Part 24: Adolph Hissler, NaCj - Seven
The final verse in the poem, Adolph Hissler, Naga Conjurer.
We're at our stash to drop some stuff off, pick some stuff up, and get ready for the
We Acquire jewelery with our final scroll, trying to get one or two particularly useful pieces we haven't found yet, we fail, but get this handy ring. The str+3, Int+2 is better than our MP+9 and Acc-6 ring, so we swap those. We also pick up a potion of great use.
Oklob plants are probably not a big deal now, but because they can't see invisible and we had a potion of invis in our stash.
I quaff it and freezing cloud gets landed right on top of them.
The slime pits are six levels deep, full of slimes and eyeballs, two families of enemies that warrant the respect they get. I have no qualms about using ice storm here, even if it's still at honeycomb hunger. I kill everything that's remotely dangerous very fast to avoid any issues. Slimes have a tendency to get behind you and not die easily.
Three slime enemies are on the screen here, but only one warrants attention. The slime creature is probably part of a pack, but can't hardly do damage to us, the amoeba has a decent amount of HP, but can't do that much damage to us now. It's the acid blob that's really scary. Acid blobs have rather high hit points, corrosive melee attacks (like jellies) and have a ranged attack that can corrode armour. We take those out on sight as fast as possible.
We hit Slime:6 with no real difficulty. Much like Orc, slime is often broken down into separate areas and it may be hard to find a way down without using a trap door, which you should NEVER do. If you have to skip the slime pits until you have scrolls of magic mapping, wands of digging (or dig memorized) and the patience to do it, then that's what you do.
There is “a powerful magical force warping space” here, preventing controlled teleport until we deal with The Big Reveal.
Ah, His...jelly must've been burning. This is TRJ, The Royal Jelly, He is a unique jelly that spawns on m:6 and must be killed for us to get the rune here. His massive hitpoints and special ability mean you should never fight TRJ, with melee or magic, there's really almost no way to deal with Him effectively. The easiest way is to be an ice conjurer and cast ice storm a few time (~5 decent casts should kill Him.)
I took this shot because it shows TRJ's ability, when he takes damage He spits out a few jellies of varying toughness. Right after taking the shot, I realized I was paralyzed by that eyeball. I'm only out for 1 turn, but that was close. I kill the eyeball and proceed to icestorm TRJ into oblivion.
It looks kinda like this. We have killed TRJ, so we can now cBlink/cTele around if we wanted to. There's two other effects, but we'll get to those. First, most people deal with TRJ by pulling him to a stairs and fighting Him and His spawns very slowly that way, as He doesn't regenerate, or they kite Him around and whittle away at Him. Remember, you have all the time in the world to deal with Him, so take it!
We hit level 25, two more till max level.
Ok, so the loot and rune in here are in these walls which are not initially transparent. We dig one of the corner squares out with a wand and grab all the good stuff in each section. The rune is kinda hard to see but it's in the middle of the NW section.
3 runes! That's enough to enter the realm of Zot. We'll do so, after we go through this loot. While I do that, lets talk about the Slime Pits. Legends has it that they used to be a great and glorious city, but something happened and some people were turned into slimes, they created more slimes and this massive infestation grew to take over the city. Two beings in particular embraced the slimification of their city, TRJ and another who's a unique enemy that we didn't see this run. From this chaos was born Jiyva, deity of the slimes. All gods in crawl are exalted and powered by their followers, the more powerful their followers, the more influence the god has. However, with no followers, the god will perish. We've committed deicide, folks. TRJ was the only intelligent follower of Jiyva, and with no voices to sing her praise, Jiyva has ceased to exist.
And we did it all without rMut or rCorr
Back in the game, we get to the realm of zot, inserting the runes we've acquired opens the passage to the realm of Zot.
A deathly silence follows as we enter into the realm, there are no greeting parties here. Everything in Zot is serious business, even the easiest enemies can alert the harder stuff, I'll be pulling all the stops, playing my best here. Note the turn count
A moth of wrath, inoculous sounding enemies, these guys berserk other enemies and sometimes you. Berserk dragons are not a joke, so we tend to kill these first.
Draconian packs are the enemy du jour in Zot, they're the most common and overall deadly enemies because each draconian has enough HP that they're not easily felled and when you have to face some 6-7 of them at once, it's nasty. They come in all sorts of colours and classes, vanilla, knights, scorchers, priests, annihilators, you name it.
