https://crawl.montres.org.uk/morgue/damerell/morgue-damerell-20260819-202429.txt
Sometimes hybrid characters work very nicely. Sometimes, on the other hand, you’re not very good at anything and limp through a constant series of near-disasters. This game was the latter case; I think the only saving grace was training enough Evo to get things like box beasts able to tackle orbs of fire and ancient lichen.
HaWz is in any case a terrible combo; you have -3 Spellcasting and -2 in most of the skills the starting book uses (except +1 Tloc for Blink), but because you have almost no strength, it’s hard to switch to using any kind of armour without losing spells altogether, or to wielding anything that isn’t a short blade. You do have +4 Slings, but the damage is still anaemic early on. A lot of the time you miscast all youur magic darts and then some lousy hobgoblin traps you in a corridor and squashes you. Indeed, exactly that nearly happened to me (HP 2/11) on D:1 this game. Twice.
This one found a halfway decent short blade very early and bought a +5 randart brigandine shortly after that, abandoning spells altogether for some time, which at least freed up XP to make use of Ha’s decent non-spell apts. A shield would have been nice at this stage but I didn’t have one until mid-Lair (to be fair, because I decided to buy brigandine first and buckler third).
I found altars to Okawaru and Ihp’ix on D:3. Oka could have worked very well, I suppose, but I already had a hunting sling so I went Ihp’ix. This also did not work as well as it might; Ha is too small for longbows and triple crossbows so the best I could do was fustibalus and shield (which I did most of the game once I found a shield) or arbalest. I switched to an arbalest for the late game in the hope of actually being able to punch holes in high-AC monsters and I wonder if it was wrong to give up the shield for more damage. I also didn’t have the luck to find any sufficiently good randart weapon, or the Invo to get the best possible weapons from Ihp’ix.
In Lair things were not going so badly (by which I mean I only nearly died twice, to a steam dragon and a huge number of ants) and I was getting spells back online by switching to lighter armour - if nothing else, a ranged character in Lair would really like Blink to work. Orc was pretty straightforward by comparison, taking down orc warlords by using wands of charm monster on other orcs. I bought a randart scale armour which turned out to be +1 with {*Drain +Fly rF++ SInv}; I did not expect to use it all game but nothing else really compelling turned up, later I had a ring with {Ice MR+ Slay+3} which went nicely with the rF++, and I was quite short of sources of see invisible.
Swamp was probably where I was strongest, clearing it without difficulty; it helped that I had boots of flying. Snake got pretty bad at one point but embarassingly that is because I swapped out my ring with rPois and rElec to fight salamanders and then forgot to swap it back in again.
Having cleared D I faced the usual question of whether I’d rather be getting Marked in Vaults because of bad MR, or banished in Elf because of bad MR. What usually happens here is I say “well, E:1 won’t be so bad” and then work down the rest of Elf because things seem to be going OK. Asterion gave me a nasty moment on E:2 but E:3 was fine; I got the aforementioned randart ring, learned Insulation, and bought a legendary deck of defence (which I might have been less free using if I’d known there was no other non-plain deck coming at all, but it saved me a few times so can’t complain).
Vaults, then, hitting a Desolation. This wasn’t as nasty as it usually is and I got some useful stuff including an amulet with {rN+ Regen+ Str+3 Int+2} which I’d use all game. Next was a wizlab (Roulette of Golubria) which was easy, and I cleared down to V:4 without incident.
Depths also was pretty tolerable except that Mennas and the Enchantress on U:5 wanted a bit of thought, and then I got Abyssed by a lich to A:5. I was pretty nervous but luckily the first teleport landed me near the rune, I scooped it up, and found an exit soon after.
Next I thought, well, I’ve got Piercing Shots, I can probably dispose of the Royal Jelly without too much trouble. I had to teleport away after killing it but otherwise it was fine.
Of course now I thought to myself, I had the tricky extended rune question. You might say, what about V:5? The answer, embarrassingly, is I just forgot (I think possibly because I had four runes not three at this stage; I don’t normally do Abyss) and I think not having the XP and gear from it didn’t help. I cleared the Vestibule (alas more by luck than judgement, there was a lot of muttering “I hope Murray doesn’t cast torment”) but none of the Hell branches really appealed.
I bought all the consumables and went off to Pan. The first Pan level was utterly horrible and I expected to die - not so much the demons (athough a hellion had a decent crack at me) but groups of demonspawn were incredibly effective and hard to kill. As such when the second Pan level was Lom Lobon and I was able to kill them without too much difficulty, that was it for Pan, out through the Abyss immediately.
I had learned Haste in Pan, which (after Gooncrawl) is a level 9 Charms spell. It was of course stupidly good as level 6 Charms in 0.18, but as level 9 it is not so easy to cast and level 9 spells are allowed to be very good. However, this was probably a mistake; it soaked up huge amounts of XP getting Charms to level 27 and even then I could only cast it reliably by quaffing brilliance. It was useful but the XP could probably better have been spent on something else.
Finally, Zot - and the same old story, trouble with curse toes and draconian packs alike, and when I got to Z:5 for some reason Orb Guardians seemed to be hitting much harder than normal. As such it was a relief to get to the orbrun, face one panlord I could beat and one I could evade, and call it a day.
Next is DsAE and I’m already on a no-streak.
(I did also find a MfEn^Hep I won in April '25 and never wrote up, but it’s too late now, I don’t remember anything about it).
https://crawl.montres.org.uk/morgue/damerell/morgue-damerell-20250412-121941.txt