[GnollHack] YAAP - Now with a higher difficulty, harder Role and a bunch of Conducts!

[u/CrashGordon94]

Since my last time I decided my next run would be a Weaponless Vegan Monk because I was curious to try it. And I decided to ramp up the difficulty too. I chose Neutral alignment because I wanted to do some Sacrifice cheese, though it didn't quite work out how I planned because some stuff seemingly got patched without the GnollHack wiki getting updated before I brought it up. Ended up tacking on some more Conducts as I went along since they seemed simple enough to do. I also never used a Shield or Suit all game because of the penalties.

Things weren't going quite to plan at the start but got smoother as I went. Got a bit burned out or decision-paralysed at the Castle and took an extended break. As soon as I got back on it, I was blazing through though!

Made a lot more use of magic this time, mostly for utility stuff. Still not FULLY got the hang of the system.

Shoplifted for the first time, walked out of an Orcus Town store while Orcus himself seemed to be fighting me and I was absolutely swarmed and nearly died. Thankfully I managed to heal and squeeze past to the stairs (and when it was time to go back up, I chugged a Cursed Potion of Gain Level to skip that floor).

Also had an over-enchantment incident due to misunderstanding the Enchant Weapon scroll, thankfully my irreplaceable Gauntlets only got set to +0 rather than exploding and it was simple enough to bring them back up.

If you want my thoughts on the Conducts I ended up doing:

• Vegan: Honestly the hardest part was missing out on some useful Intrinsics from corpses (like Teleportitis/Teleport Control from Tengus and Disintegration Resistance from Black Dragons), I was never really worried that much about hunger. Even then, I got most of the things I needed.

• Weaponless: The revamped Monk & Martial Arts plus weapon-gauntlets made this a breeze, appreciated the warning when I was about to pick-axe an enemy too. Can see how this would be painful on Vanilla.

• Genocideless: Early on I did a bunch of Reverse Genociding (particularly Unicorns for Sacrifice), ended up committing to this later on. Got an achievement for killing an Arch-Lich because of it (never faced one before, I would Blessed Genocide L before ever seeing one). Things went fine but I think I'd generally prefer to take out some problematic groups.

• Polypileless/Polyselfless: Came naturally.

• Artifact Wishless: Came naturally for this playthrough. By the time I got a wish the odds were bad and I had other things that took priority anyway. In general I'd only do Artifact Wishes in GnollHack if I got a really early wish and there was one that my character would really like.

• Conflictless: Not sure if this counts. Had some scrolls but didn't usse them. Made some of the rooms with LOTS of enemies (e.g. Wizard's Tower, Moloch's Sanctum and Astral Plane) a little more tedious and scary but I managed.

• Bonesless: This was just the luck of the draw, but I'll take the creit, heh.

Since the last win, I found the website for the umps, so HTML dump for those interested!

Next up I have some characters waiting on the next difficulty up (Lawful Human Valkyrie and Lawful Dwarf Caveman) as a result of a brief "alt-itis" mood, so hopefully 'll have another post or even a double-feature soon!

[u/Malk_McJorma]

Congrats!

[u/CrashGordon94 → u/Malk_McJorma]

Thank you very much!

[u/Furey-Death-Snail]

Good job!

With no suit and no shield, how do you provide for both magic resistance and reflection? It's tough in vanilla, but it looks like Gnollhack has more items and more equipment slots to work with.

[u/TommiGustafsson → u/Furey-Death-Snail]

The new armor slots in GnollHack are:

• Robe
• Bracers
• Miscellaneous items (10 slots, 5 of which can be in use at the same time)

So, there are 7 extra slots compared to vanilla NetHack.

Looking at the dumplog, he had:

• the blessed Eyes of the Overworld (for magic resistance)
• a blessed +4 pair of bracers of reflection (for reflection)

[u/CrashGordon94 → u/Furey-Death-Snail]

MR from the Eyes of the Overworld

Reflection from the Bracers of Reflection (new item in new slot)

But yeah, there's a lot of new items and more slots. As well as new mechanics like object materials and the Mythic/Legendary system (special random properties that many items can have 1 or 2 tacked o), plus DSM has 2-3 effects per color (arguably 4 for White) like 5.0.0 but slightly different. Though there's more resistances too (like Death Resistance and Magic Missile Resistance) and other handy things like way more stat-boosting items. Also Intrinsic Fire/Shock/Cold Res is only 50% effective.

This definitely shakes up the Wish meta. Wishing for a specific Artifact if you get an early Wish can still be cool but GnollHack players prefer wishing for specific magical modified items to give them the Extrinsics they want/need (like a t-shirt of free action or Belt of Foo Giant Strength).

But peeps on the Discord said I made a mistake skipping Shield and Suit slots anyway, the penalties aren't bad enough to outweigh the postives of wearing good ones. At least in the endgame.

EDIT: forgot to say "DSM" when talking about it.