Ascended my first character in
Slash'EM today. It's such a nice change of pace after beating the crap out of Nethack. The dungeon is a lot longer (62 levels for me, plus a bunch of neat
extra branches), but Gehennom is less obnoxious.
What's neat about all of the extra branches is that almost the entire ascension kit is guaranteed at one point, so you don't have to wait for the castle wand to fill out your gear (the castle, incidentally, is now somewhere between DL 45-50ish).
I found out that Demogorgon has his own level now, and I didn't even notice him teleporting on top of me and making me deathly ill, because I was busy killing a pile of nasties. Luckily, I had switched from my amulet of flying to an amulet of life saving on the previous level!
There is much more variety in (
dangerous)
monsters, making all points of the game considerably more tricky. Of course, by the end of the game, I had 11 unused wishes, 4 mostly unused magic markers, and had genocided 81 species, so it wasn't too bad, between conflict and my heavily enchanted submachine gun with enchanted bullets.
I played a doppelganger, which is sort of EZ-mode for the early game, as they get polymorph on command and a neat technique, but I found out later on that doppelgangers aren't just restricted in #twoweapon, they can't twoweapon *at all*. This made my late-game damage output embarrassingly bad, because you *can* dual-wield artifacts in Slash'EM, and the higher level enemies have craptons of health.
1 6732840 Esper-Rog-Dop-Fem-Cha (Poly-Art) ascended to demigoddess-hood. 596 [596]
PS: My previous character died after stumbling upon a magic portal on DL16 that led to a zone full of liches, vampires, and
Vecna. He teleported on top of me, and started psi bolting me for 28d6 damage, on top of his 9d6 cold damage normal attack. I wouldn't have been able to hit him anyway, because I subsequently found out that hitting Vecna required a +4 or better weapon (an AD&D rule that hadn't been implemented in vanilla).
