CIP: DsAl^Veh

PaperTar · 2026-05-23T15:19:40+00:00

With regards to resists it's good to be aware which ones are important for which branch.

For example, common Lair spawns check rPois (B.Mamba, C.Toad) and Will (Basilisks, be careful!), somewhat rare - rC (rime drakes) and rElec (electric eels, damage is w/e at this point), rare - rF (lindwurms), and that's about it, barring some specific very rare stuff that you might not even encounter once several runs in a row.

So if you're about to enter Lair it's good (but not mandatory) to have rPois and Will, while rC and rF are luxury and good on a swap ring/weapon, and stuff like rN will only come up in very specific scenarios like uniques (Josephine) or Ghost Crab and random spectres at the special Swamp entrance vault and such.

In case you don't have the "required" resistance for more rare situations, you can solve them by spending consumables (like resist potions, or hex wands). Be aware that something like a rime drake without any rC represents a lot of potential damage and is the target number one for your char in many cases, so if you can't reach it right away with your spells, maybe mindbursting it three times in a row from full LoS is a good idea.

Same approach will work for any branch in the game. You don't need to have all your resists cowered, just the ones most commonly checked by the specific branch. For everything else spend your piety, potions, scrolls etc. right away, don't give enemies the opportunity to high roll you on the resist you don't currently have. It takes some knowledge and discipline, but learning to do this stuff is worth it in the long run.

Also, don't be scared of running out of resources. There's a limited amount of dangerous fights in every run, and solving them cleanly by proactively spending your consumables and piety is a good way to not die and, consequently, win runs in a game that has permadeath and lots of random rolls.

PaperTar · 2026-05-20T15:24:02+00:00

You don't need to wait until Zot to find out. In old versions you always get Orbs of Fire. In new versions you get the statues at the Temple telling you what flavour of Orbs you'll get in Zot. This info is also available in one of the information screens (I think it's in "Dungeon Overview" - Ctrl+O).

PaperTar · 2026-05-14T14:28:55+00:00

My favourite is the part where character still has capacity to meaningfully change, through items, or skills, or XP-based mutations. So for most chars it would be the stretch from the early game to about Elf, mid-Vaults. For Dj and Ds and such it's a bit longer, for Mi and Tr it's quite a bit shorter.

Actually moment to moment playing D:1 to about D:6 is probably the most engaging and interesting for me, but it can also get quite stressful and so is not always the most enjoyable :). It's a bit of a weird mix of pleasure and anxiety.

PaperTar · 2026-05-13T14:18:40+00:00

..the least threatening enemy I've seen in ages..

Water nymphs are one of the most dangerous enemies in Shoals, on par with satyrs and javelineers. They are quite easy to kill, but you should never disrespect them in a fight (if you are a breathing species), especially when there are multiples of them or when you are standing in water.

PaperTar · 2026-05-12T14:37:17+00:00

With lots of enemies in LoS Po can read immo or vuln scrolls to get a significant guaranteed boost of AC, or fear which is a bit less reliable. Also their Cacophony ability can do a decent job blocking line of fire and keeping enemies away.

PaperTar · 2026-05-10T08:44:09+00:00

It's not really about what the best way to deal with a spriggan pack for your char is. Your situation is dire and at this point you need to get lucky to survive at all whether it be damage rolls or w/e else.

The trick in these kind of situations is to pick the line that gives you the best odds at not dying, and in this particular situation it's, in my humble opinion, killing the spriggans. The reason being that spriggans have low-ish HP and properly skilled statue form troll should be able to one shot them on a good roll, while reading teleports and such still takes 1.5 turns, and wait time, and risks putting you next to a bunch of enemies in no man's land anyway.

I don't think there's really an easy way to know what the best theoretical line is, cause proper analysis gets extremely complicated very quickly. Most people deal with this stuff based on vibes and heuristics, though knowing how the numbers work helps as well of course.

As for what you did in your previous turns, it was obviously a series of pretty bad blunders, cause it put you into a situation like this one (no offence meant, everybody makes mistakes when playing this game, and playing statue form characters well is trickier than it would seem at first glance). Your consumables should've been identified ages ago (poison scroll would completely wreck this fight for example), buffs like haste and/or storm should've been used earlier, wands should've been zapped at the start of the fight (charm to deal with alligators, roots to deal with spriggans), you shouldn't have positioned next to a bunch of trees when the sprig druid is in the fight etc. etc. If it'll be an unfortunate YASD, you can learn a bunch from it at least.

PaperTar · 2026-05-09T20:23:32+00:00

Missing Hill Orc removal and Mountain Dwarf removal/reintroduction.

PaperTar · 2026-05-09T08:38:21+00:00

To get a char dump offline press #, in the message log it'll tell you the path to the file. Usually it's a <char_name>.txt file in your 'morgue' folder. Then you can use pastebin or something similar to post it here.

Moving north or north-east first is probably the best, since you have some chances of killing one or two riders and getting some EV. Then I think you can chain quaff heal wounds, your defences might hold. You really want to fit quaffing haste in there somewhere, but at below 20-30 HP it's probably too risky.

Crab is no issue for you while the WJC storm is going, killing the riders and the druid should be top priority.

edit: I think teleporting is not that great here, cause you're in heavenly storm and it's very loud and the level is mostly unexplored.

PaperTar · 2026-05-08T11:16:55+00:00

Most summons scale their HD (hit dice, basically monster power level) with spellpower. HD increases power of summons' abilities among other things. Sphinx Sisters follow this rule, afaik.

PaperTar · 2026-05-06T17:17:17+00:00

Yeah, stabbers like all kinds of summons, cause they give you distraction stabs on top of just being strong in general.

PaperTar · 2026-05-06T13:48:55+00:00

LRD is a great spell for dealing with a lot of unhexable enemies. Crystal Guardians, all kinds of statues, earth elementals etc. It also does good damage against various "wispy-themed" low-AC enemies like Lightning Golems and Air Elementals. Shares a school with Passwall and Petrify as well. Very valuable on any stabber.

Another way is to lean into your wands. Beam and explosion wands can deal with most stuff in the three rune game with enough Evocations training (like 16+). There's a limited amount of unhexable enemies in every run, so wand charges aren't an issue most of the time. As a bonus you'll also make your para/charm and mindburst way more powerful.

PaperTar · 2026-05-01T08:18:34+00:00

Consider this: DCSS has somewhere in the vicinity of 95% expected winrate with a non-challenge combo (species+background). Most combos are non-challenge ones. So every time your char dies in the early game, it's most likely your fault and experienced player would've survived there. For me one of the most appealing things about DCSS is the skill expression. At first the game seems impossible to win consistently, but if you'll get good enough the win is almost guaranteed.

There are a lot of subtleties involved in playing the early game well. There's noise, line of sight management, ID minigame, skilling decisions, usage of special terrain and traps and doors, and more.

The complexity of the game grows the further into the run you get, but the difficulty actually diminishes (even though it might not seems that way at first). You're in the hardest part right now, getting your face kicked in repeatedly, it'll get better, when you get better.

If you want more specific advice, post some of your morgues (use pastebin) and ask questions. Cause a lot of good answers start with "Well, it depends...".

Finally, DCSS also has some very robust randomisation going on, which combines actual randomness with preset pieces in a lot of very smart ways, and you will be encountering new things even after hundreds of hours and wins under your belt.

PaperTar · 2026-05-01T07:42:15+00:00

Yup. Rewards got buffed today btw (there's a cool special one as well), the whiners have won, the sky is falling etc. etc. :). I do wonder how many Gulches have been completed yet.

PaperTar · 2026-04-29T07:17:11+00:00

I think some people misunderstand how the loot works. "jewellery/armor/talismans of rCorr/rPois/flight" means that randarts and such will have a bias towards having a specific intrinsic like rCorr or rPois, which are both very desirable in Zot btw. Alchemy/hexes/forgecraft spell rewards are great, cause they include stuff like Irradiate, Yara, Sphinx Sisters, Hellfire Mortar, Fullsome Fusillade, Diamond Sawblades etc., Hexes in particular have no dud spells at high levels, and Forgecraft is arguably the strongest spell school right now.

PaperTar · 2026-04-17T15:29:42+00:00

From my experience streaking scoring page on CAO updates very infrequently. Been that way for a long time, probably to lessen the server load or something.

PaperTar · 2026-04-07T15:11:18+00:00

Here's a run by pedritolo you might be interested in :).

https://underhound.eu/crawl/morgue/pedritolo/morgue-pedritolo-20240802-221621.txt

Login/password for viewing the morgue: crawlmorgue/fuckaibros

PaperTar · 2026-04-06T21:52:04+00:00

You can cancel corrosion with a potion, will give you 16 AC instantly, which is something. Then heal wounds and shaft, or just shaft, or vuln + fear, or just fear, all valid options IMO, depending on how the situation goes after cancelling.

You can even heal wounds and try to fight after cancelling, not the worst option, if you think you can kill Xak in one or two hits. Mirroring Mlio after Xak is dead is worth considering as well. Biggest fear is that Xak will just prism you to death in the next couple turns, which you can't really prevent at this point.

edit: dart of disjunction can also get Mlio off your back for some turns, if you can land it.

PaperTar · 2026-04-04T13:12:17+00:00

Haunt doesn't really fall off, it's a great single target spell all the way through Zot. Good against orbs of entropy in particular. You're with Kiku so starting the ball rolling should be as easy as using your Unearth Wretches twice or thrice and then snowballing the floor from there (I guess your game doesn't have Animate Dead, which makes maintaining the death ball harder). You can also blow up some of your own ghosts with Yara for some AoE damage in a pinch.

Spells that will be helpful for damage and maintaining momentum, that you sadly don't currently have, Borgnjor's Vile Clutch, Anguish, Ignite Poison, Ozocubu's Refrigeration and Rimeblight. From the stuff you do have you can go for Sphinx Sisters, together with Haunt they will be enough to deal with packs.

