell slot on. It's essentially a slightly less accurate, poison-inflicting version of Magic Dart.
Throw Frost is a different matter.
The last time I played a Draconian Conjurer I was also green and ended up specializing in Poison and Fire spells. I think that perhaps Ice is the way to go this time, but I'm not sure if Throw Frost is worth investing the slots in.
So, I'll be asking for some audience input here briefly. Do I take Throw Frost? I have only 3 spell levels left. If I do take it, should I unlearn something else (I have a Scroll of Amnesia).
(Side Note: I didn't think it was possible for it to spawn this early anymore, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the entrance to The Orcish Mines is somewhere on this level, I have never seen so many Orc Warriors outside of it)
I know that much, my thought was that investment in an Ice spell (any ice spell) will cause Vehumet to give us more Ice later on. Potentially stuff like Freezing Cloud, Bolt of Frost, etc. maybe even Glaciate in the super long term.
But that said, I'm not sure if that weighting (if it even exists, I think it does) is worth knowing a fairly useless spell.
We clear out the remainder of Dungeon 6 and make our way downward
Spoiler:
Inner Flame is not something we have much interest in, unfortunately.
We've been sort of striking out with Vehumet so far.
We acquire two more books for our growing library here. Neither are super useful for us at the moment, but still.
We enter the Lair not long after, and are offered knowledge of Throw Icicle.
This is the first spell Vehumet's offered us that I actually want, so we take him up on it. Throw Icicle is a good all purpose killything spell, the only things it won't really work on are the rare Ice-aligned enemy and the undead. We have Mystic Blast for those, for now.
We find a very nice artefact dagger on Lair 1 as well, we're not a stabber, but two ranks of Magic Resistance is really hard to pass up. Even when we trade it for something more consistently useful, it'll be a good idea to keep this on us so we can switch to it when we need to.
Another book. We're going to pick up Shadow Creatures at some point, it's a really good "summon stuff and run the other way" spell, even if it'll be a bit of an odd man out.
This is getting a tad silly.
Mephitic Cloud is super useful throughout the early game, so we pick it up. It should serve us well through The Lair and most of The Orcish Mines if we get that far, but we're going to need to replace it with something else eventually.
Another book. This one we don't have any real use for, training some schools of magic makes training their opposites harder, and while Fireball is a good crowd-clearer, we'll have to find something else, making it reliably castable would be a huge XP sink.
Also, do you see that ant? This level was crawling with them, I found a vault inhabited by dozens of them and a queen ant. Creepy.
I have zero idea why this is here, but we make short work of the fire bats with our Icicle spell.
I learned Shadow Creatures. What Shadow Creatures does is summon a random monster that's appropriate to the area you're in. Because we're in the Lair, and our spell power for this is currently pretty weak, we got a komodo dragon. Not bad, though.
We also picked up a Staff of Summoning. Handy, but we're not going to use it as our main.
(not quite the video I was looking for when I googled that but w/e)
Freezing Cloud is going to replace Mephitic Cloud as our crowd control (cloud control?), so we Amnesia the latter away, and master the secrets of the arctic wind.
this Wyvern will make an excellent guinea pig
Yeah.
The main problem with Freezing Cloud right now is that it's expensive, but as our mana pool grows we'll be able to spam it more reliably. Right now, precise use with a side dash of stairdancing is the best solution.
so I found an artefact sword and equipped it like an idiot. Did you know that randarts (that's random artifacts, friends) can generate with a property that contaminates you with huge amounts of magical glow when you unwield them? I didn't until today when it caused this mutation.
Fortunately (?) I have a Potion of Mutation. This will either cure the problem, do nothing of the sort, or make it far worse. Let's find out!
OK so, it didn't solve our problem but this is a pretty awesome payout from a single Potion of Mutation.
Mutations, I should explain, are acquired abilities much like the ones your character starts with, except they are (theoretically) removable.
So in addition to now shouting at random, we can now breathe fire (recall that we can also breathe clouds of noxious fumes), have more HP, and get more nutrition from meat. A pretty interesting setup if I may say so.
I have had no fewer than four close calls with black mambas in this iteration of The Lair. You'd think that they'd be less dangerous what with our rank of poison resistance, but not only can their venom punch through said resistance, their bite alone is enough to cause problems.
Luckily I had a flood phial on hand at the time. It's an artefact that spawns a water elemental.
Meanwhile, the rest of The Lair thusfar has proved manageable. Killer Bee colonies and Death Yaks alike kneel before my mastery of the cold.
Did you know you could find dragon armor just lying around? I didn't. Too bad we can't wear it.
Harold is one of the less interesting uniques. His profile states he is a bounty hunter, we're wanted for some reason. Yawn.
He is not resistant to Ice Magic, unfortunately.
another artefact weapon because idk why not, right? For us it's mostly an equippable rank of Cold Resistance.
FUCK ALL BLACK MAMBAS
Vehumet offers to teach us Bolt of Cold. It's a really good spell, but we'll need to unlearn something to get it.
Reluctantly, I Amnesia Shadow Creatures for the time being. It's always better to forget spells you have in a book as opposed to ones you got from Vehumet. This also effectively obsoletes Throw Icicle, so we'll be forgetting that too if we need to make room.
The Spider Nest! One of three places we won't be covering in the Lair this update.
The Swamp, seen here, is the other.
Unfortunately, we no longer have much say in the matter.
We were pursued while magically dry by a herd of elephants. The Wolf Spider proceeded to come out of...well, somewhere, but I don't know where it was hiding, and follow me upstairs.
It and the Spiny Frog finished me off pretty darn well.
That's three characters dead on The Lair. I will get past this accursed part of the dungeon at some point, I swear it.
I suppose tomorrow we try again. With what or whom, I've yet to decide.
We are Laurentius. We're a Centaur, and as a Centaur, our skills consist primarily of shooting things full of holes with arrows, and knowing spells which allow us to further shoot things full of holes with arrows.
Spellcasting is not a strong suit for our species (-3 aptitude!) so we'll have to keep our spell list short but versatile. Currently all we know is Corona, a spell that lets us light up monsters so they're easier to hit. It's a pretty basic debuff, but it's helpful.
We're also going to be on the lookout for a melee weapon. I found a spear, which works for now, but we want something to take out minor threats we don't want to waste arrows on, and something to fall back on if we run out of ammunition. We may want to pick up some levels in Polearms at some point, or some weapon class at least.
Currently we're going to train up our Hexes skill exclusively, our starting spellbook has some pretty nasty stuff in it, and we're going to want to take advantage of it.
Inner Flame could be devastating if we use it properly. Used improperly, it'll probably kill us, but hey, that's half the fun of DungeonCrawl.
I've never played an arcane marksman, and have only played a Centaur once previously, so it's not a bad idea to take stock of our natural abilities.
We're pretty darn fast. I think only Spriggans outmatch Centaurs in terms of player species' speed, we also have hooves, which means a free kick attack in melee, and the free extra AC is a nice bonus.
I'll be honest, when we hit level 3, I have no clue what attribute to level up. I suppose Dex is a smart choice because bows, and we can't wear certain kinds of armor (I think most chest armor is available to us, but I may be wrong) so dodging seems like a smart investment.
This is one heck of a find so early on. We're probably not gonna be specializing in Short Blades anytime soon, but if we run into an early mummy or something this could help a lot. Holy Wrath is a brand that does extra damage against demons and the undead, it's rather rare, especially this early in the game.
We memorize Inner Flame on Dungeon 3. It'll be some time before we can cast it reliably, but when we do it could potentially make a great crowd clearer.
Inner Flame curses the target to explode upon death. For most casters, it's kind of useless. For us, with our ability to consistently attack at range and easily kite almost anything, it could potentially be a gamechanger.
We find a Whip of Electrocution on a random kobold. Whips aren't really our style, but the brand's versatile enough to make it a good choice for now.
I screencap'd this because I don't think we've seen this yet in the LP. This is a themed floor. They're pretty rare, but this one, filled with undead, withered plants, the odd headstone, and sometimes altars to gods of Necromancy, seems to be the most common.
I switch our active skill to Bows, we're just missing way too often even with Corona active.
Inner Flame, while not here proc'd by our arrow, shows off its potency.
I don't know when they added these suit-shaped vaults to the game, but they're a nice touch.
Nemelex is a neat god, if one I've never really played with (and apparently he gets a heavy nerf in the next update. Sadface), but because of the specific requirements our race/class combination has, there's really only one god we'll be able to worship if we want to maximize our chances for success.
More fun with Inner Flame.
We're starting to run out of arrows....hopefully we find the Ecumenical Temple soon.
Blork is a silly unique who is an orc wearing rainbow suspenders. He knows some spells and always spawns with a magic weapon, but he's not super threatening.
Fuck everything about this vault.
Everything about it.
One of our centaur bretheren.
Dungeon centaurs tend to carry branded arrows, so we're able to pick up a 10 stack of flame arrows from this fellow. After he serves as our target practice, of course.
See that book? Exact same one we already have. Weird.
We quaff two potions of mutation, hoping to solve our metabolism problem (being herbivorous and having a fast metabolism is duuuuumb). We don't, but the end result is interesting nonetheless.
