First Time Winning Angband
 

So I just finally won the game for the first time ever today. With that last blow to Morgoth, I felt several emotions, namely: joy at finally completing one of the 'major' roguelikes, relief that a month of going through the dungeon did not go to waste, and an odd sense of disappointment that, beforehand, I was scrounging dl97 and dl98 for Bladeturner but never got it. Oh well, assuming I did not screw up, the game was as good as done when I got The One Ring.

That being said, I created an account to share this feat that, in all honesty, these forums probably get frequently enough that it isn't all that special. The character that I won with, Vanna the High-Elf Mage, is on the ladder if anyone wants to take a look.

My only regret is that I spoiled myself hard before and during the game. It makes me curious, just how many people have completed the game without spoiling themselves beforehand? Maybe the pain and anguish that comes with learning all of the intricacies of a game over the course of 100+ playthroughs is worth it for the experience alone, but I don't think I'm the kind of person who could stand that, personally.

I used to play with save spoils a long time ago. It was a useful to learn the game I suppose, but ultimately I stopped enjoying it.

If you want to win without save scumming it's a just a case of experience, knowing which monsters to fight and which to avoid until later. Most of my deaths happen when I get too greedy these days so you have to remember there's always another treasure around the corner.

This is an old checklist, but it's always very useful

1000': Free Action, See Invisible
1250': Basic four Resistances
1900': Maxxed Stats, Confusion Resistance, Blindness Resistance
2000': Poison Resistance
2500': Hold Life
2700': Chaos Resistance, Nether Resistance
3000': Permanent and Temporary Speed of +20 or greater
4000': Permanent + Temporary Speed of +30 or greater
4950': As much as you can get. Sustains, Speed, every resistance

I'll sometimes force quit when I press the wrong button by accident and die. Do we all do that?

i only cheat when i die to commands queueing because that's literally just a UI bug. I've now taken habit to just running ("." command) everywhere to avoid the near-constant annoyance of fast mobs chasing you before you can react, when you are still at base speed.
I do however often forcequit when in town, specially when im setting up my gear. I have more than once made the mistake of forgetting what combination of gear i had and not being able to remember or recreate it. Obviously that's a randart problem.

my "to-do" list looks different than what above.

1. id !Spd so you can run away from impossible situations (mage pit, tengu pit) or kill early uniques.
2. get a weapon and a launcher (a maul for priests, a dagger for warriors, a bow for rangers), just something to do damage with.
3. lantern and rod of treasure location, so you can navigate the dungeon properly.
4. DL25/35 as appropriate to class/race to look for good gear / stat pots
5. kill orc uniques, or bigger mobs like dragons, mage pits, etc, stuff that drops good consumables. Between (5) and (7) you want some form of TO.
6. first artifacts, normally Lights, will dictate how far you can go. So if you have an early boost to your primary stat, you can go deeper.
7. Resistance (and consumables, enough to be more than enough)
[7. ESP & rPoison] - no specific depth, but you need these before you go against undead / AMHDs.
[8. stat gain] - keep grinding until you have a solid 18/80 in your primary stats and have pretty much everything from this list prior (e.g ranger: longbow of power)
9. grind DL60/65 for good midgame artifacts, including Speed bonuses, high resists, etc
10. greater vaults DL97/8 and just keep pumping up your character. At this point you have nothing to fear as you can Heal/TO/kill/MBan/WoD anything.

Congratulations on the win. I still haven't won the game yet.

It'd be a lot harder to win without any spoilers (thought still not nearly as much so as with Nethack*). Not wanting spoilers for your first few or ​several games, I understand, but not wanting spoilers before your first win is a tall order, probably for any roguelike.

(*but I have won Nethack once. After much spoiling of course.)

Congrats on the win!
 

It's far easier to die than to win - that's for sure ;)

Congratulations. Never fear though, playing Angband is like learning to ride a bike. No matter how many times you win you never forget how to die ignominiously.

Maybe that's just me...

Uh, what? Learning to ride a bike is hard, but actually riding a bike is dead easy. (Though I did have to remind my 79yo mother that riding a bike below 5mph is far more difficult than 6mph.)

Congratulations!

