Part 39: Doctor Rocktopus - Four

Oh my, I have been neglecting my duties.

The Adventures of Dr. Roctopus!
Chapter four


When we last left off,



Dr. Rocktopus had crashed some silly elven party. There’s no runes here anyway and Dr. Rocktopus doesn’t benefit from silly, frilly elven armor, so we leave before the party crashes us.



So we head on down to Swamp. Water heavy levels like swamp and shoals are much, much easier for Octopodes than the other races. They don’t get superpowered in the water like Merfolk, but not having to worry about drowning is enough to trivialize much of those branches. Naturally, Shoals didn’t spawn for us.
This is also the first interesting thing that happened to us during exploration. Ran into a flock of Tengu, they fly and scratch like their player cousins, but they aren’t much of a fight to our cuisinart-like octo doc.



This potion of strength will help us considerably. Like I said, swamp is pretty easy of Octopodes, the only problem we have he is with hydras, since we can’t really use blade-tacles because we can’t set our tentacles on fire, that just screws us over and we don’t really have the armor to tank them out with classical unarmed battle.



Fuck you, Dungeon Crawl.



This particular hydra is probably the toughest swamp ending for melee characters, spawns with 27 heads (the maximum amount for normal hydras) , and can reach 255! Having it come into contact with us is asking for four pages of hydra kisses and a swift death.



Does down like a punk to our unlimited magical arsenal of cards and destruction.



And just like that, we got our first rune.



Feeling lucking, I dive into snake pit with no poison resistance, Sonya is kind enough to remind me why that’s a bad idea.



With slightly updated skills and abilities, I head back to finish off The Elf halls. They don’t appreciate my presence and show me the door. The boring, horribly drawn out door.



Several thousand turns later, and only empty stone arches to taunt us, we wander into a fairly tough vault, couldn’t get a screenshot of it full without dying, but I probably spent several decks of summons on this room alone. We nab the rune in the nick of time, a few dozen turns later we are pulled into another area to resume our search for an exit.



Joseph greets us upon our reentry to the mortal realm, unfortunately for him, Dr. Rocktopus is freshly pissed off from being banish and short work is made of him thanks to the experience gained from our Abyssal rampage.



After being ousted from two branches, I decide to go a little further in the dungeon proper. I love the Spriggan Baker. I don’t know why, I just wish I could befriend him and buy his bread instead of murdering him. Alas, Doc Roc isn’t a priest and such friend making abilities are beyond him.


Nergalle is OHKO on contact. I think I might have spent a little too much time in the side-branches.



And now I really wish I had explored this floor earlier. Roxanne always guards a spellbook, these commonly contain a very powerful spell that we’re interested in.



There it is, the spell for which Dr. Roctopus was partially named for. Statue Form Greatly boosts our Strength and armor class and generally makes us a badass, we can go toe to toe with some pretty nasty monsters with this on our side.



It’s not without its downsides though. Our speed is slowed to a crawl and other than stoneskin, which has a nice synergy with statue form, we can’t use other transmutation augmentations, namely, blade tentacles.



Situations like this are where Rocktopus Form come in exceedingly handy. Big open area, surrounded by enemies that aren’t grouped up, and all three stairs in one spot. A lesser character might make a run for the downstairs in the picture, but we are no mere intern fresh out of med school, we are The Doctor.
We go Statue form and effortlessly stone-slap everything into a pulp.



Further down in the dungeon, we run into Agnes and Frances.



Frances was kind enough to gift us a Scroll of Acquirement. That is a rather nice hat. In fact, now that we have access to berserking, very little stands in our way to the Orb. A few more resistances and we’ll have no problem, barring RNG shenanigans.



Mara tries to copy us, but our statuesque perfection is unobtainable to such novices.



Oh hells no. A Saint Roka and Mennas double team is more than I dare to challenge. Mennas alone would require more than a bit of luck. I squirt a cloud of summons out at them to confuse them as I make my escape.



Xtahua appears as I was creeping up on an archer statue. This is tough, but a little more doable than the other duo. I don’t think Xtahua has come up in the other runs, but he’s basically just a beefed up fire dragon, whose most notable feature is being the only creature whose name starts with an X. Statue form grants us some fire resist, so we slap him silly.



After clearing the rest of the level and gaining a level, we run into Mennas all by his lonesome. I don’t want him surprising me at an inopportune time later, so Doc Roc buffs himself up before wading into the silence zone and wailing on him. Note: we are one hit away from death after this battle, Mennas is serious business.



Without his Angel buddy, Saint Roka goes down like a punk. This level was pretty hard on us with the unique and without the XP from Snake Pit, we might get in a little trouble further down the dungeon.



So with that in mind, we take a trip back to visit our good friends Sonja. Statue Form grants us poison resist, so now we’ll dominate this branch no problem.



And we do. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened after Sonja. Battles follow the pattern of Summon assloads of monsters -> Statue Form -> Claim riches, in this case, the Serpentine Rune of Zot.



And with that rune, we’re in pretty good standing. We have enough runes to get the Orb, but I don’t know if we’d have a successful ascent. Our equipment consists of jewelry and artifacts, both of which are immune to corrosion, but without acid resist, the slime pits could prove fatal.
Find out next time, when we continue the adventures of Doctor Roctopus!