Matthew's Journal

 1.  1533867  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, level 37
               Killed by nobody (yet!) on dungeon level 51
               (User 1024, Date TODAY, Gold 291132, Turn 1804308).

This is 3.5.1 (which seems to have eaten my previous high-score table, alas); after a couple of stupid deaths, this character is going reasonably well (so will be dead by morning, no doubt).

I've got enough HP that there aren't many insta-kills lurking any more, which is nice. And I was fortunate to find Kelek quite early, which means I have banishment and mass banishment to help me pick my battles. I am at the point where I have too much stuff at home, and need to work out what to get rid of (probably the DSM, to be honest). I've killed quite a few uniques recently - having the dungeon books with offensive spells in really helps here, to the point where I'm hardly using the crossbow any more (which may mean I should carry fewer bolts round).

( YACD )

  1. 12590291  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, level 50
               Killed by nobody (yet!) on dungeon level 100
               (User 1024, Date TODAY, Gold 1965854, Turn 2254811).

After my previous post, I continued to descend, with a policy of using mass banishment to clear out vaults, and otherwise only engaging with monsters that were easy to kill or had good drops - drujs, for instance, just get banished because they're very annoying and never drop anything. Other than that, meteor swarms took out interesting monsters (ancient dragons of various sorts), and chaos strike was used on Uniques (otherwise it polymorphs the thing you're trying to kill into something more annoying). The various Uniques didn't prove troublesome other than Qlzqqlzuup, the Emperor Quylthulg which summons something pretty much every turn. I shut it into a room, mass banished the summons, and nearly left it at that. But then I realised I could build a tunnel such that I could hit it with area spells and it wouldn't be able to see me, so I did that.

Somewhere along the line, I found Balance DSM and a shield with nether resist - that meant I was finally able to cover all the resistances without swaps.

Sauron was quite a pain, mostly because he kept teleporting away; but he succumbed to chaos strike (and banishing the monsters he summoned). Then it was time for a kit-shuffle - I knew I wouldn't want to swap out the Great Axe of Eönwë (which previously I'd done for monsters with powerful acid or nether attacks), so I could afford slightly less +CON and +INT - that meant I could swap in boots of speed to make it easier to keep up with Morgoth, and that's the kit that's in the dump below.

Then it was time to load up on all my carefully-hoarded Life and *Healing* potions, and go to find Morgoth on level 100. As it happened, the level was created with a huge vault in the middle, which contained Morgoth. So I could clear out the rest of the level's monsters before fighting him. Then it was a case of hitting him with Chaos Strikes, phase dooring out of the way so he could never melee me, banishing (or mass-banishing) the summons, and using the healing potions to keep my HP above 600 (since his mana-storm spell does 600 damage). This requires quite a lot of attention to get right, and to keep on top of mana & hit points, speed, not getting meleed by Morgoth, and removing the summoned monsters. But then he was down to 1* of health, and then **CONGRATULATIONS** :-)

Conventional wisdom is that Mages are hardest to start and easiest to finish in angband, and that would certainly fit my pattern - I've had a lot of characters die young, but actually once I'd reached the mid-40 character levels, maxed my stats and found the final spell book, it was pretty easy to only fight the battles I wanted to (by teleporting or banishing monsters), and the firepower of the higher-level spells is pretty impressive.

( Victorious character :-) )

  1. 10453188  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, level 50
               Killed by nobody (yet!) on dungeon level 88
               (User 1024, Date TODAY, Gold 1511279, Turn 2154349).

That's the highest character level possible - now I "just" have to accumulate enough kit that I stand a chance of taking out Morgoth (and not die stupidly).

I did recently kill Gothmog, though, which is conventionally the third-hardest monster in the game (after Sauron and Morgoth). With Mass Banishment, it wasn't so hard...

( YACD )

  1.  3245247  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, level 41
               Killed by nobody (yet!) on dungeon level 60
               (User 1024, Date TODAY, Gold 557651, Turn 1854643).