Continuing our catalogue, tentacled monstrosities were a joke until they got constriction, now you never want to be in their vicinity, lest they squeeze the life out of you.
Bone dragons are undead dragons, well, they're not risen dragon corpses, but rather natural dragons made of bone. It's all very confusing and they have too much HP (it takes like 7 dispel undead casts to kill them.)
We do hit XL 26 on Zot:1.
Ghost moths are normally invisible, they steal your MP and are a pain, like their wrath cousins.We always kill them first so we don't lose all out MP.
There are a lot of zot-unique enemies, and electric golems are one of them. Brutal if you don't have rElec, elec golems are very fast and still dangerous if you do.
We only see a couple of these fellas, but Golden dragons are like the kings of dragons, able to use any type of breath attack, they're very annoying and powerful.
We reach level 27, the final one as we're told. After this, the only gains to be made are in skills, but there's still quite a bit to obtain in that department. Humorously, this is the 27th screenshot I took for this update.
Zot:5 also has -cTele, just like M:6. It also likes to have statues in hallways.
I remember I'm in zot:5, so I magic map the level. All z:5's are similar to this one, a normal zot level with half of the level taken up by the vault for the OoZ. As you can tell, the vault is divided into two large circular areas, called lungs, which are connected by the entrance into those and a small area which houses the orb. The enemies in that vault are numerous and powerful, we'll be taking lots of care in there.
The orb has created guardians, fast and deadly enemies that're quickly dispatched by our iron shot.
Every time I see an ancient lich on screen, I freeze. I look at everything, and weigh my options for the fastest way to blow him out of existence. In this case, ice storm is my best bet because even though they're resistant to cold, a lot of the damage is irresistible.
Killer Klowns (from outer space) are chaotic, fast, and very very deadly. It's a pretty good movie, in part because of how awful it is, I'd watch it with a few friends who are willing to laugh and comment aloud during it.
Orb guardians pale in comparison to orbs of fire. The final and most nasty enemy (I forgot to cap death cobs and dragons, but the former are really easy and the latter are dragons) of Zot, OOFs can mutate you and do large amounts of damage with their fire attacks. We don't pick up any mutations, fortunately.
Now we just need to return to the surface, proving to all doubters that Nagas are the true and virtuous peoples, meant to rule over all others.
Every few (between 5 and 200, or so, I believe) turns a thing will pop out, ranging from ufetubu to tormentors and even lords of Pandemonium. We don't want to mess with Pan lords. Also, I made an executive decision to not clear the other lung, a bad idea, but I really don't want to dally in here, for fear of something very bad potentially happening.
Pit fiends are mean little buggers and we've no MP, so I promptly forget to use sublimation of blood and...
This is quite a situation, Psud the Pandemonium lord has come in to our view, being rather cross that we've taken the orb. He will try his best to kill us, so I pop a scroll of Tele, well, two to be exact. The first lands us in the uncleared lung, so I panic and pop another, we end up here. The stairs up is right on the other side, so we dig through...
Oh, that's cool crawl, just be like that. We manage to slither past him and his (weak) summons follow us up the stairs, where we kill them. I try to rest on the stairs up when I can, but crawl doesn't give my much luck.
Scheuw Ebla decides he wants to have a go at us, but we're having none of this, so we... teleport away.
Seriously, crawl, cut me some slack. I teleport away again, I'm in no shape to fight and trying would only worsen my condition.
We finally reach the gate back to the dungeon, from there it's 27 levels of slithering as fast as we can to the surface. We kill a few weak things to give us time to rest, then head up once Smiffum the Pan lord shows up.
Wulegiyn is apparently unfortunate enough to have a brain for a head, we continue.
I pop up to d:1 here, dig through the walls to get to the exit...
If you decline, you just stand there, there's no other special thing. We hit “y” and Adolph ascends.
Our final score, 1,291,447. The other Adolphs were a thing I was going to do for April fools day where I died in zot, then I relented on doing that because it wasn't authentic and would've been dumb, I think. The d:24 death was just me messing around in between updates seeing how good constriction was at that level if you hadn't been doing anything with it. I died to a yaktaur pack before I could do anything really, so I gave up. Also, my HP was steadily rising as the update went on because I was training fighting, you can see that even after they nerfed the increase, it's still very much worth it to put points into it after your second rune and you've got your spells castable if your a magician.
The Dump Also, I spent just over 15K turns in zot (including one trip to get more food.)