The intelligence will help us out, as will the free AC from the scales mutation. Blurry vision is straight up horrible, while beserkitis (we sometimes randomly go berserk when striking a foe in melee combat) is a mixed blessing.
That's all for this part of the update. Part 2 will come after I get back from my walk this evening.
Also, Fossilmaiden, I saw your suggestion. We'll probably do a Tengu Air Elementalist at some point, just not sure when.
We pick up Enslave on D5, and it saves our asses a floor later, albeit, on a wand instead of natively cast. Enslave allies a monster to us, briefly, and in situations where there's a spellcaster or two surrounded by a mob of less magic resistant but beefier warriors, it can make the difference between life and death.
We find the Ecumenical Temple, and I'm tempted to jump for joy, however
this is basically a worst-case scenario.
The Corrupted Temple is a very rare, themed version of the Ecumenical Temple where many of the altars are replaced with altars to Lugonu, God of The Abyss.
Lugonu's not a bad deity, but we need Okawaru. Yes, the default melee god. Why? Because he gives weapon gifts, and a lot of them. Namely, ammunition. He'll keep us well stocked and supplied if we join his faith.
This is a problem, as Okawaru's temple is not here. We will need to find it elsewhere. I believe it should be still located somewhere on the first 9 dungeon floors.
Monster Box vaults are some of my least favorite in the game, but they provide us with another opportunity to spam Inner Flame, so I suppose I should be grateful.
Many altars! But none to Okawaru, we press on.
Eek.
Cyclopses are some of the earliest true giants you can meet. They hit hard in melee and at a distance they like to toss large rocks at you, which hurt a lot if they connect.
Thankfully they're slow, so kiting wins us the day here.
I have actually never seen one of these before.
I decide to be cautious and just avoid it. I'm not sure what kind of demons it summons and we can't really afford to be dealing with Balrugs right now.
After half a floor of running from yak herds and a shapeshifter(!), I've explored most of it and come to the conclusion that the only possible place for an altar to Okawaru is behind where the statue is.
Fuck.
Or perhaps not
this is where I'm leaving things for the day. I'm not sure what to do, I don't really think we'll survive even The Lair without a way to reliably get more ammunition. So I'm at a loss.
"Hey now!" You might be saying to yourself "A Shining Eye is an awfully rare thing to see outside of the Slime Pits!" You'd be right, that's a shapeshifter.
This incredibly brief update is a tribute to said shapeshifter, because he killed me. Very efficiently I might add.
Stupidly, I thought I could take this thing down.
I couldn't, because as it turns out, one of the things shapeshifters can shapeshift into is Yaktaurs. Centaur's uglier, beefier cousins. Another thing is Giant Fireflies.
Both of these things are very fast, and I had no real way to escape before it made quick work of me.
So, we'll be trying that Tengu Air Elementalist soon.
Hwaawk is a Tengu, a sort of raven-person, like most Tengu, Hwaawk is perpetually sick of everyone's shit and is always on the lookout for ways to end it. Also like most Tengu, Hwaawk is very big on Air Magic, zapping folks is fun.
We only know one spell right now, Shock. It's a bit like Magic Dart, but less accurate. However, it can also bounce off certain surfaces, opening the possibility of zapping multiple foes in a line or even the same foe multiple times. It's a handy spell.
We quickly hit XL2 and pick up Swiftness and Repel Missiles. Swiftness is worth elaborating upon. Essentially it's a buff to our movement speed, and it's going to act as an escape rope out of situations we don't really want to be in, it has the downside of slowing us down after it expires, so we have to be careful. It shouldn't be confused with Haste, which increases the speed of everything we do, and lacks that downside. We'll probably replace it with the latter at some point, but not now. Repel Missiles is more or less exactly what it sounds like.
For now, utility trumps destructive might. We should have enough of that soon enough, or we would, if we had not died on the third floor to an adder.
I may need to just take a break from this LP for the day.
So! I've decided on a solid direction to take this series.
From now on, what we're going to do is a rotating cycle of Fighter->Mage->Rogue type characters. Every once and a while I may mix in zealots in the Fighter spot.
But for now! I'm about to start my next Fighter character. Not a Minotaur this time, tho.
Meet Grom! Grom's a Hill Orc, not unlike our dearly departed Death Knight Thrall.
The crucial difference is that Grom, at least right now, does not worship a deity, so we're free to pick and choose who we like (I have two options in mind, but I'll cover that later), and also, we start out with a bit more skill in the various "whacking things" skills.
We're going to start by dropping our shield. We're an axeman primarily, and there's no way we're going to find a shield good enough to justify having to use a one-handed axe, all the best axes are two-handed. Also worth mentioning, axes can cleave, damaging any adjacent foe, not just the one you're targeting. It's a nice bonus. Mostly we're going with axes because orcs have a great axe aptitude (axetitude?) of +3.
The first three floors are largely unremarkable, but we run into Natasha on D4. I am not sure why, but I have been encountering her constantly lately.
D5 proves to be very dangerous. We've got! 3 or 4 Orc squadrons, plus wizards. A nasty gnoll pack with tons of throwing nets, Edmund, Sigmund's younger brother, the Elf Twins Duvessa and Dowan
and whatever the heck this weird vault is. I found no way in there, for the record.
It took some tricky maneuvering but we clear the floor mostly problem-free.
We also get a sweet bit of loot that I don't notice until later.
See this baby? It's a Potion of Beneficial Mutation. Unlike regular potions of Mutation which are riskier, this is guaranteed to give us something good.
Oh
and how good it is. Robust is a great mutation, if not as flashy as something like Spit Poison.
Vampire Bats! Largely harmless, but novel. I've never seen them before.
We hit The Ecumenical Temple on D6, and join up with our chosen faith.
Okawaru is sort of the default melee god. We're playing it super safe here, basically. Oka gives us two active abilities, one at * and one at *****. The first is pretty spammable and is called Heroism, it makes all of our fighting skills better, and it's awesome. The second is less spammable and is called Finesse, it makes us attack much faster. It is also awesome.
Theoretically, Oka can give followers powerful gifts, but we should not necessarily count on that.
That's today's update!
Inventory Summary (gonna try to do one of these from now on):
We run into some odd dens on D7. The first is a Cyclops and his herd of sheep, the second, a pack of rats lead by a rare orange rat (their attacks are draining-branded, be careful).
A floor below, we encounter the unique Psyche. Psyche's a sorceress, but the only thing remotely dangerous about her is her chaos-branded dagger. Here, all it does is berserk us, making her death all the quicker.
What is it with psychotically dangerous Lair entrances lately? An elephant slug, a literal elephant, and two jellies that corrode my sole weapon into a lovely 0/-2 war axe. It's a sign of things to come.
We don't have any cold resistance, but of the two elemental mini-branches (the other being Volcanoes), Ice Caves are usually the easier of the two in my experience.
I must stress usually.
Demons are awful things to fight. Ice Devils (and the weaker Blue Devils, the other type present here) are probably the worst form of this branch you can get, even a variant with a pair of ice dragons at the end isn't usually too bad. The problem is that despite being "only" very competent melee fighters--contrast some demons who can murder any character who happens to be so much as within their LOS--we have neither fire damage nor cold resistance, meaning they hit hard and take forever to kill.
We mostly (spoilers) don't die here by virtue of Heroism, one of Oka's two activated abilities. It elevates all of our combat skills by several levels, essentially allowing us to temporarily punch above our weight quite significantly.
Ice Statues are another hazard (though one found in most ice caves). They cast various cold magics and summon Ice Beasts to defend them. We eventually manage to take out the top one, but it takes quite some time.
After punching through to the vault, I'm greeted by simularca. Simularca are cold-branded derived undead, being essentially ice-based clones of the original creature. This draconian one is not very dangerous, the three troll simularca in the adjacent vaults? Incredibly dangerous.
We manage to take those down, but the presence of several more, more Ice Devils, and at least one (probably more) necromancers in the loot chamber motivates me to book it.
We can't go back, and now we're down several blink scrolls, a teleport scroll, and our meager potion collection. Things are looking dire.
And they're not about to start looking up any time soon. Yes, that is Thrall, our very own dearly departed Death Knight.
Zealot classes, unlike various arcanists, do not retain their supernatural powers in death, but Thrall doesn't really need them. He was quite physically powerful when he died (and some backreading reveals he had a vorpal flail when he was killed), and it's rather unfortunate that we encountered him here.
Seems that he and Yredelemnul have had a bit of a falling out. Shame.
We book it back upstairs, and against my better judgment, leave The Lair behind.
We just don't have what we need to not die in there, and I'm thinking an alternate plan is in order, but I have not yet figured out what specifically.
Two-Headed Ogres. More or less exactly what you'd think.
The Orcish Mines.
Our time here will be brief, but we've come to hopefully slay some of the natives and scavenge some better equipment. Our unimpressive scale mail and rusted axe are impressing nobody, nor will they help us in The Lair.
What will help us is this. Potions of Curing are not as good as just having Poison Resistance, but they will help in alleviating the pressure throughout most of The Lair.
