Lets watch ADOM unfairly rape my wizard!

[Damned Registrations]

So, with the Pyramid down and cold immunity in hand, the next logical place to go is the dwarven graveyard, where we'll find two more pseudo-useful artifacts and probably get a whole pile of random items.

Also, I'm going to start doing the spoilered updates thing, because the first page got way too fucking long.

Spoiler

But before that, I want to take a trip back to high mountain village to sell some shit.

The first floor of this dungeon (the route to the HMV) generates monsters that are double your level. Generally still goblins and shit, but super experienced ones that can easily rape you dead in a turn or two. So we teleported straight to the down stairs. I wasn't really going to screencap the trip, but for some reason a scroll of identify is sitting on the ground here. Which is rather baffling. Presumably on my first trip through, something peaceful spawned in here, got killed by a non-peaceful enemy out of my line of sight, and dropped the scroll. Nice find, not that we're in dire need of ID scrolls, treasure hunter tends to provide a decent extra supply of them.

There are also a couple of shops in here along the way. The first one is this book shop. Sadly it's filled with useless shit light dark and light spellbooks. Magic missile is about the best thing on offer, and iirc that's the most common book in the game, hardly worth spending money on. Maybe we'll come back here in the distant future if we become fabulously wealthy and want to buy out his shop and have him restock with better books.

The second shop is potions. Not much here worth grabbing, though I do buy this (cursed) potion of insight. It's super cheap, we can uncurse it easily with a spell, and it'll give me a nice screenshot for you guys to know where we stand later.

Statues like this are a new dungeon feature added in 1.2 or thereabouts. They all do different shit if you kick them, pray on them, on simply walk on them. Or sometimes you need to do more specific things. I can't seem to get this one to do anything, and the wiki has no advice for it. There are like a hundred of these (I think it was a donator reward thing) and the shit they can do varies from pretty much killing you, to granting you awesome intrinsics or free loot, so being spoiled on them is highly advised.

Here's the result of using that potion of insight. We're pretty well off, only lacking acid resistance as far as main elements go. Getting Fate smiles intrinsically (as in we'd have it even while naked) would be a nice thing to do, and is part of the reason I'm making this trek. Hopefully we can get enough gold to do that.

I don't usually pickpocket these days, but when I do, I steal useless potions apparently. Yay. (I was pickpocketing in hopes of lowering my alignment as part of the requirements to do the full ending.)

This is where the HMV is technically located btw, in the very bottom right of the map, completely inaccessible except through the cave I came through. Which is a major pain because that cave is dangerous as fuck for characters without controlled teleport or at the very least frost bolt for crossing rivers.Many a character has been lost by going into the cave at level ~3, reaching level 8 or so inside, only to face a choice between drowning in an attempt to cross a river without swimming, or getting beaten to death by level ~16 monsters when you try to fight your way back out the way you came.

Also, this stone giant here is sometimes hostile. And also sometimes a stone giant lord. And also sometimes both of those things and instead of standing here, he's close enough to throw a rock and kill you the moment you arrive. Because that's fun apparently.

Sale price of one of our weapons was suspiciously high, so I tried it on and it turned out to be this. Nice enough to use for the foreseeable future.

I have vague memories of this message showing up when selling SIs (an artifact that replicates infinitely when it's in your inventory. Actually fairly useful as a potentially infinite source of money, if you have enough patience and the Strength of Atlas spell to render their weight irrelevant. Another reason herb farming is useful- the time you spend doing it lets the SIs replicate until you have a nice big wad you can cash in on. I just sold a few here to see the pricing and what the effect was on the shopkeeper, I don't have enough to make a pile of money off them yet.

Christ that is a scary shopkeeper.

And the SIs are making him stronger at an alarming rate. Hopefully he doesn't go berserk and murder me when I sell a big pile of them later on. Can't find any spoiler info on this effect.

Also, just realized I could have skipped the second trip through the dungeon. I guess the exit from HMV is two way? I could have sworn it was a one way trip, maybe it got changed.

I do some exploring to see how fast my SIs replicate now (apparently not at all, I guess it's based on spaces walked, not game time) and find this cave up here. Memory is fuzzy, but this is probably the tomb of the high kings we need to visit. Which we'll do later because it's got a decent chance of killing us with pure bullshit.

