After reading about the "fling the bling" challenge here, I was
inspired to give it a try.
Some
spoiler
space
because
this
might
be
slightly
spoily,
though
not
very
spoily
at
all,
come
to
think
of
it.
Proceed
at
your
own
minuscule
risk.
Goldflinger, a female Hurthling merchant, got off to a good start:
found some decent shields in the SMV and double-wielded them from that
moment on, upgrading where possible. At the time of her death she was
less than 5000 points from grandmastery with shields.
I noticed quickly that there was a drawback to this challenge: it
takes a long time to kill anything tough. There's only so much damage
a flung gold piece does, and you don't gain levels with them.
On the other hand, it's fun killing dopplegangers with missiles.
I took her from the SMV to do the Carpenter quest, so she could have
the much-needed Healing skill. She then dove into the CoC, made her
way to Dwarftown, and got crowned with the Crown of Leadership. She
took the first two dwarf quests, and missed her chance at the pyramid
because I wanted to get the guaranteed fireball wand first.
Because of the slow combat, I decided to try to maximize efficiency
and combined the Dwarven Graveyard and the Ring of the High Kings into
a single above-ground adventure. She got to level twenty-two doing
these and I decided to throw in the ToEF. (Her crowning immunity had
been fire.)
Here I evolved the basic tactic that would stand her well in _almost_
all her big fights: stand in a narrow point where only one enemy
could get to her at a time. Still, the worm nearly got her down to
zero before dropping before a combination of gold and cold cones (from
wands).
After the fire temple, the water temple was a doddle -- the only thing
was that she needed to charge her cold wands to get to it, and she'd
no booze or charging. She wound up blowing up one on a final charge.
Most of the rest was routine until the end. She picked up Preserver in
the Casino shoppe, but missed Nature's Companion somewhere. The only
really difficult fight was the Earth temple -- in order to avoid
getting surrounded, she popped up and down levels, letting one or two
elementals/grues follow her at a time. By this point she was dual-
wielding tower shields (one eternium, one crystal) so was pretty hard
to hit if she didn't get surrounded. Eventually the ASB came out after
her and she used a combination of coins and fireballs-from-wands to
take it down.
Even the Mana temple wasn't too bad. She stood behind the doorway,
wearing two rings of the clear mind (the only time she took off the
cat ring once she got it), and coined things to death.
Alas: it was well into the fifth month by the time she got to CoC:48.
She closed all five rifts, descended to the ice level ...
.... and it was there that she turned into a WMoPC. She never saw a
potion of cure corruption in the entire game, and she didn't save
Khelly and get his ?oCRs.
Alas, poor Goldflinger. She could have been a contender.
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