Re: OT: Nethack
I was doing the Valkyrie... or was it Samurai... special quest thing. I'd skipped it on the way to the amulet. Trotting around thinking I was invincible. Had some stupid weapons too if I remember. +6 frostbane, +6 silver sword or something. Had been collecting wands of digging for the elemental planes and everything. Had the candelabra from Vlad, not sure about the book of the dead though.
Anyway it was a hot player. Good looking too
Death Resistance comes from black dragon scale mail. Makes you immune to wands of dead and Touch of Death (spell). its difficult (read: insane) to defeat Asmodeus without death resistance or reflection. In D2 I'd liken it to hell ancients with a full str, naked sorceress using only a punch on players 8. It can be done, but why would you?
Black dragons/scale mail provides disintegration resistance. Magic resistance protects from death attacks. You also can't get the amulet without doing the quest, as the quest provides one of the invocation artifacts. Also, next time, I
strongly recommend doing everything you would possibly want to before getting anywhere near rodney or the amulet - once you've got the ammy, you pretty much want to beeline for ascention.
Regarding build selection: Limiting things to random roles is a pretty bad idea for new players IMO - it is best to play a given role enough to figure out what it's strengths and weaknesses are, and best to focus on the tier 1 roles rather than immediately going for an archaeologist or something. With regards to a tourney, the competition style would involve fixed choices for roles (and possibly other starting attributes) for each of the divisions and the tiered leaderboard would split roles up based on their difficulty. The unrestricted leaderboard would very likely be topped with valks, barbs, samurai, and rangers even if we did force all participants to use random roles.
Speaking generally (at least with regards to my personal experience), if you don't die in the first couple hours, you're going to get very very far. And, bearing in mind how infrequent ascentions are among most people, that means that most games of nethack end in a rather messy death very early on. So, (particularly for new people) there's a lot of turnover in the less easy-to-start-with roles, and random only provides 13 different choices, so people'll be rolling up the powerful classes on day one regardless - might as well give them the ability to focus on a few of them.
edit: I personally have no intention of requiring screenshots - anyone who has figured out how to post on the forum can fake a plain text high score. Everyone'll be welcome to post screenshots to their heart's content, but quote tags and retyping the text is good enough for me. It's a trust-based forum, and (just like in d2) the nubs who try to cheat will probably be caught just by being a nub about it (I know the mechanics of the game pretty well, and it sounds like we've got a couple other people who do also), not that I'm really expecting anyone to try to cheat in a
nethack tournament on a
d2 forum.
edit2:
loki said:
My best game ever was 20k points or so, where I found an Excalibur really early and proceeded to kill everything.
Fun fact - if you're (a) lawful, (b) level 5 or greater, and (c) dip a long sword into enough fountains, it will turn in to excalibur, so it's quite possible to replicate your feat of obtaining it quite early on (I hit clvl 5 on either dlvl 2 or 3 depending on whether I'm paying attention to my exp). This is one of the (many) reasons that valkyries pwn so much - they start with a long sword and are lawful. Knights are also in a position to take advantage of this easily (also start with long sword and lawful), but they have other drawbacks. It works for anything lawful with clvl>=5, though. Unfortunately, dipping in fountains also can produce the rather painful-to-low-level things mentioned in the scumming discussion, though this is almost always a worthwhile risk as compared to wish hunting (and not considered scumming anywhere I've seen, aside from the fact that 95% of my chars that try for excalibur from a fountain get excalibur before they get pwned).
-CG