That guy in the plate mail is an Orc Knight, we cut him to pieces and take his armor. We also lift a nice battle-axe off of someone else. No brand, but it's still better than our rusted war axe.
Now that we're a smidge better equipped, it's time to take The Lair on again.
We lay Thrall to rest, hopefully he will find peace in his second death.
Here's our main Lair issue right now.
Hydras function exactly as their mythological equivalents. Many-headed reptilian beasts who are only made stronger by lopping off their heads (read: using any bladed weapon that is not a dagger). They are effectively immune to our axe, and trying to use it will only make the thing stronger, and this one (and his littler, four-headed brother elsewhere on the floor) nearly kill us because of our inability to damage him.
Phials of Floods are evokables, they summon a friendly Water Elemental. It's not an ideal solution to our problem, but for now, it will have to do.
What's that saying, "second time's the charm"?
Volcanoes are Ice Caves, but for fire instead. Simple.
And it turns out this one is undead themed.
We actually got lucky here, this is easier than many we could've gotten.
Unfortunately our loot haul is....mixed. Plenty of fire resistant armor, a flaming scimitar, a demon trident(!)...but no flaming axe.
Seems we're going to have to train up polearms a bit. Luckily, polearms crosstrain (gain a bonus) from axe training, so we shouldn't have to pour too much XP into the skill to get a decent return here. Besides, we'll mostly be using this only for hydra-killing.
Player Ghosts, as it will turn out, are a bit of a running theme on this update.
Kazmodin here is an offscreen character of mine. He's a Deep Dwarf, and that means two things.
The good thing is that he does not heal. At all. Deep Dwarves don't heal naturally and need to drink potions or use wands to heal themselves, and as a ghost, Kazmodin can do neither, meaning any damage inflicted to him at all will stay there forever.
The bad thing is that to compensate for this weakness, Deep Dwarves take less damage. From everything. It's called Damage Shaving officially, and it reduces all damage Deep Dwarves take from any source whatsoever, including us.
The third thing, which I forgot about, is that Kazmodin had a venom-branded weapon when he died. Prudence is the best option here, we teleport away and avoid him for now.
The Shoals are a merfolk-themed sub-branch of The Lair, and possibly my least favorite of the four possible. I have never made it more than a single floor deep in The Shoals, and it's going to be one hell of a thing if we manage to get there on this run.
This however, is not the staircase to The Shoals. It's a mimic imitating them. Easy XP.
The Snake Pits are a Naga- and Serpent- themed branch. It is also quite annoying. This entrance is real, and its guards go down without much of a fight.
SHINY
HELL YEAH
something to round out our stats is always nice, though we may swap it for something with some nice resistances eventually.
Meet PC Phantom #3. You may remember Saghuim as the Draconian Conjurer who died to a water moccasin.
His spell list is quite dangerous!
PC Ghost spell lists are always interesting, because they rarely have the rhyme or reason you see on a "real" unique's. You can tell that Saghuim split his efforts between conjurations and cold magic, but! the spell list makes sense. Battlesphere will fire in tandem with two of the three other spells (Mystic Blast and Throw Icicle), and Freezing Cloud is a good crowd-clearer.
His poison breath, meanwhile, is replaced with a nasty draining attack. Eech.
Nonetheless, he's not much of a match for us when we activate Heroism, and Finesse, our new ability (which lets us attack roughly twice as often).
Incidentally, it turns out Finesse and Berserker Potions don't stack. Who knew?
After we take down an elephant herd on L6, Okawaru does something he has never done for me before in my entire time playing Crawl. Gives us a gift that is actually directly relevant to our playstyle for this run. A battleaxe, an artifact by the look of it.
Afucking awesome artifact battleaxe, I might add.
The -rF is annoying but can be remedied, the draining brand, two pips of Magic Resistence, See Invisible intrinsic, Dex Bonus, and +14/+5 enchantment are more than worth the price.
I am going to have to disagree with our old friend Thrall. The gods are far from useless.
Even though it will break my own rule, I will be uploading a Part 3 tonight as well. Stay tuned.
L6 and L7 are uneventful (we will be going to L8 eventually, just not now). On our way back up we encounter Kazmodin again
We re-kill him offhandedly while fighting a herd of Death Yaks.
So now that we've conquered most of The Lair (and Grom here has become the first character in this LP to survive it), where are we headed next? I think you may already know the answer.
Most of the enemies in The Orcish Mines are absolutely no match for us at all. We mow through hordes of lesser orcs like a whirling dervish as they pray for Beogh to save them.
Okawaru grants us another gift! Finally, a way to deal with hydras. Broad axes are the best onehanders in the game, but we're mostly going to keep it as a switch weapon in case we encounter any many-headed nasties.
Baileys are another minibranch, usually a sort of medieval setting, and filled with essentially the same enemies we're fighting here. We found it and quickly cleared it out, but the loot was so unremarkable that I didn't bother to screencap anything.
Don is a unique. He is good at swimming, that's his power. He can swim.
Joining Don today is Honder Emmott. A Deep Elf of mine who I just finished playing as today (confirming my suspicion that player ghosts are placed when you enter a floor instead of in advance)
I am not entirely sure why, but death has severely neutered Hon's spell list. He knew a wide variety of summons as well as some conjurations in life, here, he's reduced to just his favorite. Monstrous Menagerie is an excellent spell that summons some magical beasts, Manticores, Lindwurms, Harpies, even Sphinxes (who can confuse enemies and heal themselves) at high spellpower!
Hon and Don both go down without too much fuss.
This is the entry to The Elven Halls, an optional sidebranch where we can nab some nice loot. Unfortunately we have to plow through thickets of deep elves--all of whom know a wide variety of magic--to get to it. We're not going to go in there today, and probably not on this run at all. Maybe some day!
Orc Sorcerers are some of the few genuine threats the Mines can produce at this point. The main reason for this is that they summon demons, and lots of them.
High Priests, seen here in blue, are also annoying.
The four shops here are the "loot" at the end of The Mines. We pick up some odds and ends, but unfortunately nothing gamechanging.
Our conquest of Orc will end our update for this evening.
I'm considering possibilities for a ranged attack option and was thinking perhaps a crossbow (we have a decent one, and the Orcish crossbow aptitude, while hardly fantastic, is not too awful, at -1). I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Common wisdom is to hold off on Lair 8 until you've already chopped through 1-7 and the Orcish Mines, the last floor of The Lair tends to be much nastier than the preceding 7.
That wiggling green block in the corner there is an altar to Jiyva. Jiyva is an awful god early on for anyone except Trolls, and in any case you can't usually find altars to it early on. Jiyva's altars only reliably appear near the entrance to The Slime Pits, yet another sub-branch of The Lair. We may or may not cover The Slime Pits in this LP, I've never really done them before because I've never had a source of corrosion resistance on hand.
Some exploring reveals that a dragon's nest in an underground river is the branch-end vault of the day.
This is a Fire Dragon. It's big, nasty, and breathes fire. Quite a classical western dragon really. Unfortunately this one doesn't leave a hide (as dragons sometimes do when butchered). I say unfortunately because Fire Dragon armor is decent medium armor. Though, truth be told, it's not really better than our plate mail anyway.
This is a bit more typical of the kind of gift Okawaru usually gives you. Why would you want to be able to turn invisible if the armor also made you far less stealthy? Who can say.
All in all a fairly tame Lair 8. We're now going to actually return to the Dungeon. I want to clear out the last few floors (I think we have 4 or 5 to go?) before we tackle one of the Lair sub-branches. We're still not really prepared for either, though if I'm forced to pick, I'll go with The Shoals first.
We do have to be careful, the lower floors of the Dungeon are nothing to mess with.
The only notable loot we picked up was a Lamp of Fire, yet another "summon elemental of a particular type" item. If we get the Fan of Gales, we'll be able to summon all four kinds.
Shadows are an annoying form of undead that are hard to hit, they're not much threat to us.
This here is a portal to a treasure trove. We can't just go in, unfortunately. They need to be opened by paying a toll, often many copies of a rare item. Here, it wants 7 potions of haste. Considering we've found only one of those so far, we'll probably not be able to enter, but it's nice to keep in mind in case we do.
This is a skill manual. They train up the given skill a couple levels. They're very rare, but unfortunately this one's not much use to us, and using it would only make Okawaru dump a bunch of god gift daggers on us, so we're not going to use it.
This is a weird sight. You very rarely see plain humans in the Dungeon.
Oh, that explains a lot actually.
The Vaults are a dangerous branch we'll have to visit later in the game. We aren't going to go there now, of course. The fellows in plate mail are Vault Guards. Common fodder in The Vaults proper, but a bit more dangerous here. The wizards next to them are the bigger threat, though, they can cast some truly awful spells.
This is a better get than it might first seem. The various linked mails are worse than plate mail, armor wise, but this one has a pip of Magic Resistance. Meaning that when we wear that and wield our axe at the same time, we're completely immune to almost all enchantments. This'll help out a lot on The Shoals.
"Monster boxes" like this are pretty common this far down in the dungeon. Hellhounds are nothing super special. We dispatch of this group more easily than one might think.
Another god gift. This one makes tackling The Snake Pits viable. But I'm not sure which (between this and The Shoals) is a more viable option.
