Part 11

First off, I was requested to show off our current skills, so here they are:





Note in the weapons tab that we have nothing invested in specialized weapon skills: i.e. swords, polearms, daggers, each of which locks out the others. The reason is that, per the spoilers, each of those raises our accuracy with that weapon type by four points; in contrast, 'Neophyte Combat' raises our accuracy with all melee weapons by five points. There's no reason to specialize until we've maxed out neophyte & standard combat, as far as I can tell?

Plausibly I'm misunderstanding the mechanics, but that's what it looks like.

(There's also a tab of magic skills, but we don't have anything invested there.)

-

All right, we're heading up to level 27 to kill a passel of Steam-Powered Shotgun Sentries.

Sentries are immobile, 'slow-moving' enemies that will alternate between sounding the alarm & firing their gun. Guns hurt like hell in Steamband (well, at least your enemies' guns do), so it's generally inadvisable to get in a fight with sentries when other enemies are around; luckily, their immobility means that it's usually very easy to set the terms of a battle. So far we've run into pistol & rifle sentries; shotgun sentries will be an upgrade, but not too much of one.

After equipping a magic shotgun we had lying around (for irony?), we recall & ascend. Not much happens on the way up. This is the only thing which is vaguely of note:



And that is because I am a child.

(It was a Thick Tool of Ingress/Egress detection.)

We enter level 27 in an auspicious position:





Literally adjacent to a sentry! (And a passel of Lynch Mob members, but those are irrelevant chaff.)

We cut the sentry to pieces without difficulty. A fine start!

After exploring the right side of the map and beginning to zig-zag back upward, we enter a room to this greeting:



And, on the same turn, another shotgun blast, which hits and takes out about a quarter of our HP in one blast.



Yep. Shotgun ambush.

Very carefully, we move toward the closer sentry, using System Cypher to heal whenever our health gets too low.



Even both of them hitting in the same round can't take our health too low.

Clearing them out nets us a prize!




Don't much care about the slowed metabolism, but I will take another 40-point AC boost, thank you. (And that's our last original body part gone, I think.)

Heading down the corridor to the west of the shotgun ambush, we get this alarming message:



After thinking about it a little while, I decide to not tangle with unseen Nexus enemies and book it down the corridor to the right. Before I get to the end, though...



We get slapped across the map.



Into a sealed monster pit.



Amazing.

We blast a hole in the wall with our ray gun (which takes two tries - might be worth investing a few more points into Use Devices?) and duck out. Immediately, another high-level card enemy shows up outside & blinks away; looks like more of them spawned outside.

Now that we're outside, we're able to kill the cards one by one with no particular difficulty. The Suicide King might have been able to damage us, but, well...



Being vulnerable to both fire and edged weapons is not a good combo when facing Conan's Broadsword of Aquilonia. He goes down in one round.

The enemy that blinked away turned out to be this one:



Despite our resistances, two of them still manage to drain some XP from us. Annoying!

Slaughtering our way through the cards, we find yet another preposterous upgrade.



This brings us up to +25 base speed, or +35 with Systems Cypher active.

However, there's a catch: according to this nearly 15-year-old Angband FAQ, Speed hits a soft cap at +28, and each point after that is steadily less useful; "there is little point in trying for speed higher than +35 or so." We're probably going to want to look into switching out some of our +speed gear for kit that gives other benefits.

That's later, though.

About the only interesting thing that happens after this is a curious run-in with a unique. (Our only unique of the update, now that I think about it!) We tunnel out a pile of rubble, and in the single tile behind it, we find...



A unique?



Huh.

I guess this is a shotgun-themed level.



After killing the Marquis, we've explored nearly all of the level; I decide to leave and re-enter it to refresh it. While hunting for the last sentry, we find a new enemy type...



...which is basically a huge bucket of hitpoints with resistances to everything we've got... (They're annoyingly common, too, if I remember from the one character I got this far before.)

But eventually we find the last one. And that's that!

-

I haven't taken a new quest yet; haven't decided if I should, or if I should speed through a few more levels first. This level was a little more exciting than the last few...

I know MJ12 thinks I should take another quest; if anyone else has an opinion, let me know!