https://crawl.montres.org.uk/morgue/damerell/morgue-damerell-20260902-235249.txt
This one represents a bit of a dilemma; I got at least some benefit from a bug I wrote myself. It turned out to be extremely hard to for the Regeneration permabuff to fail once it was running, with the miscast chance never being checked. A few times this game I quaffed brilliance to get it going and only later thought hang on, brilliance ran out half a level ago, how has Regeneration not miscast? After about the third time I looked into it, found the bug, and fixed it; but this one feels a little tainted.
Nearly collected by Sigmund on D:2, but who hasn’t been? After that I hit the Temple on D:4 and took Qazlal; it’s been a while, and Ds does have that +3 Invo. After that I found a +3 mail hauberk with {MR+} on D:5 which I’d use for a surprisingly long time - spell failure wasn’t too bad with a bit of training, and MR was almost always a problem.
Nothing was too bad through the Lair (getting a +2 cloak with {Str+5 Slay+3} - nice to have, but did discourage me from using a scarf of resistance, giving me resistance problems that would lead to unwise decisions later). Cleared Orc and down to D:14, where I got the macabre finger necklace; plugged through Snake which was moderately bad at times, and Shoals to Shoals:3 where I found a +6 ring of
slaying.
At this point I thought, well, there’s a GDS in the Orc:2 shops, I keep finding stuff with slaying (besides the ring and cloak, I had another ring with {MP+9 Dex+6 Slay+4}, Song of Slaying (who cares about the noise with Qazlal?) and some slaying from demonic ancestry), I’ve also got some +Int stuff - maybe I should buy GDS, put on the ponderhat (MR troubles again), hit monsters with an axe for a bit and see how much I can get spells online.
This did not work too badly (and given the other options for rF/rC/rPois weren’t very compelling, certainly simplified matters in some respects) except that I got Abyssed on Elf:1 and being on Abyss:3 with Qazlal is no fun, no respite from the incoming hordes. I got out, went to Elf:3, and hit a wizlab - Wucad Mu - where also there’s no respite to be had. It’s here that the Regeneration bug may have saved me. I got Abyssed again on E:3 but it wasn’t so horrible, partly because it was to A:2 not A:1.
On the brighter side I got augmentation from demonic ancestry stacking up yet more slaying; even with relatively modest Strength, my melee attacks were very effective.
Vaults was moderately bad and I nearly killed myself with mirror damage from a death knight - which would have been exasperating since in the cosplay variants tournament I killed myself by firing an orb of destruction at something else and having a death knight walk in front of it.
Also got a bazaar on V:4 which had a nice set of pearl dragon scales… but I miscalculated and bought a randart plate first and couldn’t afford them. The road not taken, etc. Instead I bought stacks of consumables.
Straight on to V:5 - it’s funny to quaff resistance and immolate the ambush but I could have saved consumables and skipped straight to blowing them up with Disaster Area. Teleported away after making a tremendous amount of noise and then it was pretty easy to clear.
Slime should be easy, right? Get some jellies out of TRJ and Disaster Area. Not so much - the wide open Slime:5 let everything make a beeline for me at once. However, I survived (just) and cleared the Depths, then the Crypt, then the Vestibule - not much to write about those.
I figured it had been a while since I’d gone after Dispater and I fancied the other hells even less, so Dis it was. I hit the door vault on Dis:4 and unwisely opened it “because I could just Disaster Area the lot of them, right?” Not so; as soon as I opened the outer ring, monsters opened some of the inner ring giving me LOS on some but not all of it. This got really nasty; I survived, but down on consumables.
Bits of Dis:7 were pretty bad… and I ran into my own GrAK ghost, a bit of a warning that it’s easy to die here. However, Dispater himself was easy, strolling into melee range to be squashed by semi-infinite slaying (and a potion of might).
So I went to Zot, right? Well, no. I had a load of potions of lignification, some of brilliance and magic, a +1 plate with {rN++ Int+4 Dex+3} - not so good everywhere else, handy in the Tomb - and the ability to cast Ignition with brilliance if I did lignify and meld the body armour. (Focussing training on Fire Magic meant I soon didn’t need the brilliance). I figured I should be able to handle the Tomb:3 ambush by spamming whichever of Disaster Area and Ignition seemed most appropriate. I skipped the Tomb:2 ambush and the corridor of royal mummies by teleporting, and while the Tomb:3 ambush was pretty nasty I wasn’t in danger of running out of anything.
And I finally found a book with Iskenderun’s Battlesphere, hooray! For ages I’d been using Shock for poking at range - with all that slaying I should have trained and used more Throwing - but now I could have a nice MP-efficient offense at range, right? No, alas, the battlesphere is not immune to Qazlal’s clouds and doesn’t last any length of time. Sigh. I had however been working on getting Death Channel online, which I used through Zot, and that was pretty effective - the spectral things didn’t last forever, but they lasted long enough.
In contrast to the nervous moments earlier, Zot was straightforward. Plenty of OOFs and ancient lichen on Z:5 but in most cases I could back up round a corner and then hammer them in melee. Two panlords turned up at once on Z:1; hammered them in melee. Another one on Depths:5… hammered it in melee.
Next is FoBe. Oh good, a berserker who can’t berserk. (Mind you, I have won GhBe and Trog was pretty helpful then…)