dcss : what have I learned

Evaluating risks

Dcss (dungeon crawl stone soup) is a pretty good game, it taught me very valuable lessons - why ? because this game is very rich in features, very very well balanced and very deadly.

I only realized the value of this game after hours and hours of frustration, but this game is good - first my strategy was to look for the 'perfect' combination - I tried gargoyle hunter (because gargoyle are not affected by poison and start with a decent armor class - and I was losing a lot of characters because of poisonous adder or scorpions) - but they lack in strength at the beginning, that's why I switched to troll hunter - but the constant search for food to feed these beasts was overwhelming, so I switched to spriggan (not requiring much food) and tried the spriggan venom mage - who is very powerful at the beginning, only to discover that he could be smashed in one hit by giants or ogres ...

Now I sort of found a real winning combination with the deep dwarf artificer follower of Elyvilon - he has a very nice beginning with 3 wands (including a healing wand he can recharge them using his MP) and then later he can cure himself - that was the way to fix his natural flaw of not being able to regenerate hit points. And now this little fellow has conquered the lair, decimated the spider nest, and entered the vaults ...

Oh, one thing you should never, never do as a healer is to protect yourself (using a,p) then attack monsters - this is considered as a transgression by Elyvilon and the healer is then under penance.

Strategy 

Quit early, if you have never seen that monster before, press x go over the monster and press v - this will give an overview of the monster's capacities, and more in depth description.

There is no shame in going away soon - as a rule of thumb if the character has lost one third of his hit points, it is time to run away, read a teleport scroll, blink or use a wand of teleportation on himself, if the loss goes more than 50% then the situation can really be fatal.

Don't engage monsters on an open ground, unless you are 5 or 7 blocks away and can outrun them (with a haste potion, or using cheibriados 'slow' on the opponents). Now if you don't have other options, then you better switch your weapon to an axe type - because you can then hit multiples opponents at once. But this is not a guaranteed strategy.

Trying to enchant and use a troll hide to regenerate a deep dwarf doesn't work.
If you want to use the immolation scroll, make sure you are far from the opponents flocks.

You can burn trees with a wand of Fire, this can be quite useful.

Stupid deaths series

Here's a few screenshots of stupid deaths

Mistake number 1 : getting surrounded
Mistake number 2 : not using an axe type (which I had in my inventory)
This was really a stupid death, I had a scroll of fear I could have used
none of these monsters alone would have been a problem at all.
Retreating the the small square on the right, I could have taken them one by one, I even had many unused healing and curing potions,  what was I thinking?!

Mistake number 1: attacking in the open (again)
Mistake number 2: not using the haste potion to run away
That is the typical situation that followed a 'winning streak' where I thought I could handle this kind of setup - I used a phial of floods to help - but it wasn't enough and then the character got confused and it was over in matter of 2 rounds.