CrayonRosary

I had already done runs where every possible upgrade went into a Throwing Stone or Studded Gloves. I wanted to try maxing out the Mage's Staff. Normally I would only ever upgrade it to about +12. At +8 you get the max 10 zaps, and upgrading higher is just for damage.

The trick to get max upgrades was to not upgrade the staff until I met the Troll Blacksmith and I could put two of his upgrades into it before spending any scrolls, but you can actually do better than that.

The Old Wandmaker gave me a +3 Wand of Lightning! Perfect! In all of my hundreds of games, I have literally never used the feature where you imbue a higher level wand into the staff for "free" upgrades. I would always dump the first 7 upgrades I found into the staff to smooth out the early game and kill bosses.

This time I waited until I found the troll on Floor 12 and suffered with a +0 staff until then. That was the only real challenge in this mode of play. Then I had the Troll do one upgrade on the staff before I imbued the +3 wand into it, resulting in a +4 staff. Excellent start! Them I dumped 7 upgrade scrolls into it. Now I was suddenly a beast, one-shotting almost everything.

On floor 24 my staff was +19. Just murdering everything. Elemental Blast with Lightning is really good, BTW. Stuns everything in a radius for a long time. And then I made a critical mistake!

I'm so used to doing these challenges with melee characters that I had the brilliant idea to Curse Infuse my staff. That made it +23! Nice! Time to go fight Yog. I try to zap him and paralytic gas comes out. What have I done!? I had no scrolls of Remove Curse. I had to do the whole fight with melee only. Not gonna lie, a +23 staff hits for a lot. My curse was Flashing, and I had Eye of Newt, so it wasn't even a bad curse.

I decided to try the ascent, and it was tough. The imp didn't have any scrolls either. I had already bought and used them. The enemies during the ascent get so much evasion. I used a lot of healing pots. On floor 2 there was an unused Well of Health, so I uncursed my staff so I could have fun zapping things again on floor 1. I must have killed 40 rats just for fun.

Now I want to try this exact run again, Curse Infusion and all, but with Wonderous Resin! I'll have to find a seed that has the resin and another +3 wand. Actually, I'm not even sure that'd be interesting. It would still only shoot cursed zaps, and they would be neutral at worst. That still means I would get a lot of bubbles, paralytic gas, random teleports, and probably not a lot of damage. I dunno. Worth a try.

Turns out, making it to the Troll Blacksmith with +0 gloves wasn't all that hard. There's always the bow and random wands.

Finished the ascent with one potion of healing left and no food except for a couple of hasty blandfruit which I forgot about all game.

Someone on Discord mentioned how good Aqua Brew is, and damn, it's amazing! I made it twice (16 uses) and ended the game with just a couple left. They have so much utility in so many situations. They're like baby Ethereal Chains sometimes: you can push yourself over 1-tile gaps and push enemies into chasms. Plus they break traps, and put yourself out when on fire.... kind of. I swear in used one right on my head, got pushed away, took several damage, and was still on fire. I had to take a step to put the fire out. They're also really good for putting distance between you and an enemy who's all up in your butt.

It's not that hard of a challenge. For one, you still have the bow. Two, the gloves really aren't bad! I was hitting for 20-25 damage, and you get two hits per turn. Also, the Warden is tanky as hell. That barkskin did a lot of work.

Ring of Accuracy so I could punch things better. I got almost every ring this run, and half were +1. I used Accuracy the most.

In order to hit +17, had to wait until I reached the troll blacksmith and spend his favor on two upgrades on the gloves before I could spend any upgrades scrolls. This meant the gloves were useless for most of the first half of the game. So I was using a +1 mace for a long time.

The +3 plate was quite the find.

Spirit Hawk is soooo good! Makes punching Scorpios a breeze due to the crippling and blindness the hawk inflicts. Plus the insane move speed it has. Once in a while I could blind an Evil Eye and avoid getting blasted, but rarely had time to move the hawk away, and it took the blast. Kinda makes the blindness not matter. Just taking aggro was enough for me not to get hit.

It's a silly challenge I've wanted to win. I tried a couple times before and had no luck. The stone was alright as a weapon. It only gets +1/+2 from upgrades. It was doing 35-40 damage sometimes.

Since you start with 3 stones, the Troll Blacksmith can upgrade once and reforge twice, and with 15 upgrade scrolls in the game, you can have a +18 stone.

The Ring of Evasion was originally Tenacity from the Imp, and one Transmute turned it into Evasion. It did a lot of work! Finding +3 Platemail in a grave was clutch, too.

Got the chains super late, but they helped a bit on the ascent where my gloves were doing 0 damage most of the time. I had every artifact except Hourglass and Medalion.

Not pictured here was a +2 Ring of Wealth I found early. It helped tremendously! Mostly for getting extra consumables. Probably turned 3 Transmutes into Recycle for healing pots. Must have drank 25-30 of them during the run. Ended the game with 1 left.

