After splatting about 15 HOFE and about 25 HO Fi and Mo of Beogh, I rolled a HOFi of Qazlal for my first win!
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/ForkInBrain/morgue-ForkInBrain-20230701-154443.txt
Curious to hear any feedback other players might have here. The kite shield of reflection helped a lot, but ending with 27 Fighting/Shields/Invocations I wonder if I could have branched into other skills instead (evocations? spellcasting?). Frankly, apart from “staring” Fighting and Invocations I just let auto-skill do its thing for most of the game.
RNG for enchantment scrolls was a bit stingy (both armor and weapon). I played most of the mid/late game with a +5 broad axe, switching between an artifact heavy and a vampiric one, until near the end when I got my vampiric broad axe up to +7.
Beogh was kinda fun for the first 20 runs or so, but the micro management gets old and after 5 more failures I was done. Two of these runs ended to OOF in Zot, which I now know should be instant-Smite for Beogh followers.
Ironically, for this run I could mele OOF down with relative ease.
2 Thanks
Congrats! My main feedback is to spend less on shields; it’s the least important defensive stat on any character and you mostly want to train it to reduce the penalties (I would never train more than 14 with a kite shield, and even that is probably excessive). Qaz’s bonus to sh and passive repel missiles makes this even more true, and I’m happy to stick with a buckler or no shield when worshipping them.
I find qaz very fun for melee, currently by far my best win rate god. If you liked them you might want to try them on a melee demonspawn as well (tied with HO for best invo apt, and fun mutations).
1 Thank
Thanks for the tip on shields. The in-game text and the wiki don’t really make it clear when there is going to be a diminishing return on any of these stats. I’ll try stopping at 14 in my current run. I think pushing to 27 did take my min-delay from “sometimes 0.8” to “always 0.7”…but that isn’t too critical.
A two hander with Qaz could be fun. In this run I found a kite shield of reflection so I went with that. It was fun just to see ranged enemies kill themselves while I basically ignored them. Sometimes I just hit . for a while to watch it happen. 