https://crawl.montres.org.uk/morgue/damerell/morgue-damerell-20240628-222728.txt
This is old Mountain Dwarf (just apts and stats); the aptitudes are equivalent to those at removal adjusted for global changes (eg to Spellcasting), which particularly gives -4 Spellcasting, +2 Fire and Earth - which makes old MD quite good at spells for a species that’s terrible at spells, but not quite in the way new MD is.
(Also, while I wasn’t around for their 2011 removal, I do think it sets them aside from minotaurs - I’ve three MD wins two of which have had a crack at spells and one of which was the rare character who wanted to cast in the OCPA. Of course, new MD can do that too, but so could old MD).
That said, MDAE is a pretty cursed combo since you come out the door with a grand total of 1 MP and if that first zap misses a jackal you have a bit of a problem. I splatted 7 MDAE getting this one home; 3 at XL 1, 2 at XL 2.
It’s also old Ash - wear cursed gear, get skill boosts based only on piety and which slots are cursed - with the bcrawlism that cursing items is free but removing curses costs piety. Very solid once piety gets going because even a modest amount of XP in any skill gives a large benefit.
After being nearly collected by an adder on D:1 I escaped Sigmund on D:3 into a sewer (which also got very nasty), parking him for later - but only escaping with the use of potions of desperation. D:4 also could well have killed me, with a Xom vault with a bunch of gnolls with chaos weapons. However, I also found and took Ash here.
I managed to beat an orc warlord bailey then hit the Lair on D:9. Spells started to turn up here and look feasible with Ash skill boosts; I took Sticky Flame immediately but never used it - by the time I had it online, I had a better option when a monster was next to me.
That better option was acquired on O:2 in the form of a +10 randart great mace with {speed, rF+ rN+ Dex+2}. I had been single-handed with shield, but this was too good to pass up, a huge improvement on any weapon I’d found so far and very effective all game. (It helped a little that two-handers have +1 base damage in Stoat Soup).
After that Snake was easy and Shoals tolerable; I’d learn Statue Form on Snake:2 but it was never very compelling because I had relatively low spellpower and excellent normal armour. I used it mostly for rElec and to make being torment-and-damnationed less dangerous… and completely forgot about that at the most important time, nearly losing me the game.
After that I cleared out Elf (learning Iron Shot, which saw a bit more use); Vaults 1-4 - hammering Mennas flat, so nice to have a character who can just tab him down - and learning Yara’s and Irradiate, which I’ll basically always go for on any character who can get them online, then Isk’s Battlesphere and Magic Dart to cycle it.
Depths was not so bad (although one thing I did lack almost all game was rCorr, with no good way to swap it in given Ash’s desires, and a pack of caustic shrikes was worrying) and gave me gold dragon scales. I was surprised by how relatively viable spells were in it, and it fixed a lot of my resistance issues.
Vaults:5 I hit about to teleport and had no trouble. I rolled through Crypt (no trouble, but then, no curse skulls) and then wanted an extended rune. I’d rF+++, so Gehenna seemed a tolerable choice.
Getting to Asmodeus, no problem; hammering him flat, also no problem. Opening a door to see two Brimstone Fiends and forgetting to use Statue Form meant HP 11/273 and very nearly losing the game.
After that I’d had enough excitement so bought all the consumables and went to Zot. I’d been plugging away at Fire Magic having found a manual in order to have Ignition online for the draconian packs and suchlike in Zot… only to find Zot about as short on monsters as I can remember, so I only cast it five times. It maybe didn’t help poor Ignition that Ash had let me squeeze out an effective 22 Evo, giving me plenty of other options.
The lung I went through had about four OOFs turn up in the same fight but with massive melee damage and rF+++ they weren’t actually too serious, and even Z:5 was not as nasty as I expect.
Bit of a hiccup on the orb run (paralysed by a panlord for 4 turns) but other than than no issues, evading another panlord. So I fear the theme of this game is that Crawl went pretty easy on me and I carefully arranged to try and lose the game anyway.