Perhaps let players configure some number such that the game will never plot a path for your character longer than that without first getting your confirmation.

"The path you've chosen is longer than N steps, are you sure?"

And then I also feel this needs to be very easily toggleable. Like a persistent UI button. I'd have it on when exploring and off when backtracking, and those two activities are back and forth all game.

Relevant screenshot below. The entire level is explored, and this damn piece of grass sent my character haywire then I trapped at the X. This kind of thing has happened to me on much later levels and messed me up good.

In the Depths, I would set this number to something like 2 for safety. I can't count how many times a misstap has gotten me zapped, chased, and then pincer-attacked by some second enemy in the room behind me. But then I'd want to toggle it off to run back to an alchemy pot or whatever.

This was a comment I made on a "sink" post the mods deleted, and I think it's an issue that needs addressing, so I'm pasting it here. The comment I replied to said something like "Superscript and spoilers have always worked fine in Sync".

Ironically, that isn't valid Lemmy markdown. Sync should be supporting Lemmy markdown, not Reddit markdown. Here's what your comment looks like on the website:

This is^superscript^ and you can also do~subscript~.

Source:

This is^superscript^ and you can also do~subscript~.

Here's what it should look like:

Instead, you get this:

Personally I don't like Lemmy's syntax for spoilers, but Sync should still support it!

Source:

hidden or nsfw stuff
a bunch of spoilers here

I'm surprised that actually even works in Sync. It didn't used to. However, Sync doesn't show my code block accurately, which is funny as fuck! No app should be editing my code block. Sync is replacing my text with reddit markdown in order for it to display properly. And even when I put that markdown in a code block, it still converts it to reddit style! It also strips out the warning text!

Here is what I actually typed:

And here's what Sync shows:

What a lazy ass way of doing it. It removes an important feature: the warning text, and won't even let me show Sync users how to do a proper spoiler!

Oh, WTF. Sync butchered my comment when editing it! I had to fix it back on desktop.

Sync is not fine. It's full of bugs that the dev is ignoring.

Here's an example. I'll escape the markdown so you see the raw text:

![](https://rimh2.domainstatic.com.au/M3S7ooR3ugIz1AMW8WhMJ1JBivc=/fit-in/1920x1080/filters:format(jpeg):quality(80):no_upscale()/2018585659_8_1_230614_022120-w1920-h1280)

The URL contains unescaped parentheses which are illegal in a markdown link because the link itself must be wrapped in parentheses.

This results in my comments showing no pictures and users only seeing this nonsensical text:

:quality(80):no_upscale()/2018585659_8_1_230614_022120-w1920-h1280

If I try to escape the parentheses, I get this:

Oh, hey, it's the picture!

Whatever admin or bot is editing people's comments when moving pictures to some other host needs to escape special characters in the URLs.

EDIT: It's something to do with my VPN and/or EasyTether, but it only happens in Firefox, so I didn't think that could be it. I commented about my findings below: https://lemmy.world/comment/7585497

I start a video and it either doesn't load at all of stalls within 5 seconds, never to recover.

I've tried everything:

• Deleting every Mozilla folder in AppData to completely refresh Firefox. (after backing up my profile)
• Flushing DNS cache
• Uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox. (Which made me remember I had a policies.json file in the program folder to permanently lockdown the settings I want. So that wasn't the problem either.)

Even when using no extensions like an ad blockers it still won't play videos. Besides, I'm a Premium subscriber. Once in a while a video will work, but it's so, so rare. And often it'll even stop after a minute.

Meanwhile, it'll work in the DuckDuckGo Browser all the time, which is Chromium based.

What do you think the deal is? It broke rather suddenly a few weeks ago. Do you think it's Mozilla's fault, or Google's?

Edited the image to stop putting the person on blast.

I was just trying to go thank some people for recommending a mobile game, and I can't find my original comment where I asked for suggestions nor the inbox replies from the two people who recommended the game.

Does that mean that post was deleted? And all the comments and inbox replies go with it? That's kinda sad.

I suppose this isn't really a Lemmy.world issue, and more like a Lemmy issue in general, but I didn't know where else to ask.

It would be good to display whatever the real error is instead of this erroneous message.

I don't even use filters except for a very short list of user filters from before the block API was implemented in Sync. I do, however have a very large list of blocked communities on the server, but I don't see why the Lemmy API would generate an empty page of posts due to my server-side blocks. Is it not smart enough to generate a page of posts after excluding my blocked communities? I've written a lot of paged database queries with filters, and implementing blocks after performing the query would be pretty dumb.

I can't seem to upload an image of my current mount, but it mounts flat on the top of my dashboard on a little plastic sheet that's permanently affixed to the dashboard.

The mount has a suction cup made of that sticky rubbery stuff. Any new mount needs to mount the same way. I'm hoping some of you have similar mounts and have some experience with what holds such a large phone well. (I have a slim case).