by Kestrel on Sat Mar 08, 2014 12:08 am
After some failed attempts at VT naga city with the orc Pisorf wizard (they just have too many hit points and I ran out of resources on the third wave) I switched to Orc Monk of Binlor, prepping Dragon Shield/Quest Items and got it first time. I explored half the map at the start using Pisorf and stone fist to gain piety, picking up Fireball and Dwarven Gauntlets which was a good start, allowing me to kill +1 level monsters. I also found HALPMEH which was useful for snakes, and bought a soul orb. Later on I found APHEELSIK which and decided to convert HALPMEH for space. I picked up Crystal Ball / Burn Salve and hit the arena at low level 8 feeling good about my chances. Piety just below 50.
First wave spawned with Iron Man, Tomithy and Jorm, a troublesome set for monks because of the poison and curse. Converted out to Dracul with 50 piety after kicking one of the minions into a wall (getting 58% magic resist after it), and desecrated EM to get Blood Shield and drank the burn salve. I started off the fight poisoning Iron Man and kicking him into Jorm, but then realised halfway through this it would make more sense to just poison Jorm because Ironman wasn't doing too much damage anyway and the poison was inefficient on him. Besides, it was cool to poison-fight a snake for a while without having poison cures of my own. I used Reflex, Quicksilver, mana potions and crystal ball to kill Tomithy because I couldn't afford more than a couple of curse stacks. Then I used 3 health potions as poison cures to allow me to regen-fight Jorm the rest of the way, pushing him into the side arena wall.
Second wave was SMM, Tormented One and Tower of Goo. Since poisoning the secondary knockback target worked well last round, I decided, again, to poison the Goo and kick SMM into it which let me get some extra damage in, and leave me with some mana resources to use on Tormented - I needed schadenfreude and the rest of the Keg mana potions and crystal ball to finish Tormented One, and used Dracul's blood swell too. After this I took Consensus/Body Pact and switched to Mystera, just because I had 3 health potions left and wanted a safe deity to park on.
Third wave was Frank / Aequitas / Gobb, and again rather than fight Aequitas and his massive damage head on I poisoned Aequitas and kicked the other two into him while throwing spare mana into fireballs at Aequitas too, using Yendor to hit level 10 along the way. This was the easy part of the fight because although Frank and Gobb tend to be a pain for other classes, the monk has an easy time with them, especially so at level 10. Both Gobb and Aequitas actually hit low hp at the same time and I finished them with a pair of fireballs.
This left Kinissch who went down easily to regen fighting, I had 3 health potions and a whupaz which I forgot to use left over at the end.