A random wilderness encounter with a pile of jackals nets us a spellbook of Ice Ball, which is like all the other ball spells except ice elemental.

It's also the cheapest apparently, unless fireball is even cheaper than 20pp. We'll get some mileage out of this in the ToEF eventually, maybe even using it to kill the boss if we can get our willpower high enough to add some range to it. 34 damage isn't too shabby, and I think that boss is weak to ice so triple that... it'll hurt him fairly bad. Except it's a dragon with a billion hp. Whatever, we'll fall off that bridge when we get to it.

Oh joy, more mind numbingly tedious Disarm Traps spam. I hate these fucking trap dungeons. Such a retarded idea. Traps in general tend to be bullshit in roguelikes, since dealing with them is either obvious (but tedious) or impossible. At least Nethack let you use polymorph traps to turn your pet doggy into a dragon you can fly around on.

And now for the massive room filled with weakling undead. Did I mention I already killed like 50 undead on the surface of the graveyard above? They dropped a bunch of random potions and shit. Time for the flawless roguelike strategy of walking to the end of a corridor (so you can't be surrounded) and then leaning on the 'walk east' button until you've either killed a huge pile of shit or die. It's flawless because the only other alternative is reading every combat message, which has the flaw that I'd quit the fucking game after about 10 minutes of that shit, never mind the 40 it would take to clear this room out.

Eventually this fucker walks out,, and we probably shouldn't lean into him,

Not super dangerous, but he hits hard enough to hurt us, and he can probably go super saiyan and wreck our shit if he gets injured. This is where being the only decent class in ADOM (spellcaster with teleport and teleport control) helps out.

Teleporting past the berzerker zombie puts this guy in line of sight. He's rather dangerous if you're not cold resistant, but we're cold immune, so he's pretty much a joke.

A single burning hands spells takes off 95% of his hp. He's weak to fire just like the mummies, and that spell hits like a truck, and he doesn't have many hp to begin with.

Making our way deeper into the room with another teleport, we get on top of Griff's grave. If you know that you can pour holy water on the ground by using it (I have no idea how you're supposed to figure that out, it's not a very sensible thing to do) you can do it here to instantly kill the dwarven ass raper. Also, doing it on levels that had herbs growing on them before will create herbs. Again, not sure how the fuck anyone figured that out.

With the only real dangerous guys in the room gone, I wipe the rest out with a combination of the corridor and acid ball spells. I want to use up the last of the stock so when I relearn the spell I get more castings, and I want to relearn the spell so it doesn't cost 50 damned pp when I need it.

Digging up the grave off the dwarf we were fighting a minute ago somehow disturbs his remains. It also reveals this shitty artifact sword, whose only real purpose is to boost willpower for wizards using ball spells. I suppose it's also decent for mindcrafters or if you're fighting enemies that can confuse you. As long as you don't need to hit those enemies with a melee weapon, because this one is shit.

To the east of the grave, behind a secret door, is this fucker. He's way too strong to kill in melee with our shitty wizard, but acid ball does the trick just fine.

And in the room he was in we find the elemental gauntlets, which are some of the best gauntlets in the game, by virtue of the fact that the gauntlets in this game really, really suck. Yes, even the other artifacts. These give us fire, frost, and shock resistance (which we already had on all counts) and more usefully, halve the corruption caused by invoking the elemental orbs, which can do some fairly useful shit.

Anyways, quest complete. Where to next guys? I'm thinking the Tomb of the High Kings. The boss there shouldn't be able to confuse us as long as we have the sword and our confusion resist ring both equipped. So we only have to really worry about being one shot by his ranged magical attack, which is a thing that can happen. *Edit: After doing a bit more reading, it seems the 'Glowing Balls' spell he uses is actually fire elemental, so he should be safe to fight, I think.)

Alternately, we could go to the Tower of Eternal Flames and slowly burn to death before fighting the dragon that can one shot us far more easily and also confuse us.

Or, I could go to the Ice Queen's domain. Which has a bunch of dangerous enemies and shit and no real rewards at all.

Or I could go to Dark Forge. The steel golems there can hurt me real fucking bad in melee, but probably can't fuck my equipment up too bad if I wear a ring of ice and keep my fireproof blanket equipped. I might eventually be able to make my way past them to the armoury if I get enough readings out of my book of ball lightning. The lightning bolt spell is shit vs them, because they dodge bolt spells like fucking ninjas.

