Just rambling here, I made it to GC4 for the first time in dozens of attempts.
I lucked out with some great items
- amulet of ESP
- symbiotic worm ring (sold it though, the green light it emits is too annoying)
- wand of cloning which had at least 2 charges
- wand of polymorph (never got to use it though)
- ring of invisibility (bought in Attnam)
- horn of plenty
- horn of healing (bought in Attnam)
- map of black market (in GC shop, not sure if it is guaranteed to be there or I got lucky)
However my actual armor was trash... didn't have any equipment with stat bonuses, my boots were just nymph hair, and I didn't find a single pair of gloves/gauntlets. Fighting the wolf cave was very hairy because of my weak limb protection.
I had a ton of enchant armor & harden material scrolls thanks to the wand of cloning, but I was "saving" them until I found better items to use them on
I went with double axes, one was 3d6. The other was only 1d4 but it was a chilling axe so I kept it. I think this may be the main reason my character did well- usually I get much more powerful weapons early, without the proper stats to balance it out, which boosts my danger level too high.
Also had good favor with Atavus which was super nice for enchanting my armor without spending a scroll.
I ended up losing to Rondol... definitely could've been more careful because he didn't one-shot me. I had used up all of my healing liquid recovering from a mustard gas trap and didn't have any teleportation methods available. To be honest with the lame armor I had, I wasn't too in love with the character, or I would've tried harder to keep him alive. I was more just rushing to get further and hopefully find some better equipment throughout the dungeons
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.I like the concept of the black market. I like that it offsets when you get really bad luck like I did with never being able to find certain item types. Unfortunately I had spent all of my money so I wasn't able to take advantage of it
I think we should nerf landmines. It's just practically impossible to survive GC2 without some form of fire resistance. Searching several times per step is a big nuisance and still doesn't even guarantee that you've found all of them.