Learn the game the way you want to learn it; I doubt anybody will judge you harshly for looking up things like monster info. But if you do have regrets about using spoilers, plenty of variants out there waiting that you can still play unspoiled :)

I guess it depends on how you define "unspoiled." I did manage to get my first win populating the monster memory the hard way (dying and Rods of Probing). However, I was lyrking here and reading peoples comments on strategies and the like. That being said, I did come up with anti-summoning corridors on my own, and I was playing a priest, who become very hard to kill around DL60 or so. I still havent won with a mage.

Regardless, congratulations! That first win is something special.

Thank you, all of you, for the kind words of encouragement! I know I'm still nowhere near being good enough at the game to be considered a pro yet, but it's encouraging that I got even one win under my belt. Looking back, though, yeah, maybe I was being over dramatic about using spoilers. Sure, I'll never be able to tell a legendary tale of triumphing over the game with only my own skills and knowledge of the game at that point, but, in the grand scheme of things, not many people will care about that. Oh well.

I've actually been thinking about starting a new character; how does a Dunadan Necromancer sound? Any advice for that character?

Sounds hard to me. You're playing in the dark so it's good to have some intrinsic infravision. I like high elves, you get light, dark, and nether resisted, you have high INT and decent other stats (except wisdom, but who cares about that), and see invisible is very useful.

Grats for the 1st one.
Early Necromancer will be in lot of trouble with anything evil. That is all kobolds and orcs, for example. Nether bolt just doesn't cut, even though it does some damage through resistance. Try to get a launcher and kite monsters using bat form. You may even buy stackloads of flask of oil and throw them at monsters.

Necromancer is the hardest start by a big margin, imo.

Necro is considered by many to be the most difficult class. (Druid is also in the running.) You might want to try the equivalent half-caster first, tho Blackguard has its own difficulty.

I've never force-quit or save scummed. A few times I've turned on the recover from death option, planning to play to the end but I always lose motivation on those characters.

You know, now I'm almost tempted to run Necromancer just for the promise of high difficulty alone.

Almost.

That being said, it would be nice to have melee as a fallback for nether resistant enemies. I guess I'll try Blackgaurd first then.

Blackguard is very heavily spell dependent. Early in the game, you can't get more than 1.3 blows for quite a while, though you can get 2 with spells.

Well, I'll just have to stay clear of evil in the early game till I find a good artifact/strength and dexterity potions. Aside from that, it shouldn't be TOO different from the Mage I won with. Though, I imagine statements like that are liable to send characters to an early grave.

Blackguards dont have the same evil enemy problem Necromancers do. Despite being the half-caster, Im not sure Blackguards and Necromancers have any shared spells at all. What you want as a Blackguard is a nice, heavy weapon. And a willimgness to murder damn near everything you see in the early game.

I've been going back and forth between Kobold Necromancer and Half-Orc Blackguard for a year now. I'm trying to get a win in each class/race. They are tough to play.
Both come Nec and BG come with a significant handicap - Necs need to avoid light so that beautiful +3 strengh artifact lantern you find, leave it on the floor, it's dross.

BGs don't restore their spell points by resting - they actually lose them. It is constant battle all the way down (or at least, as far down as I've gotten one. )

Oh. It appears that the Necromancer and Blackguard classes are much more complicated than I first thought.

Maybe I should try a different class for now. Maybe a Ranger?

Sorry; was implying that the "natural" state of playing Angband ends with a dead @ and the game ensures you never forget how to do that.

Too dry? Nevermind...

Depends on what kind of game you are interested in. If you want a game similar to mage, but a bit more forgiving. you can try rogue. They play similar to mages, but are tough enough to melee every now and then. If you wamt a more aggressive playstyle without all the Blackguard weirdness, warriors are a good choice.

I honestly find Rangers to be tough. Their melee capabilities are bad, their health is good but not great, and their stealrh is also good but not great. Meanwhile most of their early spells are easily reproducible with items you can buy in town. All tbey really have going for them are fast bow shots. Geeat if you can find a powerful bow, not so much otherwise.

@archo
Rangers have one excellent early spell: Resist poison. And detect life is a good, especially when backed up with a Staff of detect evil.

Thats true. I guess to me Rangers are in a bit of an awkward spot. Most of their spells really shine when you play without a town, but they are *so* reliant on arrows, and arrows are *so* rare in the dungeon that you end up either playing with a lot of spells that are at best conveniences, or where you have to carefully ration the only offense at which you shine. I know they eventually get a spell that lets them turn staves into arrows, but that doesn't help early.

Mostly, Im annoyed that the class that seems like it should be the *least* dependent on the town is in fact the *most* dependent.