This is now a higher score than my previous best character, and after substantially fewer turns (1.9M vs 3.5M). I seem to have notably better kit, too, although not Kelek's Grimoire yet.

I found Shelob and Glaurung on the same level, which was a bit alarming. The former was a bit of a push-over, but the latter was more challenging (not least because he summons extra ancient dragons). I should probably go deeper...

( YACD )

  1.    72318  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, level 27
               Killed by nobody (yet!) on dungeon level 29
               (User 1024, Date TODAY, Gold 69894, Turn 1071860).

Finally, acquired a permanent light source! Also, another bug (the BDSM was found under rubble, but on level 28, not the town), and a particularly annoying level where the only good bit of loot was the Iron Helm of Gorlim (-3 INT,WIS,-25% searching,heavy curse,rFear,FreeAct,SeeInvis,Aggravates, (+8,+8)[7,+10]<-5, -3>) which is entirely useless for a mage (not sure I'd ever use a heavily cursed object, TBPH.

I've now reached the "house inventory full" stage, which is a bit irritating; not quite sure what to get rid of next. It was particularly embarrasing when a Dread drained 3 STR points, and I couldn't carry all the Stuff. Thankfully, going up a level restores drained stats...

I've elided the character history that was in the previous dump.

( YACD )

A previous update to angband broke the shared scorefile, so I stopped playing (and need at some point to see if I can fish the old score file out of the backups). But 3.5.1 is in unstable, and has restored the shared savefiles, so I thought I'd backport it to stable and have a try. Quite a lot has changed!

  1.    20709  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, level 22
               Killed by nobody (yet!) on dungeon level 20
               (User 1024, Date TODAY, Gold 36257, Turn 631806).

( More thoughts, and the obligatory char-dump )

  5.   587777  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, Level 33
               Killed by nobody (yet!) on dungeon level 42
               (User 1024, Date TODAY, Gold 376292, Turn 2022740).

  6.   586295  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, Level 33
               Killed by an Inertia hound on dungeon level 45
               (User 1024, Date 2009-08-27, Gold 552156, Turn 1628789).

(Position 6 being my previous best effort on the 3.1.0 beta)

( Details under cut ) Having to remember to swap in Thengel when dealing with confusion attacks is a bit annoying, but telepathy is so useful otherwise that I think it's worth the pain. I seem to be being a little more cautious this time, too...

  6.   545991  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, Level 33
               Killed by nobody (yet!) on dungeon level 44
               (User 1024, Date TODAY, Gold 551061, Turn 1618961).

  7.   542267  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, Level 33
               Killed by an Ancient multi-hued dragon on dungeon level 40
               (User 1024, Date 2008-12-04, Gold 170636, Turn 1804423).

( also, previously )I've finally found the first of the dungeon spell-books, which I would normally expect to have found long ago. Temporary rPoison is very handy (as is temporary double-resist of the other basic breath types). I'm deeper than all but one of my previous characters, which may account for a feeling of being slightly under-powered; an excellent missile launcher would really help there. Comments welcome, as ever.

( YACD )
ETA: I note that this is now the best I've done on the new beta.
ETA2: Amusing, I just descended a staircase, and was insta-killed by a room full of inertia hounds.

  9.   123894  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, Level 29
               Killed by nobody (yet!) on dungeon level 28
               (User 1024, Date TODAY, Gold 118986, Turn 1083902).

 10.   122768  Matthew the High-Elf Mage, Level 28 (Max 29)
               Killed by a Law drake on dungeon level 34
               (User 1024, Date 2009-03-17, Gold 96579, Turn 1414031).

cf. the previous char. to reach this point, at rather more turns. I've done much less well in terms of loot, though; the lack of the Resistances book is making life difficult at the moment. The CD below the cut is more recent than the snippet above; I'm still on less turns than position 10, however. ( YACD )

( YASD )

Another Great drake death - its shards breath was enough to kill me in one go, even resisted(!). I clearly need to be more careful of the breath attacks that aren't covered by rBase. I learned the value of missile weapons this time, though - Uvatha the Horseman was a walk in the park.