Skeletal Warriors are durable but not otherwise remarkable undead soldiers.
Erica is a dangerous unique who knows some decently powerful spells and always has a flaming scimitar. Mummy characters beware!
Slime creatures are awful. They combine into larger and larger slime creatures, and each combination nets them more HP and a stronger attack.
Rakshasas are dangerous demons that can clone any other monster in their LOS. They're not super durable, but more dangerous in melee than one might expect.
Lastly, we find the gate to The Depths. The Depths are the lowest part of The Dungeon, on the outskirts of The Realm of Zot, the endgame area. They're much more dangerous than we can currently handle, and we'll not be going to them any time soon.
For reference though, this is what they look like. Essentially just a tile-darkened version of The Dungeon.
So I'd like some input, friends. Shoals first or Snake Pits?
My only concern is that we only have one pip of poison resistance, which is often not enough, a lot of the poison there can punch through a pip. Else'd be an easy decision.
rFire and rElec are more or less optional on that branch, but they'd help too.
What I'm gonna do is test out The Snake Pit first, we'll clear the first level and if we find ourselves getting poisoned or badly damaged a lot, we'll head for The Shoals instead. I'm not sure one is really any easier than the other, but this should work.
My only concern is that we only have one pip of poison resistance, which is often not enough, a lot of the poison there can punch through a pip. Else'd be an easy decision.
rFire and rElec are more or less optional on that branch, but they'd help too.
???
With any form of poison resistance whatsoever, you are 90% resistant to poisoning.
My only concern is that we only have one pip of poison resistance, which is often not enough, a lot of the poison there can punch through a pip. Else'd be an easy decision.
rFire and rElec are more or less optional on that branch, but they'd help too.
From what I understand of poison resistance, it doesn't stack, but certain perks (being undead or nonliving, for example) allow you to get 3 levels of rPois, which makes you immune
But I'm going off of the wiki, whose resistance page is only up to date for 0.12, so maybe they changed it recently, I dunno
My only concern is that we only have one pip of poison resistance, which is often not enough, a lot of the poison there can punch through a pip. Else'd be an easy decision.
rFire and rElec are more or less optional on that branch, but they'd help too.
???
With any form of poison resistance whatsoever, you are 90% resistant to poisoning.
what, really?
I actually didn't know that. That's strange considering how the other elemental resistances work.
also while I type up this update, is Okawaru worth sticking with at this point? I'm using Heroism relatively rarely and he's mostly giving me junk for gifts, but I've never actually abandoned a faith in Crawl before.
The Snake Pit. It's not a particularly charming place, what with the walls being sickly green and all, but we need to get through it.
Salamanders are the less common of the two primary species we'll be encountering here. They like to burn stuff, but one by itself is not much of a problem.
Azrael is a powerful fire demon, and we can't really tussle with him right now (plus he's immune to the negative energy damage from our axe).
Naga are more typical opponents down here. They're slow melee brutes and can spit poison from range. Many are also classed, and have extra abilities, though not this one.
Naga Mages are what the name implies. They're beefier than most spellcasters but again, not much trouble alone.
Naga Warriors are essentially stronger vanilla naga. Also, they have helmets and blue socks.
Mana Vipers can cripple if you're a caster, they drain your MP, and quite quickly too. Thankfully we're not a caster, so these guys are a lot less dangerous for us.
Naga Sharpshooters are some of the more dangerous of their kind. They fire crossbolts at you and use a spell called Portal Projectile to hit you even if you're behind cover.
Lastly we have Ritualists, who are big into poison and can punch through your resistance to it with relative ease.
Also, I forgot to screencap it but we accidentally put on an Amulet of Faith on Pit 1. This sucks because taking those off gives you a huge piety hit. So our Finesse is disabled for a little while.
This here is Jorgrun. Jorgrun is a Deep Dwarf Earth Elementalist (one of the few Deep Dorf NPCs still in the game in fact, most of the non-uniques have been phased out), and he knows two spells that are awful in conjunction with each other. Those'd be Petrify and Shatter, which do exactly what you'd think. Our best bet here is to kill him quickly, which we do.
I forgot about Greater Naga, they're not much different than the mages though, essentially beefier versions of them.
Kirke is a unique who can turn you into a pig. We kill her before she does that to us.
Guardian Serpents in the meantime, are odd creatures most notable for teleporting their allies in a circle around you. They are quite annoying.
Shock Serpents are not of much threat to us with armor on, but they're deadly if you don't have any. Even with it on, they can toss lightning bolts that will kill you from range if you don't close in fast enough.
My my, what do we have here?
Speed is a rare brand that lets you attack with a weapon faster. Today, I learned from our own Fossilmaiden that it's among the best brands in the game. Needless to say, it's an upgrade.
Not one, mind you, that we get much chance to use.
On Snake 5, Oka grants us a suit of armor. I hide away in a corner thinking that we'll be safe while we remove our plate mail, only to be caught with my shirt off by a shock serpent. It kills us before our teleport even kicks in.
That's the farthest we've gotten in this LP so far. Progress is progress and I'm glad we made it, but I'm quite upset that I died in such a dumb way.
Oh well, mistakes were made. Tomorrow, we'll roll up another spellcaster.
Feel free to make suggestions, but I already have an idea of my own.
one day turned into several months later, we're back.
This is Irontooth, he's a gargoyle.
Gargoyles are one of just three species that have been added since I started playing the game (the other two are Vine Stalkers, who we'll probably cover relatively soon, and Formicids, who we probably will never cover), and are actually one of the easiest species to beat the game with. Why? Well, a few reasons.
Mostly, we start off with an immaculate set of intrinsics. Resistance to poison, a rank of negative energy resistance, resistance to electricity, immunity to petrification, increased Armor Class, Rot Immunity, and Torment resistance. Finally, we gain the ability to fly at will at a later level. Not unlike the Tengu, but without having to be a frail bird man to get to that point.
There are some downsides of course. Our skill aptitudes are not terrific for one thing. We have basically no talent for any magic that's not earth or fire-related, and when it comes to combat, we're more or less limited to maces. We also can't worship certain gods. Gargoyles aren't technically alive, and thus can't become undead, so Yredelemnul doesn't particularly like us.
We've started out as a regular ol' fighter here, meaning we have several choices for our god, but the choice is essentially made for us fairly early on.
That top altar belongs to Qazlal. Qazlal is the newest addition to the game's pantheon (excepting Ru, who is currently exclusive to trunk builds), and is a god of storms. What this translates to in in-game terms is that, as we rank up in piety, Qazlal will surround us with a storm, which takes the form of various elemental clouds. These clouds damage enemies that get caught in them, at the cost of making quite a lot of noise at higher levels (we weren't exactly going to take the stealthy approach anyway). He also grants us some other abilities that I'll talk about momentarily.
As proof of our power though, Sigmund becomes our first unique kill in the game, and furthermore, goes down easy.
Our storm starts forming soon after.
On D3, we find a fortress, a kind of large vault that takes up most of the floor and is packed to the gills with all types of a specific kind of enemy such as kobolds, goblins, or in this case, gnolls. We clear it out fairly easily and, much to my chagrin, discover that there is no treasure.
Piety comes quick. Qazlal grants us the ability to adapt to elemental damage we receive, with this, we have a chance to gain a rank of resistance to an appropriate element whenever we take damage of that type. It's quite useful, especially in themed minibranches. Furthermore, our storm now surrounds us with a permanent Repel Missiles effect. Suffice it to say, this is a huge boon.
The next several floors are relatively uneventful. We eventually gain the ability to summon elementals from our clouds, as well as Upheaval and its big brother Disaster Area, ranged attack options that will probably come in handy several times throughout our campaign.
We find an interesting vault on D8. This might be the first time I've seen an unclassed, non-enslaved human in the wild in the dungeon that wasn't a shapeshifter.
The ghost of an expired Troll Berserker is our first foe of the Lair, in what will become something of a minor theme.
We take him down, but not without a lot of stair dancing and general fuckery.
One of the downsides of our god power is that it creates a ton of noise at max piety (which is where we're sitting), meaning situations like this one are pretty common. Note the swamp dragon.
swamp dragons, funnily enough, are often indicative of the presence of swamps. We're about as well equipped as a character can be for the Swamp, so hopefully the branch will go well.
The Spider Nest is represented here as well. Another branch that should hopefully be simple with our current intrinsics.
Longtime followers of the LP will remember Snorg well. The gluttonous berserker ended our very first run, as the minotaur fighter Hanno.
This time though, we're not alone.
You might argue that turning Snorg into a suit of armor I'm never going to wear is a waste of an enchant armor scroll. I argue that revenge is never a waste of resources.
We get into a sticky situation on Lair 5.
There were, as I recall, at least two distinct herds of death yaks, a Lindwurm, throngs of crocodiles and easily-underestimated komodo dragons, and a bee hive. We got out of it largely through liberal use of teleportation scrolls, but it's definitely one of the harder Lair floors I've been witness to.
We find this a floor later. Rings of Teleport are useful treasures, though their effective use requires some judiciousness.