Until you get the make arrow spell :)
"I don't know what this staff does, but it makes some mighty fine arrows"
Me quoting me

Oh don't let me stop you

I have a ton of fun playing my hopping kobold necs
I finally have one to legendary stealth so there's a chance at victory.

The real issue is so few hp's in a kobold so ultra-fragile

Doesn't a lantern of shadows need fuel to keep it's antilight active?

Maybe it'd be good if Rangers had two make arrows spells. The high level one they have now, and a low level one which only makes average arrows.

Yes, it does.

This I would totally be down with. That or just giving them a better blows table. They are a hybrid class, I feel like they should be better at melee. I think you could give them the same blows table as the paladin without losing anything. A paladins healing still means they are better in melee than a Ranger. But this way Rangers actually have some means of offense wothout having to recall to buy more arrows every other floor. Or give them a table that is generous early, but much more stingy later. So by the midgame they are lagging hard behind warriors in melee, but in the early game they arent a priest without any healing spells.

Their melee is better than it used to be, and they also have good stealth. So they're meant to be more like a rogue than anything else, really.

The blows calculation doesn’t work like that. Except by capping the maximum number of blows, you can’t make a class get extra blows early and not still be good later.

I just experimented a bit, and it looks like they can hit 2 blows per round to start (at least a Dunadan), however you have to tweak the default point buy a bit. I was under the mistaken impression that you couldnt hit 2 blows. Ill have to try again some time, and see if starting with 2 blows changes my opinion any.

this is what you do to win with mage.

Get a mage to DL35/40.
Pump him full of stat potions.
2x rings of Escaping
stash all the !Enlight and ?DD you find.

when you get to CL35 circa (10% TO fail or lower) read all the scrolls of DD you have and get to DL96+, find stairs and keep scumming until you get a LF 8.

use !Enlightment and look for a Kelek's. Teleport away everything that stands between you and Keleks.

Learn banish. Banish everything and pick up gear.
Drink potions of !Exp

Once you are CL50 find morgoth and mana storm him into nothingness.

That sounds like a cool speedrunning/powerdiving strategy! My playthrough was much less interesting, though. I made decent progress through the dungeon until I hit points that I felt I needed better gear/certain resists in order to survive, say, a surprise capped poison breath. Reveal Monsters/Detection and Teleport Other helped to mitigate such risks, but I still didn't want to take any chances.

When I got Wizard's Tome of Power, I just started spamming Banishment and Mass Banishment to get rid of the non-uniques that I didn't want to deal with, and only engaged Uniques that I felt I could take on. At DL97 and DL98, I just started grinding those, getting experience and extra consumables along the way, hoping to find an artifact that had all resists on it (namely Bladeturner) so that I could resist anything that Morgoth could throw at me.

I never found Bladeturner, but I did find The One Ring, which was close enough for my purposes. After tens of thousands of turns later of searching and a near death experience with some dragon that nearly one shot me, I finally decided to just face Sauron and Morgoth. In retrospect, they were surprisingly easy. The gear I used covered resists nicely while supplying the status protections I cared about. The summons were no issue because of the whole Banishment/Mass Banishment thing, as well as the fact that I offed all the other uniques beforehand.

I think, in the future, I'll play another High-Elf Mage and see how well the powerdiving strategy works.

Hanging at DL 40 Atil CL 35 isn't exactly powerdiving. Without (e.g.) midgame U to pick off, it'll take a looong time.

I have gotten to the endgame with a mage, before getting offed by Wiruin, but honestly I just dont enjoy the class much. I find scumming to be boring, and that seems to be what mages are good at, and I dont like being within one-shot range of everything all the time. Mass Banishing a vault is fun the first time, but gets old the seventh.

Generally, when a mage detects, they look for monsters they can kill, and avoid everything else. I prefer to play classes where you use detect to find monsters to avoid, and can kill everything else (whether you do or not is up to you).

This is an interesting point

This is an interesting suggestion. Giving it about 3 minutes of thought, here's a half-baked idea:

Create an object called "arrow heads." When arrows break they (usually?) leave behind arrow heads. Also, you can find them like normal low-level items. For most characters they are useless except to be sold cheaply in town, if selling is on, and can be immediately ignored. Rangers would have a very low-level spell called Fletchery which turns arrow heads into arrows. Could sell arrow heads in the general store as well, maybe.

