Lord Paco - The Cowardly Wizard
The Dungeon Crawling Goodness of Lord Paco the Demigod Wizard
Part One - The Cowardly Wizard
... in which we are introduced to Lord Paco and watch him stumble through the starting levels.
Meet Lord Paco.
Lord Paco is a Demigod Wizard who chose to start with the Book of Flame.
Lord Paco's starting gear - and a knife he found a few steps from the dungeon entrance. Lord Paco briefly considered bringing a better weapon to the dungeon with him, but he decided that it would be unfair to the denizens for him to have such an advantage.
Before Lord Paco's adventures really begin - let's just go over the build I've chosen for this run.
Demigods are:
...more or less like members of their mortal part's race, but they have excellent attributes and are extremely robust. They can also draw on great supplies of magic points but they advance very slowly in experience, they gain skills slightly less quickly than Humans, and due to their nature cannot worship the various gods and powers available to other races.
Wizards are:
...magicians who do not specialize in any area of magic, making them a jack of all trades, master of none when compared to more focused spellcasters. Wizards enter the Dungeon with the Magic Dart spell in memory. They are one of the best spellcaster backgrounds, making up for the lack of initial firepower with high spellcasting and some great early utility spells.
Demigod anythings are not easy, though Wizards are a decent combination for them. The lack of a god is actually a fairly significant hurdle, and the Demigod early game can be a bit tough because of how slowly you level up (I find at least). They're also bad at learning pretty much everything, so skill development is a bit of a grind. On the other hand, the extra HP and MP and the high stats can make for strong characters in the middle and later stages of the game.
Back to Lord Paco.
Lord Paco meets and destroys a surprisingly dangerous early opponent. While strong melee based characters can just run though DL:1 / DL:2 bashing on monsters and not worrying all that much until the first spellcasters appear around DL:3 / DL:4, Lord Paco finds himself having to run from a lot of battles early. When he does engage, he has to make sure he softens his enemy up as much as possible, and dance around rocks to allow himself time for his MP to regenerate.
Perfect example. There is no way Lord Paco is going to engage with a snake on level one. Time to run.
Lord Paco clears most of DL:1 and is working his way through DL:2 when he finds himself in a very tough spot. He was fighting the kobold when the snake appeared. With fairly limited offensive magic he's been depending on his Summon Small Mammals spell to keep the snake at bay, but Lord Paco's little rat summons aren't able to hurt the snake, only buy Lord Paco some time to decide on his next course of action.
He spots the stairs and runs for the exit.
If in doubt, dive. You can always come back later.
Down in DL:3 Lord Paco grinded his way up to level three, but when he returned to DL:2 the snake was still there. This time he's stronger though, and he manages to kill the snake with magic darts.
On DL:4 Lord Paco meets Edmund. Edmind has a big flail.
A quick summon gives Lord Paco some room to breathe, and he runs as fast as his somewhat godly legs can carry him. Edmund will mince Lord Paco in melee right now, and Lord Paco still doesn't have any strong offensive spells.
Now on DL:5 after having run from Edmind, Lord Paco levels up. He is now level 4.
Still on DL:5, Lord Paco sees some slaves. That means Pikel can't be far. There's no incentive to killing the slaves and they're surprisingly tough in close, so Lord Paco books it from this encounter as well.
When you're a wizard, you seem to run more than you fight, but live to fight another day and all that.
Lord Paco finds the entrance to the temple on DL:5. Being a Demigod means that the Temple will really only be a storage location for Lord Paco - he can't choose to worship any of the gods of course.
Lord Paco meets Ijyb.
Ijyb is a unique goblin who sometimes spawns with a wand. If he does have a wand he can be a dangerous opponent. If he doesn't have a wand though, he's often an easy kill.
Lord Paco still has to be careful, but he takes care of Ijyb without any issues. Mephitic Cloud is going to be a very common spell for the forseeable future. Fighting enemies who are confused is always the best way to go.
Lord Paco sees Blork the Orc.
Lord Paco kills Blork the Orc.
Lord Paco, now level 6, returns to DL:4 and murders Edmund. The greatest feeling in crawl is going back to an earlier level and just demolishing something that was a huge threat earlier in the game. Progression like this is so rare outside of roguelikes what with all the level-scaling and linear monster progression we see nowadays.
Lord Paco softens up a group of orcs for the easy confusion kill on DL:8.
Lord Paco returns to the Temple to ID some items and when he reaches there, has to kill an Ogre. He is now level 7!
That's it for this update. Lord Paco's current inventory:
Of note - he has a good dagger of freezing which will be helpful in the next few levels. He also has a ring of wizardry - this is huge.
The Wizardry brand can come in ring or staff form and makes spellcasting less likely to fail. The brand stacks, so having more of these items is a good thing. Each worn ring of wizardry provides 3 levels of wizardry, and that has the effect of reducing the chance of spell failure to 74.9% of what it would otherwise be. (You can't reduce spell failure chance by more than 50%.)
The skillset Lord Paco has developed.
As you can see, I leave spellcasting on and turn off the related skills to maximize spell power and minimize hunger cost. I've left air and poison magic on for the moment to ensure Lord Paco's failure rate with Mephitic Cloud lowers as quickly as possible.
I leave dodging and stealth on with pretty well all my characters - they're lifesavers.
Next Update: Lord Paco dives down the dungeon.
...
A final thought to leave you all on.
This game is brutally hard, but fundamentally fair. If you die, it is
always your own fault.
See:
a win streak that's currently happening on the cao server
Code:
7 9 mikee 2011-01-19 06:00:58 2011-02-05 06:46:05 MfPa, DrSu, NaTm, DGRe, TrAM, CePa, KoBe, DDCK, MiMo
I'm happy when I clear the Lair and ecstatic when I see a rune, let alone pick it up. Mikee has streaked 9 wins in a row, with some vastly different playstyles, and is still going strong. This shit blows my mind. (The guy has a 45% win rate online and has won 25 games since Nov 27th. Jesus christ.)
And a final note: as I mentioned earlier in the thread, I did run through Lord Paco twice, this being the second attempt. I'll give all builds two chances - either I succeed in reaching Temple / Lair the first time, in which case that's their only shot, or I don't and I use the larger of their two games for the actual LP. As a result of this though you may see some ghosts later on that don't make sense based on where the LP goes. Those are the ghosts of the failed characters.