Or I could farm herbs in the big room, which would bring my hp up from 60 to around 120, and my will from 15 to 25 (30 with the sword) which would give the ball spells an extra square of radius.

Or I could wander around in the infinite dungeon for a while, hoping for something useful to show up. Realistically, the best I could hope for is something like a spellbook of burning hands, which I could get more quickly by farming wilderness encounters.

Or I could explore the map some more and try to find one of the new 'random dungeons' that are apparently in the game now. I've yet to see one though, so maybe they're not actually in this version? I also have no idea what we'd find inside one, they aren't well documented.

 

[Monstrous Bat]

Man ADOM tiles look so gay.

Tomb of the High Kings would probably be the most sensible choice now. The boss shouldn't be too dangrous as long as you're careful and you might get a chance to finish the first Thrundarr quest. After doing the Tomb, if you still feel like going for an ultra, you could go to Darkforge and drink from the pools in hope of getting a wish for AoLS. But even if you succeed you'll probably get cursedoomed and all your good intrinsics removed.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Fortunately I have like 2 different sources of extrinsic tele control, which is the only intrinsic that really matters. Unfortunately, ADOM is bullshit and is far more likely to Doom me than give me a wish, and trying to do basically anything while doomed, even just fucking escape darkforge, is really really fucking dangerous. I swear it seems to be about as important in ADOM as it is in Nethack. I almost never survive being doomed, you get stunlocked/crit/etc. pretty much non stop.

I'll probably go pool sipping anyways though, because there's really nowhere else to look for an AoLS except ToEF or the water dragon lair, both of which are equally suicidal. Then again without Thrundarr quests you're in a shit position too, and berserker lords are rare enough that I'm probably just plain fucked.

 

[garren]

Where's mah update

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well I played some more, but didn't accomplish much. I'm currently on the overworld over the Kings' tomb with a completely cursed inventory, on the verge of starving to death. Will probably have to head back to Dwarftown to get this shit resolved. I'll post the update... I dunno. Maybe tomorrow.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Where the fuck did I leave off again? Just after the graveyard right? Welp, time to go to the Tomb of the High Kings. Which is a pretty grandiose name for a really short, really generic dungeon with only 1 special level and almost no unique features.

Spoiler

But first I'm going to dick around with the graphics a bit, because I figured out how to access the Noteye menu while looking for a way to turn off that infernal music the game comes with now.

Slightly better than the giant fat tiles that don't let you see anything, at least. Oh, I actually fought these goblins in hopes of finding a nice spellbook. No dice.

Here's the dungeon. Like I said, nothing special really. Doesn't even have the traps of the last two places, let alone the special layouts. Even the monster generation is pretty mundane; iirc the only real difference (besides the generally higher level) is that it's a bit more likely to throw rare enemies at you.

Wow, the 6th or so book of darkness. It's too bad such an ominous sounding spellbook is actually totally worthless garbage. Darkness used to be useful in the old days because the creator forgot to tag a bunch of bosses with the ability to see in the dark, or give the AI remotely sensible actions while in the dark (they just stood perfectly still and waited to die) but that shit has since been patched so now darkness is just a good way to get eaten by a grue. And yes, thats an actual thing ADOM does because random deaths are so fun.

So I found another of those weird statues. This one seems to be bugged. Kicking it gave me an 'Are you sure?' message, but then nothing happened, except now when I kick the tile it acts as though the statue is gone. Which it isn't, it gives this same message when I step on it again.

Ah, the berserker prince. Not to be confused with the berserker LORD we are looking for. Speaking of changes, these guys used to hit like fucking trucks for no apparent reason. They've since been toned down.

Ah, the rather misleading 'you feel threatened' message. What this means is that somewhere on the level is a room completely full of monsters. But unlike most of those rooms, which give a 'you feel a certain tension' message, the monsters in this room are all the same type. I should probably flee in terror on the off chance that the room was full of acid vortexes or something, but this place has been boring me a lot so I go exploring. Oh, also, on open 'cavernous' levels without the corridor and room setup, tension rooms and the like can still appear, except without the 'room' part. It'll just be a horde of ~40 monsters tightly packed in one spot, all pissed off and ready to go.

