I played a deep elf conjurer, big spell blaster, level 22 when I entered vault level 5 for my third rune. Prepared with haste and resistance flasks and the initial vault guardians were trivially easy. They all fell in 3 or 4 turns. Then monster started to gradually trickle in. Nothing dangerous but if there are only 2 or 3 monsters on screen at a time I use more MP to kill them then I recover with Vehumet.
Saint Roca showed up, at the time only 2 other harmless monsters where in my line of sight but as I was down to 23 out of 50 MPs I tried to play it safe and retreated up the stairs to recover my MPs first. I expected to see these 3 monsters when I came back down repositioned closer to the stairs.
What happened instead was that the entire screen was filled with vault inhabitants, maybe 30 monsters total including 3 or 4 uniques. I was slowed and the doors where locked on my first turn and I died quickly after. The stair hopping that was meant as a safe play instead turned into an instant suicide.
I realize that conjurers tend to be pretty loud so a lot of monsters where awake when I left but even if different characters are a lot more silent the monsters aren’t so I’m not sure this would play out very different for another character. So how are you supposed to handle this?
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I don’t know what the standard strategy for vaults 5 is, but what I do is read scroll of teleportation right before going down the stairs to vaults:5 to get away from the middle of the map and then try to reach the edges of the map and then one of the corners, then once you’ve defended that corner against the initial packs of enemies attracted by noise you’ve estabilished your little relatively safe space on the map where you can expect not to see many monsters appear and where you can make noise without getting too much attention. Once you get base you can begin clearing out the rest, explore breadth-first and pull whatever monsters you see back to the safe zone so that your noise isn’t heard by too many things (of course also buff up before going, haste and might or brilliance for meleers or casters)
some more loud casters may attract half the floor into their corner anyway, but at least there are only 2 sides you have to defend from instead of being surrounded on all sides like in the middle xD
I don’t know yet how a character would need to look that staying in the middle would be safer than reaching for the corners (because I’m not that experienced most likely), maybe with fire storms you can get away with it but I’d always be nervous. If you have the firepower to do that I’d actually consider going to slime pit for the rune, if you have what it takes to defend the middle of vaults 5 don’t you have a good matchup against slime pit?
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Teleporting was the alternative I also considered (in hindsight). Teleporting and stair hopping generally achieve a similar goal but normally stair hopping is much saver and doesn’t take any resources so if you can, stair hopping is generally better than teleporting just not here because apparently any monster that is awake can move around while you are upstairs.
And a conjurer that can reliably cast Mystic Blast, Toxic Radiance + Ignite Poison, Hailstorm and Fireball doesn’t really fear being attacked from all sides at once. In fact, a good number of melee monsters make things easier because Vehumet keeps your mana filled when you kill them.
I don’t think I’ve ever tried the slime pits (or any other rune location than the branches from lair and vault), maybe I should :-)
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Stair hopping before you teleport makes a lot of sense. You can kill the first batch relatively safely.
Instead of reading a teleport before heading down, it’s cheaper and more effective to just take a trapdoor or a shaft down into V:5.
It’s still extremely risky for a blaster caster of Veh. I’d consider Slime safer for a character like that.
You can also read ?Immolation or ?Fear or ?Blink depending on the details of the situation. ?Fog can help too.
If you died too quickly, perhaps you didn’t train enough fighting. Dodging is also ok. Shielding used to be the GOAT but it’s been nerfed into the ground for casters, and my favourite orbs wouldn’t help you when you’re surrounded. At this stage of the game you should have fully enchanted acid dragon scales or something similar, (unless you’re wearing archmagi) which would also help you survive a few more turns.
Quaffing ?haste before going into V:5 always makes it safer, but it often feels like a waste because it usually isn’t needed.
?Agi and ?Resist also aid survivability, but agi doesn’t feel like it does a lot, and resist is too rare to quaff preemptively
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Let’s see a morgue? Especially if it’s online and we can check the ttyrec.
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@petercordia That contains a lot of good tips and I’ve been doing most of these things already. I just feel by the time I descended the stairs the second time it was already too late. One shouldn’t get oneself into a situation with that many that dangerous monsters on the screen.
So my lesson is mostly that if there is no extra trapdoor or shaft on V:4 (and I do want to clear the vault) then I just have to teleport (or possibly run on foot) once the first batch is cleared and then hopefully end up in corner and slowly clear from there.
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This char cleared both the elven halls and the depths before entering V:5. I also read the wiki and one of the things it recommends is to do stair hopping to take on the monsters in small groups. Generally good advice, but for V:5, at least for a very loud char like a blaster conjurer this seems like bad advice.