just finished my second mage run of an ice elementalist then air elementalist. in the first game I found many of my usual comfort spells including hellfire mortar and spellspark servitor imbued with crystal spear. I was already thinking how surprisingly easy it is to find the same spells and play roughly the same endgame from game to game because that wasn’t the first, second or third time that I played that kind of kit, and I don’t have that many finished runs on my belt, those hellfire-maining characters are a very large percentage of the mages I’ve done. I know part of it has to be luck because you definitely can’t find the same spells to win every run in the exact same way, but this still seems to happen often. other than the spells I had I don’t remember much about that run at all, but it was nothing remarkable
so the first run was a hellfire mortar main, but what is the next run? hellfire mortar main! on XL14 I buy the parchment of hellfire mortar from orc 2 and the rest was formalities. most dangerous moment of the run was probably when I had my entrance to snake pit camped by several nagas and Nikola, I came a little close to dying when I came back there to get my second rune, but after that I can’t remember being in any danger again, which I’m happy about because that means I handled the rest of the run okay, an achievement for someone who usually loses interest and gets impatient past the second rune. it was XL21 when I bought the parchment of spellspark servitor, but this time I only had it cast bombard because I didn’t find crystal spear for free and I didn’t think buying it was worth it when I had many things to spend gold on and training it to a good failure rate was going to take more investment of experience. battlesphere + shock was also there, just like in most other similar games
the other common thing that both of those runs shared is being 11 hours long xD. their exact time is really close too, the first run was 11 hours and 56 minutes and the second run was 11 hours and 35 minutes, only 11 minutes difference. unfortunately it doesn’t look like I’m going to start playing runs in a more tolerable length of time than that soon. not happy, but it is what it is. I can only hope that the times of playing 10+ hour long runs will come to an end some time. the worst part is that taking overly long to play your runs limits the knowledge and experience you can gain in a time frame, but playing quickly would compromise the individual runs’ quality too much for me to feel good about it :(
the fun thing about this run was finding a staff of earth, an orb of attunement and seeing lee’s rapid deconstruction in a shop early. there were some other options (don’t remember what they were though) but I thought LRD had to be very good with a double enhancer, so I went for it and bought it as soon as I could. it met all the expectations and was a deadly spell against many things. it actually never even fell off and I continued to use it all the way to the very end of the game (destroyed tesseract through the wall without having to see it by the way xD). hellfire mortar benefit from the double enhancer (eventually triple enhancer after I found gloves of fire in elf 3) too, so there was even more reason to pick it up than it just being a great spell. orb of attunement never went away. wasn’t a difficult choice as I never saw any good-looking shields to even consider wearing instead
one of the high points of the run was going downstairs, looking around to find a death yak, retreating to stairs, casting airstrike until my mp runs out or it gets too close. if I rolled high enough damage to kill then good, move on to the next death yak. if not - go up and repeat. truly the inspiring gameplay that keeps me coming back to this game time and time again xD
gained a bit of forbidden knowledge - if you wield a staff that enhances a summon spell, cast the summon and then switch away from that staff the summon’s damage and stats will not change (confirmed with servitor and battlesphere, at least). it’s technically optimal to not only pre-cast those summons before exploring, but also swap between a staff that enhances them and your main weapon while doing it. I wouldn’t say knowing this adds joy to my life, but it’s not that bad. pre-casting isn’t something that you have to do the whole game, and if you will swap staves you can make it less tedious by putting things on a and b inventory slots to swap quickly with '
usually I go to vaults 5 for my third rune, but in these two runs I did slime. reasoning was that hellfire mortar is extremely loud and it’s bad to be so loud in vaults 5 while you’re trying to get a foothold in one of the corners of the map (it’s still fine though, you can use other spells to limit noise, I didn’t have problems with just servitor and me casting crystal spears before). I think it holds up - it’s still good to be quiet in slime, but it’s okay to attract the whole level to yourself because killing the whole level in one go is feasible. also I think now that being a Ru worshipper is actually something that speaks towards choosing slime as your third rune for the same reasons of noise being less of a problem in slime. by the time you have to use apocalypse on a slime level it’s probably wiping out the last slimes there were. it also kills royal jelly very well
that’s about all I felt like mentioning, I don’t know how to do these YAVPs xD