We find this giant along the way, and it leaves a corpse. I've no idea what 'fomorian' means, and even if I did I wouldn't trust any sense of logic in what eating the corpse does, so I look up the effects online.

Apparently it was supposed to have raised strength and lowered appearance, but it did neither. Ah well.

Well, either there's a werewolf king around that summoned these werewolf lords (which would be terrifying) or the tension room was of werewolf lords (also somewhat terrifying.)

I manage to score another book of ball lightning (what is that, 3 now?) while clearing these guys out. The corridor serves pretty well, and they don't actually hit THAT hard. I think maybe they got toned down as well. I mostly melee them and the wolves down.

Behold, glorious first person mode. Super useful for a roguelike game, as I'm sure you can all imagine. These werewolf lords are worth somewhat decent xp (~1700) so I was planning to clear them out, and their summons drop some loot too, however...

That is a shitton of very very boring fighting. Also, we need like 70k xp to get to level 18, where we get our next class ability (which is mostly crap) so it's mostly a hopeless endeavour. Levelling in ADOM is a lot like grinding in a jrpg: it takes forever and gives you next to no real advantage if you know how to play (exception perhaps for monks or beastfighters, who get some major stat boosts with levels.)

Oh yeah, and I changed the game from tiles to ASCII here, since it lets the game run much faster and makes everything far more readable for me. Let me know how much this pisses you off.

Werewolf lord stats. Note that another reason to not fight them is that since these are supposed to be fairly rare creatures, they level up very quickly as you kill them. By the time I clear them all out they might have increased most of their stats by ~25% or so.

Behold the ridiculous scale of the xp chart. after we hit 18, the next class ability isn't until level 24, which would take killing about 600 werewolf lords to reach. If we killed that many, they'd probably each be stronger than the most powerful enemies in the entire game.

Also, sooner or later they'll get lucky and fuck me up in melee, by raging or stunning me or just plain scoring crits or armour piercing hits. This guy just scored a single armour piercing hit and did nearly 20 damage, almost a third of our hp. Oh yeah, and we hit level 17, behold the glorious 2 extra hp we gained. So much power.

This is actually a nice find, but it made me super sad. Why? Because if I'd gotten a necromancer this far along, I could have revived this thing, and if I managed to get back out and level it up (which would be easy because I could just carry the corpse out with me, quicklings weigh little, and quicklings are very hard to kill generally speaking) it would have quickly become so powerful it could just kill everything in the game for me before I even see it. These fuckers have 700 speed and use ranged attacks, and they innately regenerate. Their weakness is only having like 3 hp, but those go up quickly with levels, along with their damage.

But it's still a nice find for us, giving us a permanent speed boost of 2 points. Which isn't a ton, but every bit helps.

Aaaand holyfuckwe'renearlydead. I was punching a werewolf lord and it scored 2 crits in just 3 rounds, bringing us to 1 hp. Even though we're invisible. This is pretty fucking terrible. Now, clearly everyone is going to tell me this is my fault for not noticing after the first crit, but if I were reading all the messages individually, getting this far in the dungeon would have taken me about 6 hours instead of 6 minutes. So fuck off.

Also, note that their stats seem to have gone way up. This after just 10 kills. I guess they weren't really nerfed after all. Jesus christ.

Teleporting the fuck away is the better part of valour. Unfortunately, we've teleported near a dark elven lord or mage or some shit. Who knows, they can all summon hordes of spiders anyways, so we could have died this turn. But we didn't. Woo.

I used some spenseweed and healing spells to heal up and just went downstairs instead of trying to finish off the werewolf lords of supreme rapeyness. I've found a neutral altar. Which is kind of the shittiest sort of altar, because tons of enemies are neutral and it's nearly impossible to remember which. Are lizardmen neutral? How about owlbears? Ankhegs? Displacer beasts? Ratlings? Who the fuck knows! Oh, the reason this matters is that if you sacrifice a neutral creature on a neutral altar, the god tends to get pissed off. Although since we're chaotic, we might be able to convert the altar to chaos instead. It's actually fairly likely considering how powerful the enemies here are. Chaos gods don't give a fuck if you sacrifice their creatures. On the flip side, since half the shit in the dungeon is goblins, and they can sacrifice you too the second they see you standing on a black altar, trying to use a chaotic altar is pretty much suicide in the long term. Sooner or later your hand will slip and you'll instadie to some goblin that walked in that exact turn or something.

