I did it! My first run with Felid was a 3-rune success that I decided to play safe and just bag the win for. Second run had a sad absence of Ring of the Mage but nonetheless, with the help of Onei’s guide and Death’s Door and some fairly nice but nothing special safety jewelery I bagged 15 runes.
https://crawl.kelbi.org/crawl/morgue/qchangeling/morgue-qchangeling-20230827-100652.txt
Highlights:
- Silly death to Lom Lobon where I disrespected it and tried to just DD/melee it without buffs up (immediately killed it with Enfeeble with buffs up after).
- Spawning into Cerebov’s room out of LOS with him and not identifying it as such until he walked up two tiles away from me midway through executing his guard swarm under Death’s Door (teleport scroll saved my ass)
- Just the entirety of Tomb. Death’s Door makes it absolutely nailbiting throughout.
- Remarkably completely painless Cocytus after it was by far the hardest part of my 14-rune Spriggan and Minotaur runs I did recently: MA on 0.5 delay with unarmed combat is just SO strong, all of the glass cannons here just die before they can hurt you.
- Ambush on a Gehenna floor that needed repeated DDoor stairdancing to clear: Same ambush minus torment-capable enemies on Dis literally just had me MA and attacking to clear the whole horde.
- Dreamshard necklace that I never ended up needing to wear: mundane MPRegen amulet served me well the entire game, and when I briefly dipped down to 0 lives I had a lucky Potion of XP and the buffered 1-level-life saved up. Curiously, I got back to 2 lives way quicker than I expected to based on the text of the guide: won’t look a gift horse in the mouth, though.
I relied a lot on Enfeeble, but mostly for the bosses. I like it existing as a spell for the situations where you don’t have a super reliable way to one-turn-kill torment-capable enemies, especially if a bunch of enemies are bearing down on you at once so there’s opportunity cost - that’s not necessary for the enlightened cat, though. It feels like a no-brainer decision to get it to use on bosses and completely trivialises them, which isn’t particularly fun, and I want there to be some in-between resolution to this beyond either removing the spell entirely or just making bosses completely proof to it.
Many thanks to Onei, I must have been blessed when you popped into my spectate chat on my first run because 2 out of 2 clears is a great result.