Part 22: Adolph Hissler, NaCj - Five
Adolph is doing well for himself, he's got a nice stash of pears, some lite reading,
The Snake pit got a tile upgrade fairly recently, and now is appropriately dark and scaly. Normal nagas are easy enough for us at this point, but we still need to watch for poison spit and groups of them at once. The snake family of enemies goes all the way from the smallest ball python to the mighty anaconda, a variant we haven't seen yet.
Pictured is a naga and a naga warrior, the warrior is in blue. Substantially more tough than normal nagas, wariors are capable of surviving a single freezing cloud without dying, making them formidable foes if we're not paying attention. There are other naga variants, greater and mage, but they're more rare and we'll likely only see a few mages (but no greater nagas) before P:5, the final level.
That's an anaconda, the king of the normal snakes. Anacondas can't poison, but they have very powerful constriction and their reputation for squeezing the life out of many mages before they can be stopped is well deserved. Wizards and under-leveled melee characters alike should greatly fear constriction from anacondas as it increases in power over turns and can quickly ramp up to 50+ extra damage/turn on the inattentive.
Fittingly, we find a rod of venom. Rods allow their user to evoke spells from them and have a sort of MP all their own, this one recharges slowly (-3 is the recharge rate) but holds 12 MP, allowing for two casts of Poison Arrow and Poisonous Cloud, both are pretty powerful spells to have on-hand. We'll hold on to it in case we need those spells.
Adolph uses the last of his fava beans. Cannibalism isn't impossible in Crawl, but there is at least one god that frowns on it. Vehumet doesn't seem to care, ends justify the means and all that.
Nergalle is one of my favorite uniques. She's an orc who's acquired quite a few magical spells and can use them to devastating effect. We spell-sling with her for a few rounds but when the dust settles, Adolph remains the last man...slithering.
Ok no, I just used freezing cloud to kill her, but she did summon some spectral orc knights to fight us. They're chump change for such a mighty wizard.
We do hit XL20 as we're wrapping up p:4, we get +1AC and +1 Dex. We head back to the dungeon after that. I'm a bit worried because we're entering the levels where a certain unique spawns and I really don't want to deal with him.
Not that one, but Xtahua is a pretty nasty lady. Able to cast spells, breathe fire, and open doors, Xtahua is the only dragon unique, though she does have a cousin in the game. Freezing cloud works wonders as she'll stand in it to hit us with her fire breath and she won't penetrate the vapours it produces.
We take down the mighty dragon handily with a few clouds and a single OOD.
Necromancers usually come with cadres of undead to try and mess with us, but they're only human and can't summon demons, which are the real bad guys at this point.
A strange vault, but we can't hurt them without opening up the walls, so we pass on it for now, even though I'm sure it's easy experience.
On d:25 we get XL 21, we're nearing the bottom of the dungeon so I'm getting pumped to show off zot. But first:
Fuck fire crabs, they've lots of HP, they love to fireball you, they're just jerks all around. This one dies alone and cold in a cloud of freezing vapours, like most of my enemies.
Pictured: Why I haven't been autoexploring for the past 5 DLs. That's the aura of a servant of The Shining One. At best, it's an Angel or Daeva, at worst, it's Mennas, a powerful servant of TSO who can cast silence, move really fast and use holy weapons to kill undead really fast. We're not undead, but that first part is worrisome, silence means no spellcasting in an area around Mennas, which would be very bad for us. I explore the rest of the level, but make a mental note not to go over there.
Statues are very powerful enemies that can cast a number of spells, but wands of disintigration kill most of them in one shot.
We're in a vault that has six total statues, two are OCS, four Silver. We get a staff of wizardry for killing one of the OCS statues.
These are OCS', Orange Crystal Statues. They like to do fun things like confuse you as soon as you walk into their LOS and drain your int. We make it out, wait out the confusion, re-enter the LOS and disintigrate it. Later, we walk within sight of Mennas, the aforementioned angel, who is sleeping soundly and decide it's best to dive down now, deal with him later.
2/3 of the creatures on the screen in this shot are already dead.