https://crawl.montres.org.uk/morgue/damerell/morgue-damerell-20241122-180349.txt
After MuCK I struggled rather with the next random combos (playing each until I reached the Lair) - 21 DEWns to die on V:2, then 3 OpBes, 7 NaWzs, 2 GhGls, and finally 2 FoTms - the first of which died to a hobgoblin with no points, but the second of which did a little better - after a dismal start, HP 5/27 to a rat, 1/33 to a leopard gecko, 3/33 and 4/39 to Natasha, 9/46 to an ogre and 2/46 to a gnoll.
Formicid with its desire to end up in two-hander and shield is perhaps not ideal for a transmuter with its focus on unarmed combat, and when the Temple turned up with a pretty limited selection of gods I took Zin (maybe not the optimal choice but I last won with Zin in '19), giving up on Transmutations altogether - apart from Sticks to Snakes, which I know is good but I kind of forget exists for no very clear reason - 4 casts all game.
After a bit things got a little more under control until hitting death yaks on the Lair entrance; that got distinctly hairy (normal with yaks, I guess) and while perhaps I should have tried to work around them (wanting Orc first), D:8 was just crawling with the sods.
Orc was by comparison pretty straightforward (Recite to everything all the time) and I hit an ice cave on O:1 - I had two rings of ice and being a formicid could just dig around the cloud generators, and even the frost giant wasn’t too bad. Here I got a triple crossbow with {elec, +Inv rF+ MP-9 Dex+3}; I had been plinking away at range with a shortbow of flaming I’d picked up but I figured I’d start training Crossbows, remember the attack delay on this would be close to 2.0 and switch to melee in plenty of time, and hope a decent arbalest turned up to be a bit more practical. This worked out OK; I couldn’t get many shots off but they did have a decent chance of flat out killing the recipient.
By O:2 I’d hit six piety stars and Recite was doing all the heavy lifting - nothing immediately useful and affordable in the shops, so off to the Lair. Lair wasn’t too bad and afterwards I had enough gold to buy a pretty nice ring with {rF+ Str+4 Slay+5}.
I found Finisher on D:13. I went kind of back and forth between it and my glaive of freezing - which after all slowed nagas - but after a while settled on it as a better option, working on anyone. Snake was initially pretty awful - no rElec for shock serpents and some nagas getting pretty feisty - but by S:4 it was under control. Next was Shoals, with the traditional near miss from Ilsuiw and her pack, finding the ring of Robustness {HP+10 AC+6} and buying a +3 arbalest with {penet, rF- MR+ Dex+3} - pretty effective other than having to work aroudn the rF hole.
Elf had another near miss with the E:3 room of bastards but did give a +8 bardiche with {antimagic, rPois Dex+4} - this served as an rPois swap (I had a lot of good rings and even with the macabre finger necklace did not want to use a slot up for poison resistance) until Slime:5 and later for killing orbs of fire. Also boots of running, which are never a thing to complain about.
Then V:1-4 (finally getting a decently enchanted arbalest and branding it to electrocution) and Depths - the usual huge encompass vault was not too bad but Mennas had a pretty good crack at me on U:3, with the usual problem that I think I’ve quaffed enough potions for him but he hammers the snot out of me anyway. In a break from the silence I read a scroll of summoning and while he hammered the summons flat that bought me enough time to finish him off.
After Depths I did Slime - pretty bad moment with slime creatures on level 1 but TRJ pretty easy with immolation, keeping it far back enough it didn’t swamp me in a cloud of jellies when I died.
Hatched down to V:5; one or two bad moments but nothing too terrible. Crypt was also tolerable (Recite in general just blew up curse skulls) but Tomb was clearly suicide, so I had the extended rune problem. Zin protects from Hell effects and with fairly limited resistances it seemed like Dis would be the least bad. (I think it would have been hypothetically optimal to switch to TSO before Crypt, but I won with TSO quite recently.)
This was… not a great decision (although it’s not clear what extended rune would have been a better decision), nearly being collected (HP 12/231) by an iron giant on Dis:7 and having several more nasty moments. Dispater also was a slog; polished him off, but I was down 3 holy words.
I clearly wasn’t going to mess around with more extended runes so I was off to Zot. Draconian packs were easy with Recite and Velakast’s Superior Radiance, I could cast Insulation for storm dragons and electric golems, and I couldn’t be slowed by death cobs leaving only curse toes’ torment as a major potential source of comedy.
Comedy did not ensue and I arrived on Z:5. The first lung I looked at had not one but two permanent teleport traps letting me split up large clusters of monsters with relative impunity, but eventually most of them made their way back to me; I’d kill six OOFs (easy with an antimagic bardiche) and some ancient lichen before grabbing the Orb. I saw one panlord on the Orb Run but it was tolerably easy to kill.
I was lucky on this run to find manuals of Crossbows, Polearms, Stealth, and Evocations, all of which I wanted.
Next is SpEn; I wonder how that will go.