This is a Torpor Snail, an enemy that slows you simply by being on the same screen as you. It is very annoying.
We end Lair 7 on a high note. Our wings are fully developed now, and we can fly on a whim.
We save Lair 8 for another day, and head off to the Orcish Mines.
Comments
This is Paghuim. Paghuim is a Draconian, and he is also a Conjurer.
Draconians are probably the first race I've played so far that requires some explanation. Draconians begin their adventure as, essentially, teenagers. Their scales are uniformly a dull brown, and they possess no real exceptional qualities other than an inability to wear most body armor and a free tailslap attack. The former is an active detriment, the latter is situational at best.
So are Draconians just straight-up bad? No, in fact they're considered one of the easier races to play as. The trick is getting them to Level 7, where they "mature". Their scales take on a definitive color, they gain affinity for certain elements, and many gain a breath weapon. Draconians are one of the cooler races, for certain.
We'll try to avoid melee combat for the most part, but it won't be completely escapable, as our magic reserves are rather low for a spellcaster right now. Right now we've got only a single spell memorized, Magic Dart.
Magic Dart is fine for what it is, which is a guaranteed small bit of damage. But it's just not going to be enough for most situations.
Let's take a peek at our spellbook, shall we?
We'll be learning all of these before too long. Searing Ray will be our go-to for handling short range threats for quite some time, and Iskenderun's Mystic Blast is essentially a much more powerful version of Magic Dart. Dazzling Spray inflicts a blinding status that is very useful, as well as being our only crowd-clearer for right now.
The only one we plan to forego is Fulminant Prism, it's a bit too situational for me to be comfortable devoting 4 spell levels to it. Spell levels are how we memorize spells from our book, higher level spells cost more of them, and how many we have is tied to both our level and our experience in the Spellcasting skill. If we want to have a diverse selection of spells available, we need to train that up.
But we have to get to that point first, yes?
We pop Level 2 and memorize Searing Ray. Dazzling Spray and Mystic Blast soon follow but...
This thing spawned on Dungeon 3. Three potions of Curing, two of Resistance, and one of Heal Wounds were not enough to get me through this fight, and I had no real escape options.
The early game is really the only point where DCSS can occasionally feel unfair, and this is unfortunately one of those situations.
We'll try again in just a moment, so no worries. It's certainly frustrating though.
Saghuim Jr. is having a bit of a bad day.
He has hacked, slashed, blasted, seared, fried, and zapped his way through four floors of The Dungeon, and has just defeated the summoner Eustachio, a rival spellcaster.
Somewhere along the way, Saghuin has become a man. His scales have taken on a forest green, and he is now quite naturally attuned to the element of Poison. Furthermore, he can spit noxious fumes at any time.
It's been a long day, but he's alive, and more powerful than ever.
I'd like to do more of an update, but I'm really tired, upset at other stuff, and don't feel well.
We'll save Jr.'s journey for tomorrow.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
...Granted, that's my solution to everything. That or banishing it to the Abyss.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
When we last left our hero, he'd defeated the summoner Eustachio and moved on to the next floor of the dungeon.
Let's continue, shall we?
This is our spell set as it stands right now. It's pretty decent and we can cast most of these with a fairly high success rate.
Magic Dart, Searing Ray, and Dazzling Spray I explained already, Iskenderun's Mystic Blast is essentially a more powerful Magic Dart that can sometimes explode.
Necrophages are annoying ghoulish creatures that can cause some nasty status effects, luckily we finish this one off without a problem.
We happen upon a weapon shop and pick up a quarterstaff. It's not magically branded like I'd hoped, but it does have the Protection brand, essentially giving us some free armor.
ohoho
This turned out to be The Book of War-Chants (the Skald's starting spellbook), most of these spells are not super useful for us, but we memorize Shroud of Golubria and Repel Missiles
Both are decent defensive spells. For now, they're good fallback options, but in the long term our goal is going to be to obliterate anything before it can touch us, making stuff like this most likely a temporary investment.
a suitably destructive Ecumenical Temple entrance
Bet you thought we'd swear ourselves to Sif Muna didn't you? Nope! Vehumet is the God of Destructive Magic specifically, and for an all-out offensive style, he is the best choice.
Vehumet gifts you knowledge of spells one at a time, if you don't learn a spell before he gives you a new one, it's gone. Given our limited number of spell slots, we have to choose carefully.
a jewelry shop. We'll be back for that amulet, bare minimum. The Gormand enchantment lets you eat corpse chunks even if you're not Hungry or below, meaning you can feast all you like until your Engorged. In most places, it essentially disables the food clock, and is highly desirable for a caster such as ourselves.
While exploring a sewer, Vehumet offers to teach us Sting.
We politely decline to do so, because Sting, while a good spell, is just not worth wasting a spell slot on. It's essentially a slightly less accurate, poison-inflicting version of Magic Dart.
Throw Frost is a different matter.
The last time I played a Draconian Conjurer I was also green and ended up specializing in Poison and Fire spells. I think that perhaps Ice is the way to go this time, but I'm not sure if Throw Frost is worth investing the slots in.
So, I'll be asking for some audience input here briefly. Do I take Throw Frost? I have only 3 spell levels left. If I do take it, should I unlearn something else (I have a Scroll of Amnesia).
(Side Note: I didn't think it was possible for it to spawn this early anymore, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the entrance to The Orcish Mines is somewhere on this level, I have never seen so many Orc Warriors outside of it)
But that said, I'm not sure if that weighting (if it even exists, I think it does) is worth knowing a fairly useless spell.
I'll resume the game in a bit.
Inner Flame is not something we have much interest in, unfortunately.
We've been sort of striking out with Vehumet so far.
We acquire two more books for our growing library here. Neither are super useful for us at the moment, but still.
We enter the Lair not long after, and are offered knowledge of Throw Icicle.
This is the first spell Vehumet's offered us that I actually want, so we take him up on it. Throw Icicle is a good all purpose killything spell, the only things it won't really work on are the rare Ice-aligned enemy and the undead. We have Mystic Blast for those, for now.
We find a very nice artefact dagger on Lair 1 as well, we're not a stabber, but two ranks of Magic Resistance is really hard to pass up. Even when we trade it for something more consistently useful, it'll be a good idea to keep this on us so we can switch to it when we need to.
Another book. We're going to pick up Shadow Creatures at some point, it's a really good "summon stuff and run the other way" spell, even if it'll be a bit of an odd man out.
This is getting a tad silly.
Mephitic Cloud is super useful throughout the early game, so we pick it up. It should serve us well through The Lair and most of The Orcish Mines if we get that far, but we're going to need to replace it with something else eventually.
Another book. This one we don't have any real use for, training some schools of magic makes training their opposites harder, and while Fireball is a good crowd-clearer, we'll have to find something else, making it reliably castable would be a huge XP sink.
Also, do you see that ant? This level was crawling with them, I found a vault inhabited by dozens of them and a queen ant. Creepy.
I have zero idea why this is here, but we make short work of the fire bats with our Icicle spell.
I learned Shadow Creatures. What Shadow Creatures does is summon a random monster that's appropriate to the area you're in. Because we're in the Lair, and our spell power for this is currently pretty weak, we got a komodo dragon. Not bad, though.
We also picked up a Staff of Summoning. Handy, but we're not going to use it as our main.
(not quite the video I was looking for when I googled that but w/e)
Freezing Cloud is going to replace Mephitic Cloud as our crowd control (cloud control?), so we Amnesia the latter away, and master the secrets of the arctic wind.
this Wyvern will make an excellent guinea pig
Yeah.
The main problem with Freezing Cloud right now is that it's expensive, but as our mana pool grows we'll be able to spam it more reliably. Right now, precise use with a side dash of stairdancing is the best solution.
so I found an artefact sword and equipped it like an idiot. Did you know that randarts (that's random artifacts, friends) can generate with a property that contaminates you with huge amounts of magical glow when you unwield them? I didn't until today when it caused this mutation.
Fortunately (?) I have a Potion of Mutation. This will either cure the problem, do nothing of the sort, or make it far worse. Let's find out!
OK so, it didn't solve our problem but this is a pretty awesome payout from a single Potion of Mutation.
Mutations, I should explain, are acquired abilities much like the ones your character starts with, except they are (theoretically) removable.
So in addition to now shouting at random, we can now breathe fire (recall that we can also breathe clouds of noxious fumes), have more HP, and get more nutrition from meat. A pretty interesting setup if I may say so.
I have had no fewer than four close calls with black mambas in this iteration of The Lair. You'd think that they'd be less dangerous what with our rank of poison resistance, but not only can their venom punch through said resistance, their bite alone is enough to cause problems.
Luckily I had a flood phial on hand at the time. It's an artefact that spawns a water elemental.
Meanwhile, the rest of The Lair thusfar has proved manageable. Killer Bee colonies and Death Yaks alike kneel before my mastery of the cold.
Did you know you could find dragon armor just lying around? I didn't. Too bad we can't wear it.
Harold is one of the less interesting uniques. His profile states he is a bounty hunter, we're wanted for some reason. Yawn.
He is not resistant to Ice Magic, unfortunately.
another artefact weapon because idk why not, right? For us it's mostly an equippable rank of Cold Resistance.
