Annotated Playthrough Venture Cave Monk
In Progress
It begins! My first priority is to find a suitable level 2 monster, and some sort of edge that will let me fight it.
The Mana Pendant looks like a good deal, but I don't have any glyphs yet. I'll feel like an idiot if I buy it now and then have to pass up on a set of Dwarven Gauntlets later. You always want to delay your decisions until taking action actually makes a tangible difference.
Ah, a Fireball. Now, that pendant would let me cast two fireballs at once, which is a big boost. But, I have also already found a mana powerup. If I find one more, that would also let me double cast the fireball, but not cost me any gold. For now, I'm going to hold off and do without.
The first strike glyph is marginal for Monks, who don't really have the damage output to leverage it. I'm not going to convert it right away (10% damage is literally nothing at first level), but I'm also not going to pick it up either. Who knows, I might need that inventory space.
Also, I would normally have picked up those powerups right away. I left on the map for illustrative purposes. Unlike items and glyphs, there is no advantage to not picking them up right away.
Hmmm, a possible target. The Warlock is one of the worst possible matches for a Monk, since it's powerful magic attack ignores our resistance, but I think that I can pull this off. I realize that I can just barely beat him if I build up two stacks up burning on him before starting combat. That will cost me 12 squares of space, but that's okay. I need to explore anyway, and it's not like there's anything else that I can spend my mana on right now.
Let's do this! I have to get the order of actions exactly right, or it won't work. First, I'll fireball him, which keeps the burning stack active. Then I will explore exactly one square to bring my mana back up to 6 (I carefully left an exposed cornet of black space in the upper area just for this purpose) and fireball him again. A melee strike, combined with the burning damage, should just barely let me win.
It worked! Now I want to take on that Gorgon-2 I saw earlier, but I'm tapped out. This would be a good time to partially explore that subdungeon, since it's the only source of blackspace that isn't blocked off.
Not sure which dungeon this is. Without knowing what's down that corridor, I decide to just refill my resources and head back up. One little subtle touch: I carefully left an exposed corner so that I can get in exactly one square's worth of mana for the next fight.
