I’ve NEVER found anything build-defining in this god-forsaken place, and I die there every second visit. It’s just never worth it. NEVER!
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It gets better as you get better at threat assessment I think! Knowing if you can take a gear-stacked minotaur ahead of time is also important…
One thing it’s guaranteed to have is javelins which are top tier loot for many characters (most melee dudes). Consumables can be nice, artifacts can be nice, it’s at a stage in the game where you might be missing [enchanted] aux equipment still so those are good to pick up!
If a chamber looks too hard the loot better be evidently worth the consumables or I just won’t do it.
If there’s nothing apparently very good in the chambers sometimes I just take the easiest route and see what the minotaur has. And other times I am just not strong enough for the challenges and I simply leave. Don’t get greedy!
The same goes for making it to the portals. I am not spending a lot of resources or risking my character just to make it into a portal that might be too strong for my character anyway. I go slow and if I don’t make it to the portal, I don’t sweat it!
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My main problem with Gauntlet is the arenas’ layouts.
If you fight from afar, you’ll have like 2 turns at max before the enemies close in.
If you depend on allies, you’ll find that there’s no good place for them. Necromancers can’t get their spells going to any meaningful degree.
Melee are at their most advantage here but even then, combat is so swingy that you still might be forced to escape for your life - which you most likely won’t be able to do without huge losses.
Minotaur is actually my least concern. They have a good arena and you have the advantage of acting first. Getting to the end is the problem.
I usually just turn off auto-pickup and explore as usual, sometimes correcting my auto-explore to the area where I think might be the portal. Some portals are so deadly (bailey, volcano and gauntlet, I look at you!!) that missing them might a blessing in disguise.
I have good experiences with Gauntlets. Once I died because I wasn’t good at estimating how dangerous Tomb enemies are to a Lair-level character.
And it’s quite common (40% odds?) that I pick up something I use for a long time.
Minotaur is the one I’m most commonly worried about.
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this is not related to the viability of gauntlets or how you do them, but I recently came up with using waypoints (X w) to mark the exact places on the map where you got “very nearby/nearby/distant/very distant” messages. Which number you assign the waypoint to optionally also indicates what distance away from the portal the message reported, ie 9 could mean very distant and 0 very nearby. Even if you don’t know the distance thresholds and don’t do any kind of math, with a few of these waypoints you’ll be able to deduce roughly where the portal is pretty soon
don’t know if that’s overthinking a solution to something that wasn’t a problem in the first place, but I think that’s a cute tactic, maybe sometimes it’s useful
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Ngl this is the first time ever I heard about waypoints in DCSS :P
I found out that they existed while checking various help menus to make sure there aren’t any convenient keys I’m missing. But yes, it’s a very niche feature, and I haven’t found a great use for them before despite trying xD. Using them to deduce the position of timed portals is the best I have come up with
Ah, I should try that. I’ve tried doing the same thing with one-tile eXclusions, but decided that it’s generally more tedious than it’s worth