Gets a bit more complex when you start thinking about Mithril arrows and magic arrows...

Arrows shatter against plate mail or a steel cuirass, and the heads are usually ruined as well. (See vid I posted recently.) Presumably they shatter against dragon scales and the like, too. It's worth noting that all useful arrows in warfare were bodkin. While broadhead do more damage, they won't penetrate any metal armor and were used mostly for hunting, as are their modern versions today.

Speaking of hunting, there's one greatly feared animal from Medieval Europe that really needs to be in angband: the wild boar. They have a high AC, are fast, and come in packs.
The boar savages you <2x>
The boar tramples you <2x>
The sow bites you <2x>
The sow tramples you <2x>
You die

Herringfolt in frogcomposband is there. He has mauled several of my @'s. Wild boar boss. Very fast. hits hard.

@Pete does that mean bodkin arrow heads can never be recovered?

Chain or leather armor won't usually damage them. But if they hit plate steel or the like dead on, yeah. The arrow is ruined. Do a search for arrows vs armor. The vids are kinda entertaining. Crossbow bolts will penetrate at short distances, as does musket shot. Even minie balls will juat splash at much over 100-150 yards. The usually stated accuracy is vs an unarmored foe. (Famously, see Ned Kelly.)

this is the very opposite of speedrunning.

The speedrun philosophy rotates around the idea that with sufficient detection and stealth you can basically wander around ANY depth and look to see if you like something, take/kill it, and leave.

Mine is a modification of the previous grind-heavy strategy.

It relies on one concept; in ALL vaults, you find items that are IIRC anything between +25 and +40 levels in depth.
This means that on DL40 you can find stuff that's native to DL80.

When you grind mobs/fight uniques/raid vaults etc, it's not just the vault/unique/mobs itself that is dangerous, but the surrounding dungeon as well.
You can safely teleport_self a mage on DL30, but if you TS on DL90 you can easily wind up in a group of Time Hounds or Plasma Hounds and get instakilled, even when you've just barely entered the level.

So it's actually VERY fruitful to stair scum on DL35/40/45, and to only deal with LF 6-6 levels or better, because a simple TO can deal with any OOD mob you can find in a DL40 vault, but if you are trying to TO a unique while surrounded by Titans, Balrogs, Chaos dragons, Time hounds, lava, traps, etc then it's a completely different experience.

And, the stuff that you do find in those vaults is pretty darn good for a character that has not been to DL50 even. And with a bit of luck and just crunching numbers, you can get *excellent* stuff - Keleks, RoS +10, Boots of Elvenkind, Cloaks of Aman to plug any resistance hole you may have, helms of ESP, all game-changing stuff.

AND, because you are still at such low depths, you are practically guaranteed to be able to actually TAKE that gear with minimal losses to your consumables and minimal risk.

if instead say, you are at DL70 and there is a good book you need, but it's in a graveyard, and you dont have WoD / Banish / MBan .. you're just not gonna get it. It may as well not be there.

Once you have everything you need, you don't actually need to even see the levels between DL45 and DL96. Actually to be exact, DL44, because DL45 has AMHDs.

FYI i did this just now to "show off" and i have now a mage at DL98 with keleks, took me 8 DDs (10 would have been easier) and 3x !Enlight.

CL38, and yet i can already cast MBan :)

Look at the equipment (including at home) and see just how much stuff was found between DL33 and DL45.
Note that many artifact weapons were sold.

I've watched a lot of this kind of stuff

I'm not getting your point. Is it that arrow heads are sometimes not recoverable?

@David--
In the videos, almost no part of the arrows are recoverable *if* they hit plate armor head on. But in Angband, that is not the only type of target. This has little to do with game play as it stands, but I don't see refurbishment of arrows as particularly likely or useful.
A way to help this is to do the same with archer types that is already done with rogues for ?PD.
Give them some modest chance to drop (say) 3d7 arrows, with the quality of the drop determined by monster depth.

Rogues get extra ?PD drops??

Yes. Just like caster types tend to drop class-appropriate books. UnAngband already does this, IIRC.

This is a decent idea.

I heard that books were boosted for casters, but I didn't know this was a widespread thing. Yeah, increasing arrow drops is a very simple way to make Rangers' lives a bit easier.

Could even be explained away as a passive fletchery ability. Rangers find/recover/repair/jerry-rig arrows better than all other classes.