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Goofy monster trick, and pseudo-exploit for epic melee weapo

Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2012 8:48 am
by ro87
I need to take a long break from this game, but not before sharing a couple of new techniques.

Monster Rave
As you go back up with the amulet and a healthy mix of magic, stop on level one. Find a big room and illuminate it with a wand of light. Take off all your rings and drop a scroll of scare monster. Sleep for two cycles of food, watching as a dozen seething monsters gather around you. Put some techno music on your ipod, read a scroll of whirlwind and then a scroll of sleep. Dance party! Smite them all and leave the dungeon.

Skeleton Farming
On your way back up with the amulet, stop at level ten or thereabouts. Drop everything except your melee weapon (in my last case a +6 +7 shocking battle axe of troll slaying). Die. Next game, your objective is to find the skeleton on level ten and regain the epic weapon. If you're lucky, you will simply loot the corpse and become a 1337 warrior. Since you can't be sure of that, you'll need to alter your behavior on the first nine levels to optimize for a victory against a skeleton. Luck is the biggest factor, but here is how I try to beat the odds.

Best things for defeating a skeleton, in order of preference
1. Scare Monster scroll. Duh. Very unlikely to get two of these in the first nine levels, in which case you read one to learn what it is and then you're home free.
2. Wand of paralysis. Use this on the skeleton at one end of a long room, and then range attack him from the other end. Rinse and repeat. I found that about ten arrow hits will do the trick.
3. Potion of paralysis. Same technique.
4. Hold Monster scroll. Same technique.
5. Slow Monster wand, or haste potion. Use this in one corner of a big room. The challenge is maneuvering yourself around the skeleton to perform hit-retreat-hit-retreat-etc.
6. Confusion, potion or scroll (also Amnesia, Blindness, Hallucination). Yet skeletons don't remain ??!?!? for long.
7. Demolition potion. Best thrown if you are healthy.
8. Zappy staves e.g. Lightning, Fire, Cold.
9. Extra healing. Though, this may only get you one extra hit.
10. Teleport away wand. After using, position yourself at a dead-end wall of a long room, in line with the door. Shoot arrows at the door, waiting for the skeleton to find you. This technique is a lot easier when clairvoyant.

Learn what your wands are on level nine, preferably while standing on the stairs to guard against polymorphing a bat into a medusa.

If you have identify scrolls, ID the single scrolls first. Those are most likely to be Scare/Hold/Confuse. Then ID potions. No ring makes the difference against a skeleton.

Once you're on level 10, drink a clairvoyance potion and read a Safe Passage if you have them. If you are clairvoyant, watch for spawning monsters, so you can time your battle against the skeleton. You don't want an aquator blocking your way in a hall as you run to a big room, chased by the skeleton.

In the skeleton room, illuminate the room if you can. Count the spaces so you can switch to a melee weapon at the right time.

It's conceivable to pass a weapon through three or more games, so after finding successive Enchant Weapon scrolls you would be fighting with your great-grandfather's super-upgraded weapon.

The one hitch is that you MUST avoid re-vorpalizing. But I would never let that happen to me. Um, yeah.

...

Thanks to CD for a great game. If dev on a new version restarts, I'd be happy to share some ideas and beta-test.

Re: Goofy monster trick, and pseudo-exploit for epic melee w

Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2012 6:47 pm
by NightOwl40
Those are some neat exploits :mrgreen: CD is still working on an update for this game, and his next one...it's just that real life & work have gotten in the way of game programming progress.