That makes sense as the Golden Eagle shirt was in the water, but the zombie wasn't.

Well, in that example you could still apply the wand. :wink: Now if you are trapped without a wand, then this would be a method. It is always good to have as many backup plans as possible in IVAN.

Well, either that one or the main room in Oree's Lair, as it has many mages too.

Just to see for myself, I did some armor testing and saying "as far as i recall" was a good idea since my tests don't reflect these exact numbers. Here is my results:



This was done using wizard mode, so I apologize if wizard mode somehow makes this data invalid, (for example, if armor is stronger and lighter than normal in wizard mode, or something of that nature) though as far as I know it should be valid. From these results, armor of great health has 125% of the weight and has 75% of the armor value versus a normal armor. Also, it seems that chain mail has 50% of the weight and somewhere between 62% to 64% of the armor value versus normal armor.

I would also like to apologize for correcting you, even if it was a minor correction as your basic idea of great health providing a worse armor to weight ratio is correct. Most people don't like being corrected, but I do it anyways as I hate seeing people get misled. (Even if those people should be able to question misleading information for themselves.) I hope you understand. :wink:

That is a good note, slob. A warning to anyone who uses material limbs. Even though they are awesome, they will reduce your Endurance gain rate. My reasoning behind this is that if you take hits in flesh limbs, they will naturally heal (if they aren't severed and you don't get unnaturally healed) over time and train your Endurance as this occurs. With material limbs, they do not naturally heal so you have to repair them (similar to unnatural healing methods of flesh limbs) using scrolls or Loricatus and your Endurance will not be trained by this. Thus, only your head, torso, and groin damage that is naturally healed will train your Endurance. (well, that plus unnatural Endurance gains such as ommel snot, holy bananas, or school food)

Lack of exceptional Agility and Dexterity definitely makes Sherarax far more difficult as she gets many turns and her strikes hurt if you are not capable of blocking them.

As far as the wizard rooms, this was my first time reaching them. I will admit, they do pose a challenge. I didn't feel safe teleporting in and berserking them (besides, I didn't have many repair scrolls left and lightning and striking have little trouble harming material limbs) so I adopted a different strategy which may work for some with a reasonable stock of wands. My tactic revolved heavily around the use of acid rain. If you zap a wand of acid rain and it impacts the wall of their room, it will rain into the room even if there is no opening in the wall. (The area of effect seems to ignore walls.) Wizards have very low health so if you wait a while and come back, all the affected squares will likely have either mage corpses or zombies as the wizards in those rooms are accompanied by necromancers. Since it seeps in about two or three squares from the impact location, zapping the middle of each side of the room should kill most, if not all, of the wizards in the room. (With the tall room before Oree's Lair, you probably only need to zap the top, bottom, and one of the sides as it is quite thin.) The only survivors will be any lucky enough to not be on an affected square and mystic dark frogs as they seem to be immune to acid.

I found it to be effective as long as you have enough acid rain wand charges left. If you don't get enough charges off, the acid rain usually will open a hole for you to zap other wands in or throw objects. ESP and high intelligence is useful in general against them so you can see them first and control your engagement range and positioning. I also recommend not carrying all your wands in one box since I find it common that it will get teleported away by them. If you do keep them all in one box, keep a backup scroll of detect material separate if you can, then you can detect "fir" (provided your chest is still made of the default material that all normal chests are made of) and you should be able to see it and hopefully teleport or run to it. This happened to me once during this particular game. I happened to have a backup box which kept all scrolls and my valuable wands. Since no attack wands were present, I needed my other box back and I used a detect scroll to find it and a teleportation scroll to teleport to it. It was right outside the wizard room so I promptly teleported away as fast as possible to avoid a repeat of this event or damage from spells.

I have a feeling many have used this strategy before, but I am curious to hear from those who have. Also I am curious, has anyone used a different strategy than those listed above?

What is this IVAN CVS you speak of, how much do you know about its improvements, and do you know where it can be obtained?

I just have classic 0.50. I see IVANX, but it sounds like that also adds other features that may or may not have been intended.

Thank you for any information you (or others) provide.

It was not. This is the best I have done so far. I fell prey to the same problem I have had in the past. It is my love-hate relationship with Saal'thul. I forget to remove it and steal something from the shop instead of buying it.

This happened to this character and he fled the town and didn't return until he had defeated Elpuri and Oree drowned. I had to try the final challenge, to defeat the greatest champions of Valpurus. He cleaved my body quite nicely with his Justifier. The golden eagle feather shirt wasn't enough to stop it. Next time I will be much more careful with him.

This also was my first game to get complete control over golden eagle feather and valpurium. (55 intelligence) I only had three scrolls of change material left when I reached it so one of my arms and both my legs were made of golden eagle feather. The leftover arm was spider silk. My equipment was either octiron, adamant, or spider silk depending on its purpose.

I am very pleased with the results of this game since I achieved so many personal milestones. The main one I am so proud of is defeating Sherarax. I took her down with one hit to the torso during our first encounter. As many probably know, she wears an amulet of life saving so she was not completely defeated by this blow. She nearly got me during the exchange so I teleported and drank two cans of healing. She took two blows during our next encounter before she perished. I managed to block all of her attacks that time.

I still have yet to defeat the archmage and the champions in Attnam. Only when I manage to accomplish these will I feel victorious. :wink:

I'm not sure how he got levitation, but still sounds like a possibility. Crazy though.

I like to use a shield for the extra blocking rate. I like two weapons early on when I have poor attack power, but later I switch to a shield when I get my weapon well enchanted. (Or when I get phoenix feather limbs...)

I reached Oree's lair for the first time today and spend quite some time picking off his mage guards using various wands I had accumulated during my travels. At one point I also resurrected an elder dark mage to assist me. When I had finished taking them all out I couldn't find Oree. I saw him several times during the fight but left him alone as he didn't seem like much of a threat at a distance. I had several detect material scrolls so I used one and searched for "daemon flesh". The only spot lit up was a zombie and I thought, "It couldn't be..." but it was. Oree was a zombie, so he had been killed by something other than myself. I thought to myself, "What a loser, I wanted an epic battle!"

Anyways, I was dying to figure out what he got killed by so I made certain not to miss the results when I got killed:





Unfortunately, the game is set up so that it doesn't reflect the creature's name when you check how they died. Thus, these do not prove that Oree really did drowned. You have my word and that is all. You should at least be able to check and see that Oree can be drowned though.

I don't know how this happened. I am guessing that either one of my exploding wands of teleportation or my elder dark mage teleported him in there. Has this happened to anyone else? It is funny that he is fatally weak against something that inhabits a large majority of his lair!

Though not quite as bad as stealing, I agree that this is quite a displeasing result as well. Then again, at least when you steal, you profit.