I promise the morgue link is right this time, with thanks to the people who pointed out my last one was very much not.
https://crawl.montres.org.uk/morgue/damerell/morgue-damerell-20240714-104036.txt
After MDAE the RNG handed me MuCK… and after 20 of those to get one to the Lair, it was a great relief to get MiEn who is at least allowed to be good at something, not that that stopped me splatting three on the way to a win. (That said, this only confirmed my opinion that removing old MD with decent Fire/Earth/Invo/Evo in favour of the strictly one-trick-pony Mi was a mistake - I squeezed out a couple of spells this game but only really because I wanted to.)
Furthermore, I didn’t deserve to win this one - the best I could say about the S branches and Vaults was “I didn’t actually die”, failure to respond strongly enough to a crisis in Zot:5 could easily have killed me too, and there were more than a few other close calls. I had terrible MR problems until my 5th rune (so could easily have been hexed at the wrong time and killed), generally a lack of decent jewellery exacerbated by otherwise good armour with rC- leaving me with little choice but two rC+ rings, and almost no options for rN (but I lucked out on that one).
The early game was a bit of a unique party - Sigmund on D:2 (but I started with invisibility to quaff, of course) and then Menkaure, Pikel, Robin, Ijyb, Eustachio, and Blork on D:4. After that things eased up a bit and I took WJC from the Temple on D:6. Nearly collected there by an orc warrior; bought a +2 flail of venom, which started me on Maces & Flails, but with Mi’s superb attributes I’d end up with all of single-handed M&F, Polearms, and Axes at mindelay (which is odd, but when your rElec swap is a broad axe and you’ve got +2 Axes…)
Death yaks on the Lair staircase on D:8 - never fun, and I ended up escaping downstairs to D:9 which is not a good sign. I survived, though, and Lair:1 gave +0 steam dragon scales with Regen+ rCorr - handy since there were oklobs on Lair:1, and which got me into the bit of the game where I was trying to make Charms work at probably-silly XP investment. (I did get Shroud of Golubria and Song of Slaying online, but never Regeneration - and when I found heavy armour, as I knew I would, all that XP was gone…)
I did get an amulet of the gourmand on L:2. We have bcrawl’s chunk healing with gourmand, making gourmand actually good - normally this drops off quite a lot in the late game when you have better amulets available and are fighting fewer chunkular monsters, but nothing better turned up and I’d wear it all game.
After Lair Orc also wasn’t too bad and I got a +5 ring mail with {rElec Int+5 Dex+5} (continuing the “let’s try spells” phase), a broad axe, and a ring with {rC+ MP+9 Str+2}, barely better than a plain ring of cold resistance. When a second ring with MP+9 turned up I did consider the scarf of spirit shield I’d left behind, but I was gaining HP in buckets, gourmand was still pretty solid, and I had a +2 cloak of invisibility (which I never evoked because by the time I could squeeze out a halfway decent fail chance I had forgotten about it, oops).
D:14 gave a ring with {rPois rF+ rC+ MP-9 Dex+2} knocking the spirit shield idea on the head - and a bailey, which could well have collected me. I cleared D:15 before going to the S branches, not without a certain amount of unpleasantness on the Depths entrance.
Spider:1 let me acquire a hat of see invisible, which I was delighted by; Spider:3 gave me a +8 battleaxe with {drain, rF+} which was a definite upgrade on any other weapon I had then (although the broad axe from Orc got enchanted up and surpassed it); Spider:4 gave me an ice cave and an entropy weaver pack between me and it - HP: 2/141 [entropy weaver (8)], making that the best performing monster of the game - and Arachne too, although she was less troublesome. After that the ice cave was easy, and after buying a few supplies I cleared the rune vault and was off to Shoals.
Shoals:2 had Louise who kindly donated me an eveningstar of freezing, my default weapon for the rest of the game, and a tower shield. However, the best I can say about Shoals:4 is it wasn’t as bad as Spider:4 - without evocable flight on a ring I’d probably have died here, mostly to merfolk javelineers.
Now I faced the unwelcome choice of going to Elf and being Abyssed because of my terrible MR, or going to Vaults and being Marked because of my terrible MR. I picked Vaults, and did get Marked soon enough and found myself trying to mash up all V:1 in one Heavenly Storm, but a vault guard with distortion decided to mix it up a bit by Abyssing me from there. (I should probably have curared/netted them). I landed on A:3 very close to a rune vault with a bunch of lichen and chaos clouds; they immediately started pouring out and I had little choice but to fight, using another Heavenly Storm to make the fight merely very unpleasant instead of fatal. However, I had my rune and was soon out.
Things improved a bit when I acquired a +1 CPA with {rF+++ rC- Str+7 Int-2}. I dithered a bit on using this versus carrying on as I was, but after HP: 20/177 [stone giant (11)] I’d had enough and put it on. I then had a moderately nasty run-in with Sojobo on V:4 but found a +2 broad axe with {freeze, *Noise rElec Int+7 Dex-4} - not an amazing weapon except it was then the obvious way to deal with spark wasps and suchlike nuisances.
