The final stretch

So - it's been a long time since I've played IVAN and I decided to give it another go now. I had once achieved a Freedom ending on another computer, and now I decided to go for one of the harder endings.

I haven't forgotten to play, apparently, or have just gotten lucky - out of 7 attempts, I managed to produce 2 quite OP characters who reached Elpuri without serious trouble (3-shot wands of cloning, plentiful random scrolls of charging and nice equipment, mostly). The first died in an accident involving Elpuri's powerful bite and a wand of polymorph. The second offed Elpuri with a combination of wands and, when they wore out, melee also helped. Getting a phoenix feather right arm helped a lot, after a giant dark frog severed the original and a prayer to Sophos gave me a hardened leather replacement instead of teleporting me away, as I expected it to. After somehow surviving, I decided to stick with it.

My gods were from Sophos to Legifer, helping me in various ways. While Sophos' arm helped me, I had no SoCM to change my other limbs to phoenix feather, nor did I really need to. Though I did get a SoCM after accidentally killing ZQ-29 - I was quite OP by the time I entered GC10 and killed it without any harm to myself at all, only realizing what I had destroyed by looking at the lootpile. Shererax was also close by, and no, I didn't dare take on that. However, I had two wands of cloning, each of them 3-shot, by this time, as well as several scrolls of charging, which I eventually started using to clone less valuable, but still scarce stuff like scrolls of detect material and (especially) wands of teleportation.

GC12 had the mage room right next to the stairs, which I noticed thanks to my ESP. I quickly teleported away and hacked my way through hordes of zombies that kept being raised again and again. Then, when the kamikaze dwarves started blocking my way (they couldn't see me, I zapped myself invisible, but I had never found a fire resistance cloak and had to rely on two rings to protect myself from mines - a big mine in GC11 took my torso down to the lower regions of red, so I was definitely afraid of mines) I teleported into the chamber with the portal and entered the lair.

I had found a functioning oil lamp in GC11 and used it to wish for a belt of levitation (I kept a scroll of wishing in reserve all the way through, never needing it). I mostly used Richel Decos' belt of carrying (as I didn't find any other good belt either), but I knew from long ago that Oree's level has blood pools and I might want to levitate through them - plus I had no idea what to wish for, aside from an AoLS, which I didn't really want as I figured that the increased danger level and not having ESP are more likely to hurt me than the extra life will help me. Indeed, for the most part I just used my plentiful teleport wands to hop next to the mages and kill them, then - deciding to play it safe - I slew Oree with wands of striking and eventually found the GEF shirt.

I returned to the surface and now here I am. In the link below, you can see the incredible amount of scrolls, healing liquids etc. I have that I didn't need. I was pretty buff all the way through - Richel Decos, Xinroch, most non-Shererax mistresses I met, Golgor Dhan, ZQ-29, the hordes of dark knights and orcs I fought (including an Ur-Khan with bugged -5 equipment that I spoke of in another thread), all non-valpurium golems, the angel of Cruentus on Oree's level, even Elpuri were pushovers. I'm not sure how powerful Oree would have been, but I didn't want to be vomited upon and have my equipment be destroyed, plus he had some pretty powerful gear.

http://imgur.com/a/sli4C#3eJ21Jl

***

Now the story part is over. I'm standing in the Cathedral and wondering how I could take on the High Priest, or if I should just settle for Knighthood. I'll probably try to take on Petrus though just for the fun of it and then become Valpurus' champion. I just thought I'd ask for some advice as to how I should do this. As you can see, I don't have a massive amount of HP, but I have a lot of resources at my disposal. From reading the forums, I know that Petrus is not easy at all to take on in melee, and who knows how powerful Inlux is, but I have Sophos and a bunch of teleportation wands on me, so I could probably take on everyone else with ease and teleport away if anything goes wrong. Either way, though, my enemies in Attnam are fixed so raising endurance, wearing an AoLS and anything else that increases danger level strongly are not an issue - I know that. I'm not sure how I would go about raising my endurance, though, or even just my intelligence - I've already sci-talked the hell out of everyone and wandering the dungeons to look for mages to tame sounds extremely tedious (although Dulcis would let me do that as long as I have Seges to fill my stomach too). As for endurance, I'm not praying to Mellis and I don't want to switch gods, so I don't have infinite school food. What else could I do? I guess changing my limbs to phoenix feather could also help, although having 3 natural limbs and winning would be a lot cooler. If I do get the necessary intelligence, is it even worth upgrading to dragon hide limbs, or is the extra dexterity/agility more useful than the extra strength?

Any other tips are welcome too, of course.

For the record, I'd like to remind everyone that there is nothing in the code (or the tests I did) that supports the idea that the LifeSaved state affects your danger level in any way.

Having ESP will affect your danger level relative to invisible enemies, since you're able to see them, and as a result hit them more reliably, eg. having ESP means stronger invisible enemies will spawn, but won't affect others.

