Morgue: https://underhound.eu/crawl/morgue/Colgate/morgue-Colgate-20240110-180935.txt
I learnt lots of new stuff about DCSS during this run. I had underestimated Volatile blastmotes. Its damage is really good for level 3 spell and it can also be used to make distance between you and enemy by taking some damage. I did find early staff of fire so that helped with both damage part and not taking so much damage from using Volatile blastmotes for creating distance.
I also learnt that Cactus giant is quite strong ally. I already knew it was good spell, I have used it before but I did not realize how strong it is. I cleared elf including hall of blades and peeked depths bit early so deep elf blademasters dancing weapons, very ugly things and stone/fire/ice giants could had been quite scary, but cactus giant handled those excellently. Later on I quite liked synergy between cactus giant and martyr’s knell.
In Elf I had necessary willpower to not get banished, but I learnt that I am pretty bad at actually equipping it. It was trip to Abyss:2-3 where I had to use quite lots off consumables as one does in Abyss.
Shoals was quite painful experience as usual for demonspawn. Lots of holy weapons and silver javelins. Price demonspawn has to pay to have access to their powerful mutations.
I was quite lucky with mutations. Weakness stinger was aux attack that I did not use, early dungeon magic regen mutation was quite nice it let me spam lots of foxfire, however for rest of Dungeon, Lair and Orc I was in unfortunate situation where I had gotten magic shield mutation but not yet magic link. I had fortunately mana regen amulet to help, I switched to regen amulet once I got magic link mutation. Powered by pain was useful even though I was not melee brute I still took some damage and getting mana helped with both casting spells and survival because of mana shield. Sanguine armour added survivability as scales mutations tend to do and for my tier 3 mutation I got robust which is always great added little bit to spellcasting as well as maximum health increases regen and regen is magic regen because of magic link.
Outside of demonspawn mutations I still got lucky, from my trip to Abyss I unfortunately got less magic mutation, which I did not want to stick around so I played mutation potion roulette and got some good mutations to replace it and another bad mutation. I got only mutated once by orbs of fire and that was funnily enough rF+ mutation.
In shoals I learnt that Spellforged servitor now needs 20% failure rate when I had amnesia’d bombard and learnt LCS at 47% failure rate. Mistakes were made. I also learnt that I have no idea how gems work. I spent roughly eternity in Shoals and somehow gem had not shattered.
In Vaults:1 I had wizlab it was Maxwell’s something. I do not think I had done it before it did not seem familiar. It had no weird boss that appears only at that wizlabs as wizlabs tend to have. There were just some vaults enemies and angel(s?), was bit worried about angels because demonspawn, but managed to keep my distance to them. There was nice statstick +8 hand axe of the Kidney {freeze, rPois rF+, Int+4}, which served me until I found staff of Quantum Leap {rF+ rN+ Int+7 Dex+3 Necro} from Slime.
Vaults:2 had Desolation where I almost died, but managed to escape. It was only time I used any of dithmenos’ activated abilities. Shadow form was quite nice most of habitats there did not see invisible. More importantly Vaults:2 also had amnesia scroll so I can finally get Dragon’s Call online. Dragon’s Call carried almost rest of game.
Vaults:4 had Boris which I parked at Vaults:3 so I could clear Vaults:4 without having to deal with Boris’s shenanigans.
During clearing rest of Depths I tried to clear vestibule of Hell but it was quite tricky. Dragon’s call is strong but theer was hell knight equipped with distortion polearm who made life quite difficult as they would blink me out of staircase. I head to crypt instead and as vestibule of Hell already proved itself troublesome I decided to learn shapeshifting to use death talisman. 23 skill with -2 aptitude is lot but surely I find that much xp from somewhere and indeed after Crypt, various uniques and vaults I had previously left untouched, Tomb:1, Vaults:5, Slime:5, Vestibule of Hell and most of Zot I reached 23 skill in shapeshifting.
For low price of 1360 gold I buy Death talisman. It was only copy that generated. I was hoping I would find cool randart death talisman, but talismans are quite rare and even finding vanilla version is not guaranteed.
I had heard that Cocytus is hard even for hell branch standards. I considered clearing something else first, but I had rC+++, rElec, Dragon’s Call and death talisman, what more would I need? Death taliman’s downside of not being able to drink potions did not matter as couldn’t drink potions in Cocytus anyways. Being vulnerable to holy does not matter either as Ds is already vulnerable to holy, not that holy would be encountered in Cocytus anyways. However, I learnt that sanguine armour does not work in death form. I am generally quite clueless about which forms meld which mutations.
I made Serpent of hell in Cocytus and that was something Dragon’s Call did not solve. It abjured all my dragons so fast. I faced abjuring enemies before, but nothing like that could not even rely on Spellforged servitor. I had to manually throw some LCS into its face. Antaeus did not abjure anything it just succumbed to group of friends threw in Spellforged servitor, dragons, malign gateway summon scrolls, copy of Antaneus as well with phantom mirror for good measure. My Antaeus survived longer but it got somehow confused and was poisoning itself. Probably malign gateway was culprit for that.
Only met 1 pan lord during orb run, it was quite tough one but not enough to overcome dragons.