Elf was next - Asterion showed up but went down easily, continuing a general theme that with WJC uniques were rarely a problem unless they brought friends; Arachne and Louise had also been more or less Serpent’s Lashed to death without difficulty. Of course, Saint Roka on E:2 brought a lot of friends and that got pretty nasty; after that the Hall of Blades was trivial and even the Elf:3 room of bastards quite tolerable (I did get Abyssed again, but got out almost immediately) - stone corridor which all the elves line up in nicely, lamp of fire, javelins of penetration. I learned Blink here… which I did have online at the end of the game, but turned out to be an attractive nuisance.
Depths was next, finding boots of running (yay!) and a +1 leather armour with {*Corrode rN+++ MR++}, a pretty awful item apart from the minor detail that it was basically the only way I could get substantial amounts of rN and MR. I left it around for later thinking “I hope something better will turn up before extended”. Also a +5 demon trident with {freeze, +Inv rElec Int-5 SInv} for my collection of sort of meh rElec swaps, but I decided it was better than *Noise and started training it up, which would pay off later.
I forget which Depths level I came down to to read “An elephant, an eye of devastation, a stone giant, a vampire knight, 2 dragons and 5 caustic shrikes come into view”, but even though I could get upstairs with only some of my new caustic friends, that was not a welcome surprise.
Where next, I thought? I had rCorr and could lamp-of-fire and immolate TRJ, so it was off to Slime (making an obvious-in-retrospect mistake). That went off smoothly enough but I still was no further forward on rN and MR; I have an informal rule to get at least one extended rune and did not much fancy trying it either with MR+ and no rN or that corrosive leather armour.
Well, I thought, I could clear Z:1-4 - which turned out quite reasonably, seeing one orb of fire but with rF+++ and an eveningstar of freezing, they’re not so bad. Then what? Perhaps Crypt would be tolerable in the corrosive leather; I hit the Chambers of the Cloud Mage and had a worrying moment when a chaos cloud berserked me with the berserk running out just in time to fight the Cloud Mage, but other than that it was OK; killed Margery, XTAHUA, and Mennas. Mennas kindy dropped a trishula of holy wrath (of course, after I’d cleared most of C:3) and having already trained Polearms this made me pretty happy. It helped this game had a huge number of scrolls of enchant weapon, as you can tell from me finishing with three +9 non-artifact weapons.
At this point the obvious-in-retrospect mistake became obvious… I’d forgotten about V:5. This was easy at this point (immolate and Heavenly Storm mashup) and gave me a ring of the Octopus King with rCorr (which would have been better for Slime than plain rCorr) and the mask of the Dragon (easing my MR problems). Whoops.
At this point I was thinking that with the MR problem less bad, I could go to Pan (which at least has less torment and more chunkular monsters than Hell or Tomb) in my regular armour, grab one rune, and get the hell out. Somewhat confusedly I then bought an amulet with {Harm rElec rN+++ Dex-4 Slay-3} before thinking actually, rN+++ and Harm doesn’t make torment a lot worse… so didn’t use it. I had masses of gold but should still have thought first before buying.
I bought all the consumables and went to Pan - to land immediately in holy Pan, what a stroke of luck. There’s no shortage of unpleasantness in holy Pan, but none of it is torment and if you’re going to be smote repeatedly by daevas you can do worse than having minotaur hitpoints. I did have the seraph and its friends in view at an inconvenient distance for Serpent’s Lash, but another Heavenly Storm took care of it and a bunch more angels that seeped in. I had the rune easily, but decided to clear the rest of the level, and that paid off in spades - a ring with {rCorr +Fly Str+4 Int+3}, great if I could solve the rC problem; a +0 tower shield with {rC+ rN++ Regen+}, solving two problems; and a +11 morningstar with {freeze, rElec Dex+4} just in case I wanted a better rElec swap.
After that I did briefly consider going for more Pan runes but decided that would be chancing my arm. Z:5 didn’t seem too bad at first but I hit a permanent teleport trap in the lung that wasn’t blocked off by a Zot trap, teleporting into the one that was. Two orbs of fire, an ancient lich, Orb Guardians, etc… and a moth of wrath berserking the Orb Guardians. I Heavenly Stormed, but was overconfident and didn’t take other steps soon enough; Orb Guardians are such giant sacks of hitpoints they can weather a few hits even with a huge slaying bonus, and berserk of course they hit like freight trains.
I could easily have died there, most obviously (besides just the failure to recognise how serious things were when I had time to take countermeasures like reading summoning or killing the moth of wrath ASAP) because I had no better option than to blink twice and both times I used the spell - now in 0.23ish scroll blinks are also uncontrolled, but why take an 86% chance of an uncontrolled blink when you can read a scroll and have a 100% chance?
Still, the blinks worked, I got enough space to haste and drink heal wounds like water, and after that I could clear the wrong lung, wave hello to the Orb in passing, clear the other lung, and try to escape. After that the orbrun was straightforward; one panlord, too fast to evade but my old friend Serpent’s Lash let me take care of them.
Next is TeSk. That shouldn’t be too bad… right?