by Kestrel on Fri Mar 14, 2014 12:37 am
okay, two more VTs down to the dragonshield-packing Orc Wizard
DEMONIC LIBRARY
I prepped Earthmother. With Earthmother you have to restart if you get a terrible glyph draw, but that's rare; usually a lack of PISORF can be compensated for by physical combat glyphs like CYDSTEPP. In VT runs I'm generally not going to kill all the high level enemies unless I'm playing an assassin, so IMAWAL generates piety very quickly. This piety went to a total of 7 levels of Corrosion, 1 level of Vine Form, and entanglement as necessary.
on the successful run I didn't find CYDSTEPP or GETINDARE, but I did get PISORF / BYSSEPS / HALPMEH / WEYTWUT. notable shop items (preparing Elites) were Elven Boots and Orb of Zot. Thanks to Earthmother I was able to get +1 level kills with XP bonus, and start killing the demons at level 5 by PISORFing the magic resistant one down a long line of walls with one Clearance. To my annoyance I misclicked on Zot (was intending to use it to regen fight the avatar) after killing the second demon, which was totally unnecessary, and then further messed up by allowing myself to be cut off from the exit on the boss level, and blocking my altar access while fighting Avatar and stripping his resistance with BYSSEPS. This was very silly since I could just have pushed Avatar next to the stairs and avoided all this trouble.
I didn't use any potions at all on the demons, though, which saved the run. I took a last minute Alchemist pact which gave me a post-10 level up for the avatar, and just slowly wore him down, using a schadenfreude potion and HALPMEH for healing at the beginning, then using Quicksilver/Reflex and a chain of PISORFs to finish the fight off after the enrage.
Anyway I was surprised that dealing with a 1900 hp 120 damage enrage boss with only 33% resist wasn't as bad as I thought.
NAMTAR'S LAIR
For this dungeon I prepped Binlor and explored about 2/3 of the map at level one. Shop items were elven boots, fine sword and balanced dagger (nice), and the other two altars were EM and JJ. So, after I'd gotten the boons I wanted from Binlor and 50% magic resist I converted off to EM so I could use a few entanglements. I levelled with balanced dagger, and was able to fight the first two forms of Namtar at level 7-8 and 8-9 with PISORF and melee, using Whupaz on the second form. I finally ran out of popcorn to remove curses after levelling up to 9, but EM's Greenblood curse removal turned out to be handy. I cashed the rest of my Plantation piety in for a few levels of vine form to cancel out the corrosion, and headed downstairs.
I was actually a bit worried about downstairs, since I only had 18% physical resist from dragonshield, but I had ENDISWAL so was able to set the fight up to push Namtar up the side walls for the damage bonuses, and the Wizard really has no trouble with any particular set of abilities since it's so versatile. Just a matter of using the right potions at the right times.
So yeah, Orc Wizards are just fun!