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> On Sun, 31 Jul 2005, Eddie Grove wrote:
[not understanding priests]
A priest starts off as a near useless warrior and spellcaster, with no real
damage until OoD and it is a *long* while before you get enough mana to use
that as a primary form of damage, unless you rest a lot. This was changed
awhile ago as now priests get a magic missle spell early (hammer) so you can
play them the same as early mages, but again will run a huge turn count.
There is only one real way to move quickly with a priest early outside of
strong luck (early +wis amulet, or +speed) which is to run them as archers,
use an x-bow and potions of heroism and scrolls of blessing. Even a +8,+8
x-bow with +8,+8 bolts does a decent amount of damage and getting a x4 one
doesn't take a huge amount of luck and you can do ~80 hp's per round.
Your SP's mainly go for healing through CSW and CCW or a few early blasts of
OoD depending on the monster and its offensive abilities (open up a fight
against a unique orc for example, a couple of OoD usually mangles his
escorts). You save any decent bolts for uniques and use these and scrolls
of phase door (lots and lots and lots of them) to get you down to stat gain
along with any useful wands or staves which show up. You don't need R
because you get fire/cold from a spell, acid can be ignored as armor soaks
it and lightening is rare anyway.
Unfortunately this runs a lot of money on the disposable items and thus you
usually have little to no gold if anything turns up, if nice +wis amulet
shows up, then almost everything can go to get it. It is a bit slow until
you get your bow and bolts setup, but then it is *move*. I dive from
1000 to 1500, or basically from free action to 1500, as don't stop
unless a strong feeling comes up as nexus hounds start to come up under
there and if I am going to risk them I at least want to have a chance at a
!wis.
At around 1500 hopefully you have picked up some wis items, as there are
many ways it can turn up, and you start to switch to using more and more OoD
and less and less bolting and pretty much ditch all regular bolts unless you
find a nice missle weapon or might or better. At this point you can start
losing some of your support scrolls and items as your mana might be high
enough for you to use it, which books you find make a huge difference as
well.
You play as OoD priest for a *long* time, I move from 1500 to 2000 fairly
fast, the quickest way is to use teleport and object detection to quicky see
if a level is worth exploring, just bounce around 5-6 times and if not just
continue down. There is usually a pause at ~2000 depending on equipment,
because moving down at +0 speed, with no temp speed, without decent stats,
with one attack per round, and lacking high resists will be difficult.
Lots of guys here will have to be ignored, Gorlim for example bolts heavy
and fast and you will not be able to deal with him by OoD unless you have a
staff of the magi or two and who sees them that early. The guys with evasion
also are pretty much invunerable and you ignore all of them as well.
Anything not evil is hard to kill and anything which can heal is near
impossible.
How you play is really dependend on what you get to this point, if you get a
lot of wis items you can ignore pretty much everything and go down without
resists (have R of course), all you really need is a staff of speed. There
are a lot of things you can't kill but again you could get lucky and find
high dex gloves and a high dex weapon or just a god one like Aule.
By the time you reach 2500 you usually have decent stats and you tend to
play in a couple of ways, if you have a decent weapon then you can melee
guys with ranged attacks using earthquake to fight, and healing often.
Unless they heal it really doesn't matter how much offence you can do, even
a decent weapon is enough.
Some guys are still near impossible to beat at their depth withough extreme
cheeze like piles of glyphs (but these take high turn counts), as their hp's
are just so high that without the right slay and speed you can't damage them
faster than they can heal and you will quickly run out of SP's using heal to
recover from breaths and bolts, plus just powerful melss. So just ignore
them and move on. Once you get destruction you can dive like a maniac and
just use it to go as deep as you want.
As long as you have preserve on, there is nothing stopping you from moving
right down to the bottom and picking your fights there. Bounce around using
teleport and detection and don't hesitate to destruct. There are lots of
deep monsters and uniques that you can take out easy with OoD which will
yield good drops and exp and post little risk. A great Ice Wyrm for example
isn't that dangerous with double resist cold and your ability
to heal at will.
That last method is kind of cheezy, but not nearly as bad as mages with
genocide which is the same thing without risk. This should be at least large
perm exp-loss instead of hp drain. As with anything what you find and when
makes a huge difference, find a heavy x-bow with might/shots early and you
are likely essentially a ranger for the whole game.
--
Cliff Stamp
sstamp@physics.mun.ca http://www.physics.mun.ca:80/~sstamp/
The one unforgivable sin, the offence against one's own integrity,
is to accept anything at all simply on authority -- Maureen Johnson Long
Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. -- Publilius Syrus
yt E+++ T-- R+ P+++ D+ G+ F:*band !RL RLA-
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