Re: OT: Nethack
Report on Laura #2 - All About Eve
Annoying werewolf in Minetown with a wand of digging. Hey, I can´t have a hole in the middle of town! Ah, boulders to the left. I brought one, but had to dig in some walls to make room for the boulder pushing. Without thinking (idiot!) I kicked a door down, and a watchman saw it. So now they are all hostile. Not only are they dangerous (at least the captain is), but I don´t want to be seen as a murderer. Now I have to move on from here, and build up Missy somewhere else. Too bad I had unleashed her. She was now cut off from me by a watchman. Retreat, and Missy follows pretty well. Hm, she´s doing a good job on this watchman, and the stethoscope says he´s almost dead. Get him! Oh no, were you this hurt, Missy? I had a sad feeling for a moment.
Guess I´ll move down some more, and hope to get new pets.
DL 8 (mines, 1 below town)
Oh my, here´s the leocrotta the dwarf summoned with a scroll earlier! It died in two hits, but managed to make me half dead in the stream of attacks in between my hits.
"Here, little pony, have a carrot!"
I´ll name her Eve. I hope I am better at keeping her alive than my cats. Here´s a third cat, btw. Have some tripe. I´ll name her Lizzie.
Oops, here´s that annoying werewolf again, and it made a hole here, too. While I was eating a corpse, Eve stumbled into the hole (despite the leash).
The dwarf that summoned the leocrotta had a mithril coat. Lizzie says it´s not cursed, so I put it on. Nice AC now, but my failure % on healing spell now plummeted to 93...
Fought an elf, too, and it had a +1 elven cloak. AC -9 now.
Here´s an angry watch captain! So that´s why I couldn´t see him earlier - he had fallen down the hole in town. I left the room, and he did not seem to find me later.
DL 9 (mines, 2 below town)
Found Eve again, and leashed her. She began slaughtering gnomes, dwarves and bugbear. Took some damage, though, so I decided to remove my mithril armor so I can cast healing, and play on with AC -3 instead.
Eve actually ate a violet fungus! Let´s hope she does not hallucinate and take me for a carrot...
Eve is now a big bad level 9 warhorse with 70 hp.
Watch captain has a silver sabre! Huge battle with me and the watch captain dancing around Eve. I heal Eve maybe six times during the fight. Eve won, but with only 15 HPs left. Phew!
Back in town. Two watch guards ate it vs. Eve. Then she attacked the priest of Camaxtli. "Easy, big girl, that is not the enemy" (not yet, anyway, hehe...)
I dragged her out of the temple, unleashed her, went back inside, closed the door and locked.
Yep, stethoscope + healing spell + strong pet is so good right now that metal armor certainly is out. I found +1 gloves, +2 jackboots and studded leather. Eventually, I could get Eve to kill both Possogroene the Minetown delicatessen storekeep and Annotok back on DL 3. "No, no, I am not fighting you, I am just healing this "little" horsie that looks a little worse for wear..."
The general store owner in Minetown had a lot of cash, and I earned thousands from selling diamond, emeralds, etc. Enough to cough up the 8k I needed for two rounds of priestly protection. Jackpot on the first: -4 AC! (it varies 2-4). So Laura´s AC is now -14 without any metal armor pieces.
One level-up (to 11) and two 'golden glow' boons from prayers on Camaxtli´s altar led to my current 85 HP. I have IDed all three healing potion variants. I have 1+3+1 of them in my storage pile in the temple. Still no way to permanently Elbereth-engrave that square, so some of it has been stolen, twice, by unicorns. :rant: I usually lock the door to the temple, but those buggers can teleport in there...
Got Cleaver from sacrificing, and much later, Frost Brand. Yay, that´s one of the best! Of course I kept the watch captain´s silver saber, so now I am #twoweaponing Frost Brand and a silver saber. Basic skill with longsword and twoweapon. That goes a long way.
Cleaned up everything I said I should. Got the mimic of the mines end. Found no luckstone there, but didn´t look that hard because I had already found one two floors above this level. I quickly realized there must be a polymorph trap on the level, because I met a giant mummy (it left a corpse that I quickly tinned - ate the tin later to bring STR up to 18/03) and my ESP picked up a balrog further inside. I fought him (balrogs are wimpy and slow for their high level). There was also a skeleton and it caused Eve to lose the extra speed I had given her earlier. I fixed that back in minetown.
Some more spellbooks found: slow monster (0% fail), detect food (0% fail) and clairvoyance (64% fail). This is nice, an easy spell I can practice on, to make the higher level one easier to cast. Divination is where I really want to excel later. I think I can get to 0% with all divination spells even if I do not train all the way to Expert. The highest level spells in the school are detect treasure (lvl 4) and the spell archeologists have a substantial bonus with, magic mapping (lvl 5). Those are certainly two of my favourites. And let´s not even start about how good it is to have 0% fail on identify. :whistling:
Slow monster has already proven its usefulness. Cockatrice in minetown! And I had no lizard corpse or anything acidic, and I had recently prayed. I threw a poisonous dart at it, but it seemed not to be affected by the poison. Wand of striking then! First charge missed, second charge hit, then the wand was empty. Wand of MM! It hit four times, but the damned thing was still standing, and that wand was now also empty. Then I remembered I had just learned slow monster. With my vastly superior speed, I could now defeat it in melee without giving it any chance to attack. I made extra sure I was indeed wearing gloves, picked up the corpse, went to the temple and sacrificed it.
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