FUCK ALL BLACK MAMBAS
Vehumet offers to teach us Bolt of Cold. It's a really good spell, but we'll need to unlearn something to get it.
Reluctantly, I Amnesia Shadow Creatures for the time being. It's always better to forget spells you have in a book as opposed to ones you got from Vehumet. This also effectively obsoletes Throw Icicle, so we'll be forgetting that too if we need to make room.
The Spider Nest! One of three places we won't be covering in the Lair this update.
The Swamp, seen here, is the other.
Unfortunately, we no longer have much say in the matter.
We were pursued while magically dry by a herd of elephants. The Wolf Spider proceeded to come out of...well, somewhere, but I don't know where it was hiding, and follow me upstairs.
It and the Spiny Frog finished me off pretty darn well.
That's three characters dead on The Lair. I will get past this accursed part of the dungeon at some point, I swear it.
I suppose tomorrow we try again. With what or whom, I've yet to decide.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
So shall it be!
We are Laurentius. We're a Centaur, and as a Centaur, our skills consist primarily of shooting things full of holes with arrows, and knowing spells which allow us to further shoot things full of holes with arrows.
Spellcasting is not a strong suit for our species (-3 aptitude!) so we'll have to keep our spell list short but versatile. Currently all we know is Corona, a spell that lets us light up monsters so they're easier to hit. It's a pretty basic debuff, but it's helpful.
We're also going to be on the lookout for a melee weapon. I found a spear, which works for now, but we want something to take out minor threats we don't want to waste arrows on, and something to fall back on if we run out of ammunition. We may want to pick up some levels in Polearms at some point, or some weapon class at least.
Currently we're going to train up our Hexes skill exclusively, our starting spellbook has some pretty nasty stuff in it, and we're going to want to take advantage of it.
Inner Flame could be devastating if we use it properly. Used improperly, it'll probably kill us, but hey, that's half the fun of DungeonCrawl.
I've never played an arcane marksman, and have only played a Centaur once previously, so it's not a bad idea to take stock of our natural abilities.
We're pretty darn fast. I think only Spriggans outmatch Centaurs in terms of player species' speed, we also have hooves, which means a free kick attack in melee, and the free extra AC is a nice bonus.
I'll be honest, when we hit level 3, I have no clue what attribute to level up. I suppose Dex is a smart choice because bows, and we can't wear certain kinds of armor (I think most chest armor is available to us, but I may be wrong) so dodging seems like a smart investment.
This is one heck of a find so early on. We're probably not gonna be specializing in Short Blades anytime soon, but if we run into an early mummy or something this could help a lot. Holy Wrath is a brand that does extra damage against demons and the undead, it's rather rare, especially this early in the game.
We memorize Inner Flame on Dungeon 3. It'll be some time before we can cast it reliably, but when we do it could potentially make a great crowd clearer.
Inner Flame curses the target to explode upon death. For most casters, it's kind of useless. For us, with our ability to consistently attack at range and easily kite almost anything, it could potentially be a gamechanger.
We find a Whip of Electrocution on a random kobold. Whips aren't really our style, but the brand's versatile enough to make it a good choice for now.
I screencap'd this because I don't think we've seen this yet in the LP. This is a themed floor. They're pretty rare, but this one, filled with undead, withered plants, the odd headstone, and sometimes altars to gods of Necromancy, seems to be the most common.
I switch our active skill to Bows, we're just missing way too often even with Corona active.
Inner Flame, while not here proc'd by our arrow, shows off its potency.
I don't know when they added these suit-shaped vaults to the game, but they're a nice touch.
Nemelex is a neat god, if one I've never really played with (and apparently he gets a heavy nerf in the next update. Sadface), but because of the specific requirements our race/class combination has, there's really only one god we'll be able to worship if we want to maximize our chances for success.
More fun with Inner Flame.
We're starting to run out of arrows....hopefully we find the Ecumenical Temple soon.
Blork is a silly unique who is an orc wearing rainbow suspenders. He knows some spells and always spawns with a magic weapon, but he's not super threatening.
Fuck everything about this vault.
Everything about it.
One of our centaur bretheren.
Dungeon centaurs tend to carry branded arrows, so we're able to pick up a 10 stack of flame arrows from this fellow. After he serves as our target practice, of course.
See that book? Exact same one we already have. Weird.
We quaff two potions of mutation, hoping to solve our metabolism problem (being herbivorous and having a fast metabolism is duuuuumb). We don't, but the end result is interesting nonetheless.
The intelligence will help us out, as will the free AC from the scales mutation. Blurry vision is straight up horrible, while beserkitis (we sometimes randomly go berserk when striking a foe in melee combat) is a mixed blessing.
That's all for this part of the update. Part 2 will come after I get back from my walk this evening.
Also, Fossilmaiden, I saw your suggestion. We'll probably do a Tengu Air Elementalist at some point, just not sure when.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
We pick up Enslave on D5, and it saves our asses a floor later, albeit, on a wand instead of natively cast. Enslave allies a monster to us, briefly, and in situations where there's a spellcaster or two surrounded by a mob of less magic resistant but beefier warriors, it can make the difference between life and death.
We find the Ecumenical Temple, and I'm tempted to jump for joy, however
this is basically a worst-case scenario.
The Corrupted Temple is a very rare, themed version of the Ecumenical Temple where many of the altars are replaced with altars to Lugonu, God of The Abyss.
Lugonu's not a bad deity, but we need Okawaru. Yes, the default melee god. Why? Because he gives weapon gifts, and a lot of them. Namely, ammunition. He'll keep us well stocked and supplied if we join his faith.
This is a problem, as Okawaru's temple is not here. We will need to find it elsewhere. I believe it should be still located somewhere on the first 9 dungeon floors.
Monster Box vaults are some of my least favorite in the game, but they provide us with another opportunity to spam Inner Flame, so I suppose I should be grateful.
Many altars! But none to Okawaru, we press on.
Eek.
Cyclopses are some of the earliest true giants you can meet. They hit hard in melee and at a distance they like to toss large rocks at you, which hurt a lot if they connect.
Thankfully they're slow, so kiting wins us the day here.
I have actually never seen one of these before.
I decide to be cautious and just avoid it. I'm not sure what kind of demons it summons and we can't really afford to be dealing with Balrugs right now.
After half a floor of running from yak herds and a shapeshifter(!), I've explored most of it and come to the conclusion that the only possible place for an altar to Okawaru is behind where the statue is.
Fuck.
Or perhaps not
this is where I'm leaving things for the day. I'm not sure what to do, I don't really think we'll survive even The Lair without a way to reliably get more ammunition. So I'm at a loss.
"Hey now!" You might be saying to yourself "A Shining Eye is an awfully rare thing to see outside of the Slime Pits!" You'd be right, that's a shapeshifter.
This incredibly brief update is a tribute to said shapeshifter, because he killed me. Very efficiently I might add.
Stupidly, I thought I could take this thing down.
I couldn't, because as it turns out, one of the things shapeshifters can shapeshift into is Yaktaurs. Centaur's uglier, beefier cousins. Another thing is Giant Fireflies.
Both of these things are very fast, and I had no real way to escape before it made quick work of me.
So, we'll be trying that Tengu Air Elementalist soon.
Rest in peace Laurentius, we hardly knew ye.
Meet Hwaawk.
Hwaawk is a Tengu, a sort of raven-person, like most Tengu, Hwaawk is perpetually sick of everyone's shit and is always on the lookout for ways to end it. Also like most Tengu, Hwaawk is very big on Air Magic, zapping folks is fun.
We only know one spell right now, Shock. It's a bit like Magic Dart, but less accurate. However, it can also bounce off certain surfaces, opening the possibility of zapping multiple foes in a line or even the same foe multiple times. It's a handy spell.
We quickly hit XL2 and pick up Swiftness and Repel Missiles. Swiftness is worth elaborating upon. Essentially it's a buff to our movement speed, and it's going to act as an escape rope out of situations we don't really want to be in, it has the downside of slowing us down after it expires, so we have to be careful. It shouldn't be confused with Haste, which increases the speed of everything we do, and lacks that downside. We'll probably replace it with the latter at some point, but not now. Repel Missiles is more or less exactly what it sounds like.
For now, utility trumps destructive might. We should have enough of that soon enough, or we would, if we had not died on the third floor to an adder.
I may need to just take a break from this LP for the day.
Hey, look who I ran into.
From now on, what we're going to do is a rotating cycle of Fighter->Mage->Rogue type characters. Every once and a while I may mix in zealots in the Fighter spot.
But for now! I'm about to start my next Fighter character. Not a Minotaur this time, tho.
Meet Grom! Grom's a Hill Orc, not unlike our dearly departed Death Knight Thrall.
The crucial difference is that Grom, at least right now, does not worship a deity, so we're free to pick and choose who we like (I have two options in mind, but I'll cover that later), and also, we start out with a bit more skill in the various "whacking things" skills.
We're going to start by dropping our shield. We're an axeman primarily, and there's no way we're going to find a shield good enough to justify having to use a one-handed axe, all the best axes are two-handed. Also worth mentioning, axes can cleave, damaging any adjacent foe, not just the one you're targeting. It's a nice bonus. Mostly we're going with axes because orcs have a great axe aptitude (axetitude?) of +3.
