Beat Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup with 15 runes. There, now I've accomplished all my 2024 gaming resolutions!
https://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Sithrin/morgue-Sithrin-20250624-153315.txt
Okawaru really failed me with the weapon/armor picks, only attempt that executioner's axe wasn't one of the choices and the armor all sucked too. It was ok for the time being because I had found Glaive of the Guard and it was doing really well clearing out everything to the bottom of the Depths in combination with the Fencer's Gloves I bought in orc, but I was really worried about my long term strategy because executioner's axe of holy wrath is pretty essential to it.
I decided after clearing everything up to crypt that I didn't really have a choice and would have to settle for a battle axe. After finding the one with the best enchantment and using scrolls to bring it up to a +9 battle axe of flaming I switched to The Shining One and entered the crypt. First floor I found a scroll of acquirement that gave me an executioner's axe! Well, I guess I'll hold onto the battle axe for backup. I still had enough scrolls to make a +8 executioner's axe of flaming, and this in combination with a +8 tower shield of protection and Fencer's gloves just absolutely shredded everything I rampaged into melee range with. Once I upgraded to holy wrath demons in pan would walk up to me and just disappear. Checking the log revealed that they were "caved like a ham" as soon as they made an attack.
Overall I was really strong, there were still a bunch of close calls of course. I spent too long grinding in the Abyss and nearly died on layer 6, then later in Pan the first Lord banished me to the abyss and I nearly died there again. Then I learned where the valuable piece of information that would have told me it could do that was buried in the monster description. I kind of wish the monster descriptions were a bit better organized. Sometimes really important abilities like death curses are just mixed with the flavour text or in sections that don't usually matter, and since there's about a thousand different types of monsters you spend way too much time parsing these descriptions for what you need to know. Later, I burned through 10 potions of heal wounds on a later Pan floor that spawned a bunch of brimstone fiends and that made me really worried about if I'd have enough to survive tomb, but I started playing more cautiously and enfeebling everything that appeared on screen with torment or damnation potential, and was able to scrape by.
Zin is an incredibly good god. Being immune to mutation is great, and takes so much stress off when one of the many monsters that can malmutate appear on the edge of the screen. Vitalization was also really helpful and there was never a reason to not have it active. Sanctuary saved my life so many times, especially in tomb:3 where it clears the path the exit and gives me times to get there every couple death curses.
I still think torment is the worst thing in the game. It's completely broken. Even resisted, a single cast does enough damage that would count as a serious problem from any other source. There's so many monsters that can cast it too, it's really common to get in a situation where you have a bunch of torment casters in the back of your line of sight shielded by other monsters and it's just luck whether you can deal with them all in some way before they drain your health to almost nothing. It's not fun. Even worse is the death curse version on royal mummies where you really have no recourse other than to kill a couple mummies then escape for the stairs and repeat. I thought maybe I would use discord to get them to kill each other, but they all resisted and the lesser mummies were no match. It sucks.
Some thoughts about a few of the extended branches. I like Pan quite a lot. It was fun exploring these different levels looking for new random loot. I think I was at a net loss because I didn't find any really good artifacts and I had fewer potions of heal wounds than I entered with, but I had fun. The Abyss is also pretty cool, I just wish it was possible to stay on lower floors so you could spend more time there without it being suicide. Hell sucks, a lot of open spaces, tormentors, bad permanent effects, penalized retreat, and not much loot. Also too many floors. Would not recommend anyone to take a trip to hell. The Ziggurat was neat, but too risky for me to stay for that long. I almost died twice to mummy floors and only cleared up to 14. I would have liked to try for longer, but it was too much risk, too late in the game, and not enough benefit. I didn't find anything very useful, really at all.
Overall, some things in extended are fun, others not so much. Glad I'm finally through it because I was getting sick of losing good runs 8 hours in to something I'd never seen before.