But we don't have to worry about that, because we didn't convert the altar, we just converted ourselves and pissed off the god we sacrificed to by... accident? ADOM altars are fucking WEIRD.

Pffft, dark light. As if that's a real thing. Clearly we're fine.

I never even noticed, but apparently thing thing I sacrificed a bit later was a berserker lord. Quest complete.

Also, we finished converting to neutral. Which is fine I guess, since we can't really stick around to make use of this altar. We can get artifacts by sacrificing any more, at most we could maybe get blessed.

I strategically kicked this gem off the altar so we wouldn't need to step on it and risk death to pick it up. But then it shattered. Oops. Was probably glass anyways (not because it shattered, but because most shit is glass.)

Son of a bitch. These werewolves (which are evil, and so certainly safe to sacrifice) are summoned, and therefore not worth anything and can't be sacrificed. Fucking fuck.

Ok, my attempt to stick around and farm some piety here on this altar on a cave level where everyone says it's a great idea (it's not, fuck them and their shitty advice) has clearly backfired. I'd like to leave now. Oh, but I can't, because I don't have enough PP left to teleport. (I managed to regenerate enogh after a while without getting beaten to death by the troll or anything else.)

Hmm, thats probably a bad sign (the entire inventory is cursed, not just the equipment.)

So here we are, starving in the wilderness a bajillion miles from dorftown with everything cursed. We're fiiiiine.

 

[Azira]

 

[Nevill]

Now, clearly everyone is going to tell me this is my fault for not noticing after the first crit, but if I were reading all the messages individually, getting this far in the dungeon would have taken me about 6 hours instead of 6 minutes. So fuck off.

There is a way to colorcode some of the messages, like critical hits. I think.

Ok, my attempt to stick around and farm some piety here on this altar on a cave level where everyone says it's a great idea (it's not, fuck them and their shitty advice) has clearly backfired.

It is. At least until you get enough piety to bless water. Which you will need to bless the scroll of uncursing to fix your inventory.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I can do that at dwarftown for like 500 gold though. Water blessing costs next to nothing. Even getting lucky is pretty cheap, the only thing you need livesacs for is precrowns or fate smiles/doom removal.

Also, this was clearly just an elaborate scheme of mine to create some unholy water, which is super useful for... uh... something. I bet.

 

[Gozma]

Kudos for booting the tiles, that shit is vile

One of the big attractions of ADOM and Nethack was the "the entire playing area is one screen" idea, and coincidentally to show that much space you need absolutely stark and recognizable tiles - namely, ASCII. Tiles-ADOM and the Tile-Nethack (nevermind motherfucking isometric Nethack) just don't work.

 

[Johannes]

"Werewolf lord stats. Note that another reason to not fight them is that since these are supposed to be fairly rare creatures, they level up very quickly as you kill them. By the time I clear them all out they might have increased most of their stats by ~25% or so."

How does the scaling work now? I'm under the impression it was somehow changed since 1.1.1., but don't know how. At least back in the day the stats of already created monsters didn't scale according to kills, just those of freshly created ones.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It definitely works off of kills still. I don't think it even matters who made the kills (i.e. pets killing 3500 chaos knights will eventually get raped). AFAIK monsters have a stat that is the number of kills required for them to gain a level. Levels increase stats in a very predictable way; an extra point of speed every 2 levels, extra attack swing every 10 levels, extra die of damage every 5 levels, extra point of damage every 3 levels, etc. (dunno the specifics of how many levels per each stat gain, I'm sure they're written up somewhere.) There's also no cap as far as I'm aware, beyond presumably some stupidly large number based on hex, like 65535 or something.

I could try using a stethscope and naming to make some accurate measurements the next time there's an appropriate horde of enemies to make sure the ones already created are gaining levels (unfortunately the golems in Darkforge probably won't work, since they're not alive. Maybe the ogre quest, I can name one and measure him, leave him till the last kill, and measure him again.)

 

[Nevill]

Do existing monsters become stronger when you kill more of their kind? Shouldn't it work only for newly-spawned ogres?