PosChengband early possessor tips

gistfile1.txt

Comp 168 Early Possessor Tips
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Level 1
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You can start out by getting the quest to clear the Bandit Hideout straight away.
You don't need anything except your wand of magic missiles. Just kill them one by
one. Hope for a corpse from a bandit, or atleast novice rogue. Possess it ('Ua-').

As a reward you'll get a Ring of Combat. You can identify it, I'm not sure if
you have to. It'll cost 100 gold though. Hope for a good +to-dam roll.

Go to town, purchase 1 ?Word of Recall, some ?Phase Door or ?Teleportation and
a couple of !CLW, !CSW, or !CCW if you can. In this variant !CLW/!CSW are almost
useless though, but they can help you regen after a phase door.

Your first task in the dungeon is to find a better corpse. There are some options.

Melee / wands
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1) Cave Spider - the best one. +10 speed, sees in the dark, can cast detect monsters.
2) Farmer Maggot's dogs - +10 speed. Nothing special.
3) Rat-Thing - quite weak, but has +10 speed.
4) Fruit Bat - very low HP but has +10 speed. You'll probably need wands or !Heroism
against the first dungeon boss on D6.
5) Novice Rogue/Bandit - will probably work too, but isn't that exciting.

Bump into monsters until they die. Watch out for strong melee enemies. Remember
that you can run away and kite almost anything.

Caster
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1) Novice mage - has magic missile, phase door, detect monsters. +0 speed :(

Magic Missile deals low damage, 4d4. Almost any of the +10 speed forms are better
early on, but novice mage works too. You just have to play careful.

Make a macro for key F1 that does '\e*tma'. This will automatically target the
closest monster and cast magic missile. If you want to focus fire something down,
you can target it manually with *, and then typing 'ma'. Press 'n' to repeat the
command to fire at it until it dies. Phase away if needed.

You can access the macro menu with the key '@' (AltGr-2). Then '4' to make a macro.

Dungeon Level 6
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Your first dungeon boss is a melee opponent. It should be no problem with a
good wand even with a bad form like the Fruit Bat. You can also try to kite him
by hitting him once, moving away, waiting for him to come close and repeating.
In PosChengband, monsters sometimes seem to get two turns in a row though, so
with Fruit Bat, he can almost one-shot you so be very careful in melee.

Dungeon Level 12
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Second boss is a strong melee orc who arrives with escorts. You can probably kill
the regular orcs in melee, but the boss can hit really hard. Don't even think about
it with Fruit Bat. As a novice mage it isn't hard but can be a bit tedious.
You can try to gather some {good} armour and weapons and sell them to get money to
buy some attack wands and phase door scrolls, if you can't deal with him otherwise.

Character Level 15
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Most of the early forms listed here stop gaining experience at CL15. You will have
to find a new body to use. Some good options are strong orcs, trolls or ogres if
you're going the melee route. 

I'm not sure about great caster options after novice mage. Dark Elven Warlock is a 
good one, but they don't start showing up until DL20 or so. And even then can be 
quite hard to find without detection.

Note that priest and paladin (and shaman?) types use wisdom as their spellcasting
stat. The competition character starts with high int and low wisdom, so you should
try to aim for monsters that cast spells with intellect.

Hounds get a breath weapon ('U' menu) and can also cast detect monsters which can be
really useful. They also appear in packs so usually you'll get a corpse quite
easily. They aren't horrible in melee either.

General Tips
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1) Turn on Auto-Picker/Destroyer by pressing '_'. The syntax is quite clear if you
want to take a look. Things of particular interest are the lines that read like:
"""
?:[GEQ $LEVEL 5]       
!average common weapons
!average common armors 
?:1                    
"""
"!" means destroy, the rest of the line is pretty self-explanatory.

You can change the number after $LEVEL to destroy average/good/non-ego items automatically.
You can use the autoregister feature to destroy unwanted types easily, 'k[itemslot]A'.
They get appended to the end of the file if you later want to look at them or remove them.

2) Until level 10, you can freely try out different corpses to see their stats. Press '~4'
to take a look at the stats of different corpses. Press '=' while in the menu to see more.
Pay attention to max level, speed, fighting and stats. You can press '?' in the menu to
bring up monster recall which will tell what spells the monster can cast, more or less. 

If the lines are empty, you need to *id* the corpse to know more about it. Or possess it,
this is only recommended before CL10. Later on you can find items of Probing, which will
reveal the stats about the corpse as well as letting you know how badly that new monster
will kill you in combat. Probing is used when a monster that's alive is in LoS.

3) If you find the early dungeon levels boring, you can turn on Always Small Levels to
get through them faster. You can toggle it off later as it can become dangerous.
Accessed through '=4'.