https://underhound.eu/crawl/morgue/Colgate/morgue-Colgate-20231117-192732.txt
This was my first time trying out extended and it was easier than I expected. Managed to get all 15 runes. Maybe my high expectations about its difficulty gave me full immunity to hubris and that helped.
I decided to go for shapeshifting, because I found early snake form. Storm form felt like shadow of its former glory. I had ~10 AC and ~100 damage rating more in storm form before change in non-extended games than what I had here. Although it does give more EV nowadays. Another big change of course is that it is no longer dispellable. Not having to worry about quicksilver was quite nice. I think overall it is quite big nerf to Storm form as not only is it weaker but it is also more difficult to get online. It is easier to train 2 skills to 13 and 1 skill to 8 than 1 skill to 23.
Regardless of this huge nerf storm form was still good enough for 15 rune game, so it probably was way too OP before this change. I considered death form for Tomb, but decided to stick to Storm form instead as torment is never actually lethal and I had much higher damage in storm form. There was quite lots off xp in extended, managed to get level 8 spells castable with 8 int.
Speaking of level 8 spells, I rarely get to cast level 8 necromancy or translocation spells. Infestation felt quite powerful. Borgnjor’s revivication and disjunction seemed like nice panic buttons, but I never needed them. Snake form was quite nice for midgame. Forms overriding Jiyva mutations was bit nonbo.