Hi, I’m trying to get a win with every deity and chei is one of the few that have eluded us from the start and remain so. We had a decent start and found it on D2, on a strong MD, so we thought we should give it a try.
So far, we’re quite impressed. We hit hard, we are tanky, we feel generally safe. But we know that at any moment we will get stuck somewhere we can’t flee and die. How do you make Chei work on a character like this?
https://crawl-br.roguelikes.gg/morgue/NephilaWeaver/NephilaWeaver.txt
Update: Character reached Vaults after clearing Snake Pit and Swamp (minus the lerny vault). Learning some forgecraft for versatility. Everything is terrifying.
1 Thank
I know you’ve got past early game, but I’ll still take some time to answer your original question.
Early game Fw wants to get bee online as quick as possible, as it can shut down packs of enemies on its own through Lair-ish. Make sure to pick up construct spikes in case you need to deal with an invisible enemy along the way, but mostly you should be spending MP on summoning and bumping your bee. Maybe pick up a pole arm if you find one.
A lot of people will recommend pushing for Lightning Spire over Golem, but if you learn Golem it’s a lot better imo, especially for Chei. Golem and Spire are capable of seeing you through S-Branch if nothing better drops, but it’s a painful way to go through S-Branch.
Looks like you’ve picked up some nice forgewright spells. Keep an eye out for hellfire mortar if you can swing it, it’s easily the best spell in the game these days.
1 Thank
We weren’t playing a forgewright! MDFi, not MDFw. Ended up with Platinum Paragon wearing GDA in Zot 5 and died. It was glorious.
We recently learned the power of Bee though, Bee do be good.
1 Thank
Oh my bad, I should have paid more attention to the post and not the morgue haha.
It happens! We were mostly struggling with Chei. We have a much easier time with Xom! Got some advice on how far we could push the character though, we seriously underestimated Comical Amounts of Stats. Gonna give it another go soon.
This looks like a pretty fun build. If you have already made good progress towards winning with every diety, you’re probably better than me already, so I can be of limited help. But I have won a few Chei characters back in the day.
Not much help for this particular run, but I think your character would be significantly stronger if you started as a Forgewright. And if you can keep your stealth pips positive, Step From Time is an amazing get-out-of-jail-free card. When your stealth is 0 however, it can be pretty dangerous to use. I always like shadow dragon scales on Chei, but you may well find a better enchantable artifact.
You have pretty low dodging and armour. I know the aptitudes are bad for dodging, but bad enough to justify this? You do have a lot of dex 
With Chei generally you only need enough invo to get your god-abilities castable with reasonable fail rate, so I think I’d often stop at 16 invo.
And of course you should use lots of luring and kill-holes wherever possible. If you can get a loud spell going, that can help lure enemies to the stairs ;)
edit: I see Fortress Blast is pretty loud
1 Thank
Ohhh good stuff. We didn’t use step from time enough, that’s for sure. Maybe it would even be justifiable to put on some training in stealth for it. The evasion… we do feel like we could have trained more of it, specially later on when it was cheap. Not luring and killholing enough was a big reason why this character died, one fewer blink scroll used unnecessarily and we’d have a good shot of winning. Pface told us to stop training invo and we had to wrench ourselves out of that delicious delicious +3 apt, that’s a very important lesson learned.
We have the bad habit of shying away from bad apts even though the actual costs are ridiculously low. Scribbles scribbles nods nods
Sometimes you just need some stuff pointed out and it clicks how much it was affecting your run 
This character be great (so do you)
I have the feeling it should never hath died.
Do not feel pressured by the Tesseract.
Curse Toe was red flag, yet does not always justify a Tree Form. Gavotte do help with tactical retreats and deals significant amount of damage. Blink and Fog plus one more move (be it scroll or spells, be it potions) could have done it.
Step from Time could buy time for the minions to confront the enemies, or simply waits for the Lich to flicker back into view, more foes will come as time passes tho, and ye do not recover, forever rooted there in Zot:5 as ye ever step from Time to escape from harm. A new Legend material similar to that one Unique statue? haha. (Roxanne is it)
The main issue here was that we thought we could kill the toe with our paragon and spent all our mana doing so. We were wrong, and after we ran out of mana we also ran out of options besides ligma! We had drained all our scrolls and potions over the course of getting through the last 10 orbs of fire, which we did not handle super well 