Bled and vomited in IVAN .50 "outside the dungeon" (which is to say, New Attnam; if you meant the world map you were not specific enough)

Amulets of ESP are much handier.

ITYM *large* spiders.

As for strength abuse, I haven't gone below 10 AStr yet, but it's taken me about 3 spiders to gain 2 End, and you had better have plenty of regular food on hand while walking off the poison damage.

EDIT: Ah, spoke too soon. After accidentally bloating myself I got down to 9 AStr and 8 LStr. Got 13 End now.

Wishes are usually best spent. If you're like me and find beating the sumo properly to be not worth the time, wish for a belt of levitation. If you're not, you may wish to have a scroll of change material, or a wand of cloning. Both of those are powerful items.

The only reason to be bloated is if you're trying to gain leg strength by loading yourself down with random crap. Even then, the goal is of dubious worth since while you will be able to hold more stuff at once burdened/stressed state gives you severe combat penalties (-25% while burdened, -50% while stressed) which means it's going to be rather harder to stay alive even if your satiation is well-kept. Better to just learn to travel lightly; your satiation will not decrease nearly as fast while unburdened as it will when you're stressed, and you won't suffer from stat abuse by being bloated.

Well, as Erno's said, you'll remember that HBs break just like wands do and with just as much deadliness now.

Why throw the Holy Banana when you can zap it like a wand of fireballs?

Generally speaking I'm of the impression that weapon skill affects blocking capabilities more than low weight or flexibility, though low weight intuitively seems like it'd make for a more accurate (if less damaging) weapon. Certainly the material type results in higher/lower damage for different styles of weapons, though I don't know the actual code behind it.

Unfortunately shield bashes aren't in and as mentioned, you get plenty of defensive blocking from weapons. The game could probably be tweaked to make the choice less obvious, but as it is there's no contest between two attacks and one attack.

*slightly boggles at how easily this changed from a suggestion for a change in how natural limbs work and a resulting discussion of how unfeasible that would be to a necromancy inspired discussion of how awesome natural limbs are*