The first three floors are largely unremarkable, but we run into Natasha on D4. I am not sure why, but I have been encountering her constantly lately.
D5 proves to be very dangerous. We've got! 3 or 4 Orc squadrons, plus wizards. A nasty gnoll pack with tons of throwing nets, Edmund, Sigmund's younger brother, the Elf Twins Duvessa and Dowan
and whatever the heck this weird vault is. I found no way in there, for the record.
It took some tricky maneuvering but we clear the floor mostly problem-free.
We also get a sweet bit of loot that I don't notice until later.
See this baby? It's a Potion of Beneficial Mutation. Unlike regular potions of Mutation which are riskier, this is guaranteed to give us something good.
Oh
and how good it is. Robust is a great mutation, if not as flashy as something like Spit Poison.
Vampire Bats! Largely harmless, but novel. I've never seen them before.
We hit The Ecumenical Temple on D6, and join up with our chosen faith.
Okawaru is sort of the default melee god. We're playing it super safe here, basically. Oka gives us two active abilities, one at * and one at *****. The first is pretty spammable and is called Heroism, it makes all of our fighting skills better, and it's awesome. The second is less spammable and is called Finesse, it makes us attack much faster. It is also awesome.
Theoretically, Oka can give followers powerful gifts, but we should not necessarily count on that.
That's today's update!
Inventory Summary (gonna try to do one of these from now on):
Potions of:
-Restore Abilities (2)
-Invisibility
-Brilliance (2)
Scrolls of:
-Enchant Armor
-Magic Mapping
-Immolation
-Teleport
-Identify (2)
-Unknown
Jewelry
-Amulet of Stasis
-+4 Ring of Protection
-Ring of Regeneration
-Un ID'd Amulet
-Un ID'd Ring
Armor
-Scale Mail
-Pair of Gloves
-Helmet
Weapons
- +1/+1 War Axe
Other
-Wand of Confusion (Empty)
-sum food
We run into some odd dens on D7. The first is a Cyclops and his herd of sheep, the second, a pack of rats lead by a rare orange rat (their attacks are draining-branded, be careful).
A floor below, we encounter the unique Psyche. Psyche's a sorceress, but the only thing remotely dangerous about her is her chaos-branded dagger. Here, all it does is berserk us, making her death all the quicker.
What is it with psychotically dangerous Lair entrances lately? An elephant slug, a literal elephant, and two jellies that corrode my sole weapon into a lovely 0/-2 war axe. It's a sign of things to come.
We don't have any cold resistance, but of the two elemental mini-branches (the other being Volcanoes), Ice Caves are usually the easier of the two in my experience.
I must stress usually.
Demons are awful things to fight. Ice Devils (and the weaker Blue Devils, the other type present here) are probably the worst form of this branch you can get, even a variant with a pair of ice dragons at the end isn't usually too bad. The problem is that despite being "only" very competent melee fighters--contrast some demons who can murder any character who happens to be so much as within their LOS--we have neither fire damage nor cold resistance, meaning they hit hard and take forever to kill.
We mostly (spoilers) don't die here by virtue of Heroism, one of Oka's two activated abilities. It elevates all of our combat skills by several levels, essentially allowing us to temporarily punch above our weight quite significantly.
Ice Statues are another hazard (though one found in most ice caves). They cast various cold magics and summon Ice Beasts to defend them. We eventually manage to take out the top one, but it takes quite some time.
After punching through to the vault, I'm greeted by simularca. Simularca are cold-branded derived undead, being essentially ice-based clones of the original creature. This draconian one is not very dangerous, the three troll simularca in the adjacent vaults? Incredibly dangerous.
We manage to take those down, but the presence of several more, more Ice Devils, and at least one (probably more) necromancers in the loot chamber motivates me to book it.
We can't go back, and now we're down several blink scrolls, a teleport scroll, and our meager potion collection. Things are looking dire.
And they're not about to start looking up any time soon. Yes, that is Thrall, our very own dearly departed Death Knight.
Zealot classes, unlike various arcanists, do not retain their supernatural powers in death, but Thrall doesn't really need them. He was quite physically powerful when he died (and some backreading reveals he had a vorpal flail when he was killed), and it's rather unfortunate that we encountered him here.
Seems that he and Yredelemnul have had a bit of a falling out. Shame.
We book it back upstairs, and against my better judgment, leave The Lair behind.
We just don't have what we need to not die in there, and I'm thinking an alternate plan is in order, but I have not yet figured out what specifically.
Part 2 of today's update will be coming shortly.
Two-Headed Ogres. More or less exactly what you'd think.
The Orcish Mines.
Our time here will be brief, but we've come to hopefully slay some of the natives and scavenge some better equipment. Our unimpressive scale mail and rusted axe are impressing nobody, nor will they help us in The Lair.
What will help us is this. Potions of Curing are not as good as just having Poison Resistance, but they will help in alleviating the pressure throughout most of The Lair.
That guy in the plate mail is an Orc Knight, we cut him to pieces and take his armor. We also lift a nice battle-axe off of someone else. No brand, but it's still better than our rusted war axe.
Now that we're a smidge better equipped, it's time to take The Lair on again.
We lay Thrall to rest, hopefully he will find peace in his second death.
Here's our main Lair issue right now.
Hydras function exactly as their mythological equivalents. Many-headed reptilian beasts who are only made stronger by lopping off their heads (read: using any bladed weapon that is not a dagger). They are effectively immune to our axe, and trying to use it will only make the thing stronger, and this one (and his littler, four-headed brother elsewhere on the floor) nearly kill us because of our inability to damage him.
Phials of Floods are evokables, they summon a friendly Water Elemental. It's not an ideal solution to our problem, but for now, it will have to do.
What's that saying, "second time's the charm"?
Volcanoes are Ice Caves, but for fire instead. Simple.
And it turns out this one is undead themed.
We actually got lucky here, this is easier than many we could've gotten.
Unfortunately our loot haul is....mixed. Plenty of fire resistant armor, a flaming scimitar, a demon trident(!)...but no flaming axe.
Seems we're going to have to train up polearms a bit. Luckily, polearms crosstrain (gain a bonus) from axe training, so we shouldn't have to pour too much XP into the skill to get a decent return here. Besides, we'll mostly be using this only for hydra-killing.
Player Ghosts, as it will turn out, are a bit of a running theme on this update.
Kazmodin here is an offscreen character of mine. He's a Deep Dwarf, and that means two things.
The good thing is that he does not heal. At all. Deep Dwarves don't heal naturally and need to drink potions or use wands to heal themselves, and as a ghost, Kazmodin can do neither, meaning any damage inflicted to him at all will stay there forever.
The bad thing is that to compensate for this weakness, Deep Dwarves take less damage. From everything. It's called Damage Shaving officially, and it reduces all damage Deep Dwarves take from any source whatsoever, including us.
The third thing, which I forgot about, is that Kazmodin had a venom-branded weapon when he died. Prudence is the best option here, we teleport away and avoid him for now.
The Shoals are a merfolk-themed sub-branch of The Lair, and possibly my least favorite of the four possible. I have never made it more than a single floor deep in The Shoals, and it's going to be one hell of a thing if we manage to get there on this run.
This however, is not the staircase to The Shoals. It's a mimic imitating them. Easy XP.
The Snake Pits are a Naga- and Serpent- themed branch. It is also quite annoying. This entrance is real, and its guards go down without much of a fight.
SHINY
HELL YEAH
something to round out our stats is always nice, though we may swap it for something with some nice resistances eventually.
Meet PC Phantom #3. You may remember Saghuim as the Draconian Conjurer who died to a water moccasin.
His spell list is quite dangerous!
PC Ghost spell lists are always interesting, because they rarely have the rhyme or reason you see on a "real" unique's. You can tell that Saghuim split his efforts between conjurations and cold magic, but! the spell list makes sense. Battlesphere will fire in tandem with two of the three other spells (Mystic Blast and Throw Icicle), and Freezing Cloud is a good crowd-clearer.
His poison breath, meanwhile, is replaced with a nasty draining attack. Eech.
Nonetheless, he's not much of a match for us when we activate Heroism, and Finesse, our new ability (which lets us attack roughly twice as often).
Incidentally, it turns out Finesse and Berserker Potions don't stack. Who knew?
After we take down an elephant herd on L6, Okawaru does something he has never done for me before in my entire time playing Crawl. Gives us a gift that is actually directly relevant to our playstyle for this run. A battleaxe, an artifact by the look of it.
A fucking awesome artifact battleaxe, I might add.
The -rF is annoying but can be remedied, the draining brand, two pips of Magic Resistence, See Invisible intrinsic, Dex Bonus, and +14/+5 enchantment are more than worth the price.
I am going to have to disagree with our old friend Thrall. The gods are far from useless.
Even though it will break my own rule, I will be uploading a Part 3 tonight as well. Stay tuned.
L6 and L7 are uneventful (we will be going to L8 eventually, just not now). On our way back up we encounter Kazmodin again
We re-kill him offhandedly while fighting a herd of Death Yaks.
