Finally my first win!

[sumre]

Hello, everyone! I'm new to this forum and want to thank the devs for such a great game, which gave me much endjoyment (and frustration, for that matter).

Realy like its uniqueness, compared to more generic roguelikes (I'm not a very experienced roguelike player though) and the amount of thought put into the atmosphere. Game mechanics are simple and intuitive and therefore elegant.
The game works with "small numbers". As opposed to some rpg's (mmo's, for example) where you can have dozens of hp's on a 1lvl character and hundreds of thousands of hp's on high-level ones. I personally find "low numbers" mechanics more aesthetically pleasing, it creates the feeling that every point matters.

So my character plan was to make two evasion rings on the first forge and pump up evasion and buy riposte, which turns your defensive capabilities into offensive ones as well (after some experience with dodging+flanking builds i decided that although it was fun I couldn't get it to work more or less reliably. Sometimes you just run into a pack of enemies and you're forced to fight in corridors anyway or be surrounded and die horribly. So more conventional corridor-turtling was my choice).

Approaching depths of whispering shadows and sulraukar, "disguise" and "keen senses" picks were a necessity. But all in all by 450-500ft depth i was able to invest some 15 points in evasion which gave me around 20-21 evasion (and this is my comfort zone when fighting giants). Then I trained stealth and took "exchange places" which is a must for me.

And from that point I started training archery up till "fire arrows" and further till a dex point, because it is pretty much the only reliable way I know of to deal with werewolves and ringraukar (besides going full stealth). So at this point I transitioned from high evasion fencer to stealth-ish archer. After then the game was fairly straightforward. I picked all the necessary skills for being able to take down enemies one by one: precision, crippling shot and vanish. Also I raised perception and took "listen". I wanted to mitigate possible light problems with gwathraukar. It was the first time when I used the ability and I wasn't dissapointed!

The throne room took me awhile More precisely, a 5212-turn while. By that point I'd already been in the throne room several times and died awfuly to the habit of "going a bit autopilot" (which, sadly, I still can't get rid of). So I decided to take my time however long it would take. Nevertheless there were some very close calls when I failed to break LoS with lord vampires in time and was forced to engage in melee praying to Eru to not be stat drained to the pattypan state.

The ascension was more or less easy (with sprint + vanish + listen Morgy just unfruitfully spent all this time combing for "that damn silmaril!" somewhere deep in the dark halls of Angband). Except for one episode when I was down to 1hp fighting Delmereth. Would've been pretty dissapointing to die with all those unused potions and herbs.

After a bit of rest I think I'll try Hador which presumably is a lot more fun in terms of combat dynamycs.

[Sideways]

Congratulations!

[wobbly]

No artifacts Edain too. Nice.

[half]

Congratulations sumre! I'm really glad you connected with the aesthetic of the game. And a first win as an Artefactless Edain is insane.