I played the game since 0.29 (released in August 2022) splatting hundreds of characters in all sorts of ways. One of them even touched the Orb but didn’t live long enough to escape (ironically, it was another mountain dwarf). This run, I did something different: I actually started using my god’s abilities in any viable situation.
It was a fun run, and I’m really surprised that the escape sequence isn’t that difficult! For some reason I thought it would be really difficult. With that said I did it with 10 !haste and 11 ?blinking so maybe I’m just lucky :D
The hardest parts were probably Depths and Zot (although amusingly Z:5 was pretty easy) because the lack of resistances (particularly rElec and rCorr) was VERY noticeable.
I didn’t want to do any late-game optional branches except for Elf (because Depths is scary and I rather grind a bit before it) but I found the dreamshard necklace and figured it’d be more useful on the run than my amulet of faith so I went to Crypt to grind Nem’s piety a bit (wasn’t needed at all in the end).
Anyway, here’s my character file for the curious: https://pastebin.com/6NhHY03U
Happy new year crawlers!!
Well done, my only win was years ago with a Gargoyle Fighter of the Shining One, went all in on shield blocking and armor, no evade. I was told this is a terrible strategy but I don’t know, it’s my only win in many years of playing so it can’t be that bad.
God powers are a lot of fun. It does take a minute to get past the piety hoarding mindset but hey, if you don’t use your powers when they’re useful then you’re more likely to die, and dead means zero piety
I ran most of the game with a ring of evasion on, and my stats show that I dodged almost 3000 points of damage, so I’d say getting some EV is optimal even for dwarves and gargoyles with their low dodging apt.
With that said, in crawl clever play can mitigate many “sub-optimal” decisions and builds which I really love! I’m 100% sure I made several mistakes for this build too. Another roguelike like TOME is much less friendly to sub-optimal builds (at least in my experience).
The main reason I tend to not use gods’ abilities is just that there’s so much you can do in dcss that I sometimes just forget about what I can do. I’m way too fast in my decision making lol
I believe, rings of evasion are generally quite good for tanks, because you can be running around in the clunkiest armor and still get a flat +6 or so to evasion. Same goes for mages and rogues with rings of protection.
But yeah, I’ve also killed so many characters due to hasty decision-making. Just killed an Armataur + Wu Jian run today, because my health was running low and I figured offense is the best defense. I could’ve blinked away no problem. Hell, I could’ve launched a much better offense at practically no cost by using Serpent’s Lash, but nope, just ended up tapping the keys I always tap and hoping for RNGesus to save me.
I feel this. Splatted a lot of characters because I didn’t decided to just keep hitting/walking away when the situation requires a much more involved solution. At least I die with lots of consumables in my pocket :)