So now that we've conquered most of The Lair (and Grom here has become the first character in this LP to survive it), where are we headed next? I think you may already know the answer.
Most of the enemies in The Orcish Mines are absolutely no match for us at all. We mow through hordes of lesser orcs like a whirling dervish as they pray for Beogh to save them.
Okawaru grants us another gift! Finally, a way to deal with hydras. Broad axes are the best onehanders in the game, but we're mostly going to keep it as a switch weapon in case we encounter any many-headed nasties.
Baileys are another minibranch, usually a sort of medieval setting, and filled with essentially the same enemies we're fighting here. We found it and quickly cleared it out, but the loot was so unremarkable that I didn't bother to screencap anything.
Don is a unique. He is good at swimming, that's his power. He can swim.
Joining Don today is Honder Emmott. A Deep Elf of mine who I just finished playing as today (confirming my suspicion that player ghosts are placed when you enter a floor instead of in advance)
I am not entirely sure why, but death has severely neutered Hon's spell list. He knew a wide variety of summons as well as some conjurations in life, here, he's reduced to just his favorite. Monstrous Menagerie is an excellent spell that summons some magical beasts, Manticores, Lindwurms, Harpies, even Sphinxes (who can confuse enemies and heal themselves) at high spellpower!
Hon and Don both go down without too much fuss.
This is the entry to The Elven Halls, an optional sidebranch where we can nab some nice loot. Unfortunately we have to plow through thickets of deep elves--all of whom know a wide variety of magic--to get to it. We're not going to go in there today, and probably not on this run at all. Maybe some day!
Orc Sorcerers are some of the few genuine threats the Mines can produce at this point. The main reason for this is that they summon demons, and lots of them.
High Priests, seen here in blue, are also annoying.
The four shops here are the "loot" at the end of The Mines. We pick up some odds and ends, but unfortunately nothing gamechanging.
Our conquest of Orc will end our update for this evening.
Til tomorrow, friends!
Welcome to Lair 8.
Common wisdom is to hold off on Lair 8 until you've already chopped through 1-7 and the Orcish Mines, the last floor of The Lair tends to be much nastier than the preceding 7.
That wiggling green block in the corner there is an altar to Jiyva. Jiyva is an awful god early on for anyone except Trolls, and in any case you can't usually find altars to it early on. Jiyva's altars only reliably appear near the entrance to The Slime Pits, yet another sub-branch of The Lair. We may or may not cover The Slime Pits in this LP, I've never really done them before because I've never had a source of corrosion resistance on hand.
Some exploring reveals that a dragon's nest in an underground river is the branch-end vault of the day.
This is a Fire Dragon. It's big, nasty, and breathes fire. Quite a classical western dragon really. Unfortunately this one doesn't leave a hide (as dragons sometimes do when butchered). I say unfortunately because Fire Dragon armor is decent medium armor. Though, truth be told, it's not really better than our plate mail anyway.
This is a bit more typical of the kind of gift Okawaru usually gives you. Why would you want to be able to turn invisible if the armor also made you far less stealthy? Who can say.
All in all a fairly tame Lair 8. We're now going to actually return to the Dungeon. I want to clear out the last few floors (I think we have 4 or 5 to go?) before we tackle one of the Lair sub-branches. We're still not really prepared for either, though if I'm forced to pick, I'll go with The Shoals first.
We do have to be careful, the lower floors of the Dungeon are nothing to mess with.
The only notable loot we picked up was a Lamp of Fire, yet another "summon elemental of a particular type" item. If we get the Fan of Gales, we'll be able to summon all four kinds.
Shadows are an annoying form of undead that are hard to hit, they're not much threat to us.
This here is a portal to a treasure trove. We can't just go in, unfortunately. They need to be opened by paying a toll, often many copies of a rare item. Here, it wants 7 potions of haste. Considering we've found only one of those so far, we'll probably not be able to enter, but it's nice to keep in mind in case we do.
This is a skill manual. They train up the given skill a couple levels. They're very rare, but unfortunately this one's not much use to us, and using it would only make Okawaru dump a bunch of god gift daggers on us, so we're not going to use it.
This is a weird sight. You very rarely see plain humans in the Dungeon.
Oh, that explains a lot actually.
The Vaults are a dangerous branch we'll have to visit later in the game. We aren't going to go there now, of course. The fellows in plate mail are Vault Guards. Common fodder in The Vaults proper, but a bit more dangerous here. The wizards next to them are the bigger threat, though, they can cast some truly awful spells.
This is a better get than it might first seem. The various linked mails are worse than plate mail, armor wise, but this one has a pip of Magic Resistance. Meaning that when we wear that and wield our axe at the same time, we're completely immune to almost all enchantments. This'll help out a lot on The Shoals.
"Monster boxes" like this are pretty common this far down in the dungeon. Hellhounds are nothing super special. We dispatch of this group more easily than one might think.
Another god gift. This one makes tackling The Snake Pits viable. But I'm not sure which (between this and The Shoals) is a more viable option.
Skeletal Warriors are durable but not otherwise remarkable undead soldiers.
Erica is a dangerous unique who knows some decently powerful spells and always has a flaming scimitar. Mummy characters beware!
Slime creatures are awful. They combine into larger and larger slime creatures, and each combination nets them more HP and a stronger attack.
Rakshasas are dangerous demons that can clone any other monster in their LOS. They're not super durable, but more dangerous in melee than one might expect.
Lastly, we find the gate to The Depths. The Depths are the lowest part of The Dungeon, on the outskirts of The Realm of Zot, the endgame area. They're much more dangerous than we can currently handle, and we'll not be going to them any time soon.
For reference though, this is what they look like. Essentially just a tile-darkened version of The Dungeon.
So I'd like some input, friends. Shoals first or Snake Pits?
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
My only concern is that we only have one pip of poison resistance, which is often not enough, a lot of the poison there can punch through a pip. Else'd be an easy decision.
rFire and rElec are more or less optional on that branch, but they'd help too.
What I'm gonna do is test out The Snake Pit first, we'll clear the first level and if we find ourselves getting poisoned or badly damaged a lot, we'll head for The Shoals instead. I'm not sure one is really any easier than the other, but this should work.
With any form of poison resistance whatsoever, you are 90% resistant to poisoning.
I actually didn't know that. That's strange considering how the other elemental resistances work.
The Snake Pit. It's not a particularly charming place, what with the walls being sickly green and all, but we need to get through it.
Salamanders are the less common of the two primary species we'll be encountering here. They like to burn stuff, but one by itself is not much of a problem.
Azrael is a powerful fire demon, and we can't really tussle with him right now (plus he's immune to the negative energy damage from our axe).
Naga are more typical opponents down here. They're slow melee brutes and can spit poison from range. Many are also classed, and have extra abilities, though not this one.
Naga Mages are what the name implies. They're beefier than most spellcasters but again, not much trouble alone.
Naga Warriors are essentially stronger vanilla naga. Also, they have helmets and blue socks.
Mana Vipers can cripple if you're a caster, they drain your MP, and quite quickly too. Thankfully we're not a caster, so these guys are a lot less dangerous for us.
Naga Sharpshooters are some of the more dangerous of their kind. They fire crossbolts at you and use a spell called Portal Projectile to hit you even if you're behind cover.
Lastly we have Ritualists, who are big into poison and can punch through your resistance to it with relative ease.
Also, I forgot to screencap it but we accidentally put on an Amulet of Faith on Pit 1. This sucks because taking those off gives you a huge piety hit. So our Finesse is disabled for a little while.
This here is Jorgrun. Jorgrun is a Deep Dwarf Earth Elementalist (one of the few Deep Dorf NPCs still in the game in fact, most of the non-uniques have been phased out), and he knows two spells that are awful in conjunction with each other. Those'd be Petrify and Shatter, which do exactly what you'd think. Our best bet here is to kill him quickly, which we do.
I forgot about Greater Naga, they're not much different than the mages though, essentially beefier versions of them.
Kirke is a unique who can turn you into a pig. We kill her before she does that to us.
Guardian Serpents in the meantime, are odd creatures most notable for teleporting their allies in a circle around you. They are quite annoying.
Shock Serpents are not of much threat to us with armor on, but they're deadly if you don't have any. Even with it on, they can toss lightning bolts that will kill you from range if you don't close in fast enough.
My my, what do we have here?
Speed is a rare brand that lets you attack with a weapon faster. Today, I learned from our own Fossilmaiden that it's among the best brands in the game. Needless to say, it's an upgrade.
Not one, mind you, that we get much chance to use.
On Snake 5, Oka grants us a suit of armor. I hide away in a corner thinking that we'll be safe while we remove our plate mail, only to be caught with my shirt off by a shock serpent. It kills us before our teleport even kicks in.
That's the farthest we've gotten in this LP so far. Progress is progress and I'm glad we made it, but I'm quite upset that I died in such a dumb way.
Oh well, mistakes were made. Tomorrow, we'll roll up another spellcaster.
Feel free to make suggestions, but I already have an idea of my own.
In the meantime feel free to submit questions or suggestions or tips or w/e
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead