Sparky the Shalore Archmage is my latest character, my first to successfully complete the Dark Crypt and rescue Melinda. My theory for building him is to max MAG first, and to use all the magic or spellpower boosting gear I can find (or buy). He has opened up the Temporal tree to get Time Prison, and is making heavy use of Providence and Premonition as well.

He's currently in Dreadfell, preparing to meet The Master.

I just discovered something about Windows and gdb under MinGW.

I was playing in svn 2777 and it started to loop on me.

Not having run it "under" gdb I thought I'd try something just to see if it worked. So I opened up my MinGW MSYS command prompt window, and looked at the ps command help. "ps -W" lists Windows processes with their pid's. In this case, t-engine was on Windows pid 1088. So then I started gdb and did "attach 1088" and lo and behold, it neatly attached itself to the looping ToME process and stopped it, ready to debug.

I've been starting characters in Roguelike instead of Adventure mode, since I felt I was getting sloppy with the extra lives. Well, I'm still getting sloppy, as Sparky the Shalore Archmage can attest.

Confronted by Wrathroot at the bottom of the Old Forest, I managed to hit him with a Flameshock to stun him for what, two turns? Except that you can only use one of those turns. Put two attacks in a row and the big # gets to move after your second turn. And then it was freeze, and then Stun, and hit and hit and then freeze again and poor Sparky is history.

Part of the problem was not maxxing the big three attack spells: Flame, Lightning and Manathrust. I knew I wasn't putting out enough damage, I should have gone grinding levels until I had at least Flame and Lightning maxxed.

Second part of the problem was I didn't try to Freeze W or teleport away again instead of hitting him with that last Manathrust. I knew it wasn't going to kill him, and I know about the 'one less safe turn' for stun duration. But I wasn't thinking ahead.

Third part of the problem, I was impatient. I had already teleported off one time and he was almost completely regenn'ed before he found me again. So I thought I would risk one more hit. Whoops.

So far, I've been playing Ryuuji the Cornac Wyrmic as a rather unusual sword swinger with lots of tactical options for softening up tough enemies. He just finished off the Sandworm Queen which bumped Sand talent mastery up to 1.40. Now Ryuuji's Willpower stat is getting into the territory where he can start putting class points into Breath attacks. He's kind of spread out all over the different wyrmic talent trees at present. All in all, he's a fun character to play, but got off to a rather slow start and is somewhat hampered by the lack of stun resistance.

I started an Archmage in svn and was doing just fine thank you, until I got to Bill the Bloody Troll and he had a regen infusion! Thank you very much, Darkgod.

Between the big damned troll rushing on me when I would phase away and having to use my own meagre regen and manasurge I just didn't have the DPS to do in bloody Bill.

After a few false starts, like trying to compile with the MinGW/SDL1.3 setup which I already had installed, I got a clean compile and successful create of a new character with the sources from svn.

I started fresh with a clean MinGW install and followed the instructions in the wiki.
What a concept!

How to get source from svn.
How to build dev environment and compile sources.

Finally, after grisly deaths in the sand by Rogues and Archmages and a couple of Cursed, a Dwarf Fighter named Urist (of course) has conquered the sandhole. Next stop, probably the Old Forest again to scum for regen or healing infusions before attempting the Daikara. I want something with 300 or more points and a relatively short cooldown. A "brawler's" or a "titan's" would be ideal.

I also want to replace that Sun infusion with a phase door or a teleport rune. Now that Urist has completed the Antimagic quest and unlocked those skills, it should be OK, right? Oh, well, I'm going to find out.

I finally read that I needed to created an online profile at the te4.org site instead of in the game module. Unfortunately, it didn't upload Snik 4, my best still-living offline character so far, so I'm starting a new one.

Meet Snik 5, halfling rogue. She, like the previous four Sniks was inspired by Burb Lulls' Eden, but not going for the no-stores challenge just yet.