Forum:Winning impossible with Wiz-Hum-Mal-Neu

< Forum:Watercooler

Seriously. I've been playing this off and on since 1996, and with focus over the last few months. I'm trying to learn a single character: Wizard. I've read the strategy on this wiki for Wizard, and I'm immediately stopped at step one:

   early game wizards should try on each and every
   non-cursed piece of armor they find in order 
   reduce armor class as quickly as possible

Sure, fine. You need an alter to determine BUC status. In 100 games, I've only TWICE lucked into finding altars in the first 4 levels of the game. Beyond those levels, I die almost instantly because I have no armor.

Secondly, all this searching takes massive amounts of energy, and I die of starvation EVERY TIME. The only times I've managed to survive more than 30 minutes is when I'm lucky enough to be generated with the Ring of slow digestion (which has also happened twice in about 100 games).

Since my success still depends 100% on luck of the items I'm generated with, and the map of levels 1 and 2, it makes me think I'm still missing something fundamental about the game. My "record breaking" run over the last hour is attached here: 2010_12_26_231115.ttyrec

Davek 06:44, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Use your pet to curse-test the armor. Also, you do know you can eat fresh corpses, right? Not all of them are safe to eat (especially before you have poison resistance), but you'll learn which ones are OK (or just look them up here). If you're weak or fainting from hunger, you can also #pray for food from your god. (Just don't do it too frequently.)

Also, if you're dying of starvation, you might want to search the upper levels less thoroughly and just head down to Sokoban; there's usually plenty of food there. Of course, you'll also encounter tougher monsters that way, and wizards can be fragile, so let your pet do the fighting for you, use your spells and any missile weapons you find to help, and use the E-word a lot (preferably before the monsters are next to you). Running away can also be good strategy, at least if you're faster than the monsters you're facing (so don't be burdened; leave your spellbooks on dlvl 1).

Sometimes curses may not even matter; an early mithril-coat (or DSM from bones) may be worth wearing even if it's cursed, especially if you're planning to do Soko before the Mines (where mithril is more plentiful). You can always get it uncursed later, once you find an altar or a scroll of remove curse. --Ilmari Karonen 08:40, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Watching expert players is perhaps the quickest way to learn the right priorities of the various activities. On NAO, you can either use dgamelaunch mail or ask them on Freenode why they did things as they did. If all else fails, you can watch ttyrec recordings. Use Rodney's !lg command to find good ones. --Tjr 12:29, 27 December 2010 (UTC)