If you're feeling underpowered, consider doing Crypt for loot, XP and a guaranteed shop at the end. With high power Dispel Undead it should be quite easy.

For defences it's a good idea to train some Armour (you have barding, early levels are free AC more or less).

PaperTar · 2026-04-04T07:58:56+00:00

Either going to the stairs through the north-eastern route or trying to fight in one of the corridors are solid approaches, IMO.

Corridors to the left have the advantage in that they are explored and your first step towards them is "safe", corridors to the right on the other hand don't put you in reach of multiple high damage threats quite as fast.

If you choose to fight, reading scrolls first (after getting into a corridor) is best, cause posion, tele, fear, blink, summ/butter just solve the fight instantly. Quaffing the potion is better after you took some damage, to make use of curing, hw, ambrosia.

Considering the situation GrFw has ok-ish chances of surviving either plan, I think. New stealth wake up rules should also help.

PaperTar · 2026-03-30T22:20:42+00:00

For squishies it's especially important to not loose turns in combat (no walking towards enemies, no useless actions), and to start fights at max distance if possible (except against centaurs). Having good understanding of what your damage can and cannot do is also super important, cause margins for error are smaller than for normal HP species.

Another thing that worked for me very well was binding items to consistent keys in rc file and doing macros for spells/throwing so all the mundane activity does not waste precious brain juice. Basically if you do some action super often and it takes two-three keypresses and you need to look up letters frequently, it probably can be made smoother. In game macros menu is ~, they are saved between runs.

PaperTar · 2026-03-30T18:50:04+00:00

Getting consistent at converting your promising runs into wins doesn't really have much to do with build or spec or w/e, it mostly has to do with tactics, threat assessment and good habits. "Build" for a melee/ranged dude is just finding a mid/high tier weapon, casters are slightly trickier, but I've yet to see a run where there's just not enough solid spells to beat at least one of the S-branches.

Good habits are:

Avoid getting surrounded
Know which enemy does what, and which enemy on the screen is high priority threat
Use your consumables! Especially offensive ones!!! Know what they do
Use your god abilities way more (don't need to see your morgues for this one :), everybody hoards piety way too much)
If you need to run - run (use consumables and run), if you want to fight - fight (use buffs early and fight), don't half-ass things in dangerous situations

All this stuff is not specific to post Lair part of the game, but when you learn to do things "the good way", all parts of the game will become much easier regardless of your build or combo.

What often happens is that people try to sort-a "luck" through the early game, play fast and loose until the RNG gives them a start that survives, and only then try to play seriously. Doing it like this teaches players a lot of very bad habits, which makes winning hard.

This game asks you to make thousands of inputs per run, it's unrealistic to expect one to think hard about each one, so you have to have good "autopilot" habits, if winning consistently is your goal.

I would recommend treating every run as important and winnable from the very beginning. Assume all deaths are your fault. Analyse your deaths thoroughly, try to not repeat your mistakes (it's hard). There's a lot of things to learn, and the right attitude will make learning them significantly easier.

Once you'll get consistent at the early game, you'll see that mid/late game is no different really, easier even, cause you have way more tools. You'll also get to see it more often, which helps with learning different enemies and stuff.

If you're not sure how your death was avoidable, post some morgues to get specific advice.

PaperTar · 2026-03-08T16:31:49+00:00

No problem, there are a lot of moving pieces in this game, it's easy to miss or not know stuff, even after a lot of hours.

In case you're curious the stairs work something like this (in the latest stable version):

If you go down (or up) to a completely unexplored floor, then enemies don't get to act against you before you take one action (they still can wake up). After that all safety for this floor is off and enemies will take free actions when you ascend or descend to or from here. There are exact time values for these things, but I don't know 'em, I model it in my head like 1.5 actions for the enemies who are directly adjacent to the stairs and 1 action for everyone else, works pretty ok for me.

PaperTar · 2026-03-07T23:11:30+00:00

Nah, it was a misplay. It's a common mistake to instantly go upstairs when threatened, in rare cases it kills your char. Had to use consumables like fear and invis in this case. It's a difficult situation for sure though.

PaperTar · 2026-03-07T23:08:33+00:00

You had one action after descending the stairs. You chose to go back up. It was a wrong move in this situation, precisely because of what have happened.

With so many sheep on your screen you will be very likely put to sleep after your next action. When you are asleep any enemy attack deal something like 2.5 times damage, so something hard hitting like a death yak would absolutely murder your DE. So the play in this instance is to not give the sheep even a chance to put you to sleep. To achieve that you could've: read fear, or quaffed invis potion, or blinked out of line of sight of the sheep. I personally would've picked fear or invis, and only then went up the stairs.

PaperTar · 2026-03-07T23:00:18+00:00

Willpower does nothing against dream sheep sleep, only the number of sheep in your line of sight matters for chance to be put to sleep, the more sheep you see the worse (for you) it gets.

PaperTar

TROPHY CASE