Since danger is based on how many hits it would take for one character to kill another (on average), and LifeSaved doesn't do anything to change that, it doesn't actually have an effect on danger.

For Petrus, I'd clone up as many wands of telportation and striking as possible and try to keep distance from Petrus. The one time I did manage to kill him I did it this way, but ran out of charges and had to melee him for the last hit.

You could try Batman?'s approach and make a giant pile of wands and explosives then lure Petrus onto it to kill him in one shot, but I'm not sure if you have enough left at this point.

I'd suggest keeping ESP (or ring infravision + AoLS if you want to be safe) around until you deal with the head guard and mystic frogs, but swap in the AoLS before getting close to Petrus or Inlux, just in case.

thanks for the attribution but someone posted this approach in the forums ages ago, i just resurrected it.

What does "OP" mean? That's some impressive loot.

Well then, I must have been the victim of accidental misinformation. Interesting to know that about the AoLS.

I'm not sure I want to try the "explosives" method because I'm bound to screw it up and it's kind of anticlimactic. Also, I threw away all my empty wands all over the GC.

So yeah, I always considered rings of infravision strictly inferior to ESP because in practice, I tend to be able to see fewer enemies with them, and also I can't see through the walls. However, I guess that these traits are less important in Attnam. Is there anyone there who I can't see with infravision, only ESP?

Also, as you can see I don't have any striking wands that are intact. Are wands of striking better in particular than the other two against Petrus and their ilk? I might scour through the GC and the tunnels once again for any errant offensive wands, since I really can't afford to waste a scroll of charging on recharging them...


Overpowered.

Update: I died. Things were going well, I think I killed Petrus once because at one point I didn't see an AoLS on him anymore, but maybe that just can't be seen anyways, I'm not sure. I had scitalked myself up to 40 Int but stopped there because giant light frogs were disappointingly bad at helping me raise my Int, so I just turned my swords adamant. I could kill everything except Inlux, which got a sneaky one-shot kill on me, but I had also found an oil lamp that gave me an AoLS and that let me escape. I cloned gazillions of wands of striking with 4 charges, and dropped the dead wands in one pile, occasionally luring Petrus onto them and zapping those too. That was my strategy. My death was actually the result of human error: at one point I teleported next to a kamikaze dwarf with a lot of striking wands in my inventory. I knew that my only teleport wand in my inventory was probably out of charges, and actually wanted to press 'a' to break it, but due to poor concentration I zapped it instead and it didn't work. I didn't survive the wand armageddon.

I also found out, with interest, that applying a wand of striking is likely to break stuff even inside your chests. I found a secret room on an already explored level by spotting a veteran dark knight walking inside thanks to my ESP, and I tried to break in, but had few wands - I decided to try breaking a used wand of striking and see what it would do. It was a terrible idea, as it broke several wands inside my chests, including a wand of polymorph and (fortunately only) one of my wands of cloning. Thus, two grizzly bears named Khagan VII cowered in fear, waiting for the polymorph to end, and fortunately survived that incident. (I had tossed away my pickaxe because it broke, and it took me a long time to find another and actually get into the room. Wasn't worth it.)

I'm glad that I killed Oree and learnt quite a bit about taking on Attnam too. I'll probably try more runs later.

Sounds like it was an exciting game regardless But yeah nothing worse than getting polyed for a long time and just praying that nothing scary shows up

Just to follow up on this, I finally got that High Priest victory with my latest character! My character was ridiculously stacked. I had 2 bone files, both of which got me several wands of mirroring and scrolls of charging. I found a cloning wand (2 charges) naturally, and also ran into ZQ-29 on GC12 who dropped a 3-charger. I also found two scrolls of wishing and two good oil lamps, altogether wishing up at least 2 amulets of life saving (and I also found one on GC, and even had one wish I could spare for a ring of teleport control (no other telecontrol means came up, no blink dogs or anything, and I didn't want to rely on Vermis either).

I cloned up like 40-50 wands of striking and fireballs altogether, as well as about 10-15 teleport wands or so, and those were enough to slay Inlux and Petrus after a long, long period of time. Though I did also manage to clone up quite a few SoCMs so I was running on all phoenix feather limbs by the end. Even so, Inlux killed me once (my other amulets were wasted on other stuff before clearing Attnam). I still wasted so many wands that the "wand of striking" method is clearly only applicable with incredibly, ludicrously stacked characters like mine - I still had some wands left to spare (as well as the emptied cloning wands), but I had to spend a lot, including piling up the empty ones and blowing them up as Petrus walked across.

Hmm, I wonder what I could do next. Maybe all natural limbs or something...

You could look at my challenge list–.

or how about a Princess Bride win: "I am not left-handed". You could have one GEF or Phoenix feather arm that you switch to in the middle of the fight once Petrus starts kicking your ass. Melee death to Petrus with a sword is a must. If you have no seen this movie due to its sissy name then all I can say is "Incoceivable!"

iocain powder

I bet my life on it.

i think ADOM introduced a Princess Bride based artifact for one of the new classes in the latest round of development.