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Let's make mistakes
Just finished my epic NetHack game. Let me call it “20 hours of mistakes”. No, not really, everything was good when I started. I decided to complete the Sokoban first, then go to the Gnomish mines, despite the usual advice “dwarven Valkyries should go to mines ASAP”. This decision was very good. After getting the amulet of reflection from Sokoban I went to the mines, managed to reach Mine’s End and got a luckstone. Then I found an opulent throne and wished for gray dragon scale mail, got to the quest, but didn’t have enough exp, went down, killed Medusa (actually, she killed herself, my amulet of reflection helped), got a potion of gain level, whoa, XL 14, went back, completed the quest, went to the castle…
The first epic mistake is the one I made just when entered (or at a previous level maybe) – nutrition status was Weak and I #prayed, but forgot about the timeout! Tyr became angry at me.
The second one is that I went upstairs and there was a master lich who summoned two mind flayers. The lich cursed my ring of levitation so I couldn’t remove it. Damn.
And the last one. I was levitating around the castle moat and a water nymph appeared. And stole my +5 Excalibur. Wow. She can steal the cursed ring! People on the #nethack IRC channel suggested dropping all the stuff so the nymph would steal the ring. Luckily, someone said that dropping the Orb of Fate is a bad idea. So… the nymph didn’t come. And I became hungry. Unable to pick up my food ration. And I #invoked my Orb of Fate to level teleport me. Wow. It was on a level with a sink. I love you, my little Orb of Fate! Good, let’s try finding food. Damn, a housecat. I’m without my armor and weapons. Invoke again. Boom, level 1. I’m fainting already. Tried to go to the nearest fountain. I had teleportitis. So I was teleported near a vampire bat.
The Valkyrie died with just two items. The Orb of Fate and a cursed ring of levitation.
She was a minimalist.
P.S. Thanks to everyone in the IRC channel! <3
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Would you like critique or are you happy with what you have learned from this experience?
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First, when you had Tyr angry, you should probably have made mollifying Tyr a high priority? Maybe you didn't get a chance because you were caught levitating immediately after, but if not, that would have been the thing to do.
Second, why were you wearing a ring of levitation when going up stairs? There's no chance of coming up into water, and you might want to go immediately back down; in general levitation is a sometimes intrinsic :)
I'm somewhat surprised you didn't have any means of removing curses on you --- scroll, holy water, something. No bag of holding, I guess?
The real error was
listening to #nethackdropping all of your stuff. You never want to remove your options --- NetHack gives you all of the tools you need to win, but you don't want to drop them and stop using them. You could have just Orb of Fated immediately, and wandered around looking for a sink or fountains to dip in (can you dip when levitating?) and so on, although I would have headed slowly up in order to look carefully for sinks on every level. (Ideally you'd know if you saw a sink, but you might not remember/take notes that detailed.) If you really need to get a nymph to take it off for you, better to wait for one to be generated on a less dangerous level than the Castle! You don't need a weapon on D:5 really as a mid-to-late-game valk; you do at the Castle. The only way I might have done the Castle thing is if you could trap the nymph in a corner room on a cleared level, drop your things, enter the room, and then get the ring stolen and recover from there. Even then that's dangerous, and has the dropping the Orb of Fate problem... better to do something else if possible.It's easy to say all of this reading about it after the fact, of course. :) Hopefully next time you will make it further! If you can get to the Castle you are most of the way there.
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Second – forgot to remove it. I was levitating around the moat to get to the back door (no tonal instruments or wands of opening/striking).
No BoH – I got an amulet of reflection in Sokoban, and only a regular bag. I guess I had a scroll of remove curse once, but I got into water or a fire ant burned it in the Quest or something else…
Can't dip while levitating. Yes, invoking the Orb w/o dropping would be a life saver.
"headed slowly up" – if there wasn't a master lich upstairs.
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That will kill you :)
The master lich might or might not have been a problem? I don't know what your inventory was. I guess you wouldn't want to melee it. (Although if you were twoweaponing and had a reasonable second weapon it might have gone OK.) My biggest fear in that case would be #invoking the Orb and then ending up on DL 2 or something and having no way to uncurse --- although at least you could keep invoking the Orb every couple hundred turns and hopefully get back down to a lower level that way.
And of course everyone's playstyle is different. Dropping all your stuff without a solid plan, though, and the nymph having a 50% chance of taking the Orb anyway? #nethack is dangerous. :)
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