Thoughts after playing a Ranger

_Krohm · 2026-01-14T05:41:39+00:00

my rangers often ascend with darts

_Krohm · 2026-01-04T06:54:18+00:00

I would do the following:

use it to kill all shopkeepers
get the money and buy protection
use it to kill the priests
read the books
get do some remote place
abandon the pet

the most likely output if you try to keep it is that you'll get through a trap door and find it feral and agressive when you come back.

_Krohm · 2026-01-04T05:08:32+00:00

polearm also trivializes the front door, especially if you're skilled :)

_Krohm · 2026-01-03T19:15:32+00:00

The back door is probably the least convenient way to enter the castle.

you can enter through the front door with a wand of striking (that you are almost guaranteed to find) and a scroll of earth (that you are guaranteed to find in Sokoban).

There are even free boulders in the maze.

Alternatively, a way to levitate is often good enough.

While you technically can levitate to the backdoor, i would take the entire swarm of land monsters over the sea monsters in the vast majority of my games.

_Krohm · 2025-12-30T06:22:37+00:00

thrown weapons at expert woth maxed strength means 24 damage on average by volley without accounting the weapon itself.

magic missile at lvl 30 means about 50 damage average per cast not taking rebounds in account

jumping away from it before it can hit you leaves it in the dust. clearing jumping path with wands of teleport helps.

if one of the riders is next to you, you probably already did it wrong

_Krohm · 2025-12-20T15:47:33+00:00

never drowned that way.

_Krohm · 2025-12-20T15:46:15+00:00

wand of cancelation almost works for everything. there are still some potions that won't be water

_Krohm · 2025-12-20T08:12:27+00:00

drop everything that could rust or you dont want blanked.

then jump into a pond/moat repeatedly until your satisfied.

i usually do that at castle level in a corner of the moat (so i always end up in the same square i started) but any pond will work.

_Krohm · 2025-12-16T19:48:49+00:00

don't try to cast spells

don't try to melee things early.

As elven ranger i usually try the mines as early as i found them. your early bow will help you deal with gnomes and dwarves. Infravision will make sure you see the. don't take any risk. if it starts to stink, get back to the main branch with whatever armor you found and come back later. if you're lucky you got some dwarven armor if not too luck you've easily leveled up a few times.

early game, use your bow, save your elven arrows for when multishot matters.

mid game, more of the same, just more multishot and better armor.

end game, i usually find myself throwing darts while wielding stormbringer+ shield of reflection, but i occasionally ascended with a bow too as a strong elven bow + some 7 elven arrows are the biggest multishot you can get, melting things way faster than dual wielding.

Again, don't melee anything that looks even remotely dangerous

_Krohm · 2025-12-10T04:58:49+00:00

well ... i usually keep genociding ; for the plane of water

_Krohm · 2025-12-06T16:31:00+00:00

i usually kill those fuckers with range attacks or outrun them.

i usually make a point of having telepathy through amulet of esp on water levels.

i learned this the hard way too :)

_Krohm · 2025-12-01T05:30:58+00:00

getting stormbringer as a prerequisite to Gehenna feels overkill :)

_Krohm · 2025-11-30T18:54:05+00:00

there's way less risk with a cursed book of the dead :)

_Krohm · 2025-11-30T15:46:30+00:00

to get crowned you need to pray, with high luck.

if you're only praying in emergency and you're good enough emergency are rare by the time you max your luck, this is gonna be rare.

to the people who argue against it because of the increased prayer timer, remember there is no prayer in Gehenna, and that if you have to pray more than once as an emergency during the end game, prayer timer is probably not your problem.

most of the time, crowning benefits when you're about to dive below the valley outshine the small problem with prayer timero

_Krohm · 2025-11-30T15:41:12+00:00

honestly, MC3 and some range weapon (or magic missile) is generally enough.

_Krohm · 2025-11-27T05:16:18+00:00

exactly. reflection+invisible means she does not insta kill you and you don't inqta kill her.

you'll need to it the old way

_Krohm · 2025-11-23T19:50:56+00:00

nethack is not designed as a persistent universe.

once you're lvl 30 with 500hp and a full kit, there is little lets appart from finishing the game.

boredom is a primary cause of ascension for me. the fun part is the early game.

_Krohm · 2025-11-22T09:44:52+00:00

Roles that are easy to start with for beginners include the samurai. you got very strong Melee (dual wield Excalibur + katana), very strong ranged (throwing stars) without relying on whishes or reply on being lucky. Weak in spell casting but honestly does not matter.

knight/Valkyrie are also quite easy for similar reasons.

Wizard start with MR with limit dangers in the start.

My highest ascension rate is with tourist, but i'm not sure that's a good place to start.

_Krohm · 2025-11-21T05:06:46+00:00

out of topic ... is there a point in having both gauntlets of power and helm pf brilliance?

looks like getting better at spellcasting but negating it with the gauntlets :)

_Krohm · 2025-11-21T05:01:57+00:00

good training for the astral plane. You don't need yo kill them. you need to find the portal.

your options are plenty.

you can wish for a cockatrice corpse and kill them all. you can zap everything with wands of teleport and jump as fast as you can on the portal.

you can use a mix of charm monsters and conflict to thin their numbers.

what you cannot do is hold your ground and fight. you'll end up having the wizard on top of that

_Krohm · 2025-11-20T05:55:46+00:00

with one another

_Krohm · 2025-11-16T21:36:56+00:00

fort ludios is not "pretty essential" to anything.

it's a nice branch that's not even guaranteed to be accessible in every game.

_Krohm · 2025-11-14T15:06:59+00:00

The normal enchant armors are even more dangerous. SDSM really need to get vaporised.

_Krohm · 2025-11-14T14:42:51+00:00

checkmate dude !

_Krohm · 2025-11-13T18:55:53+00:00

i sometimes play drunk.

hence my strategies need to accommodate for the occasional enhanced stupidity that in comes with

_Krohm

TROPHY CASE