Longtime player, occasional legitimate winner, recent hardcore scummer. Currently, my paladin lucked into finding the potion belt and is sitting at level 42 with 99s in everything and some backup potions of gain attribute just in case I suffer from attribute abuse which has already happened once to drop me to 98 str. I mean, with the bracers of might I was still effectively 99 but the fact that magically enhanced stats turn green helped me catch it before it got too low. I was stupid and screwed myself out of the Rolf quest because I killed Hotz without first talking to the drunken dwarf. "Wait," I thought to myself. "Maybe the riddle is secondary just to save you from wandering the various posible levels of the ID and the map fragment will show up on its own anyway!" I was wrong and since you can't wish for him, meh. Got all the other fragments though!

I've never really tried smithing (started a smith on Creator's Day that I'll try out when the mood strikes me though) and might be overlooking some useful hints in the guidebook. For people who regularly smith things, does the equipment you use make a difference? Does it help to wear a leather apron? I've got a blessed eternium warhammer, a blessed rustproof anvil, and maxed out Smithing to go with my maxed out stats. Enough holy waters to bless every single ingot I use and I've blessed the equipment I want to smith. I scrolled everything first until the scrolls turned to ash which I've always assumed means they can't be improved beyond that magically. Should I be smithing first and then scrolling? It seems odd to me that even on my first attempt to improve a weapon that I'd fail more than 4 out of every 5 times because I always thought that the difficulty increased with the # of improvements.

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Unrelated #1: My diety hates me. My crowning gift was Trusted One. What self-respecting higher power would ever crown a paladin with anything other than Justifier? Onn can suck it!

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Unrelated and potentially spoiler-y #2: For scummy characters, I've found a strategy that made the fight for the Merchant's Guild loot less dangerous and/or tedious when I can't safely trap myself in a room with just the wyrm at first. If you have a decent level of backstab, good weapon, and high skill, you can one-shot the gray scribes without them raising the alarm to the whole level so I basically Solid Snaked my way through dozens of them. I was never able to one-shot Naar'Dwar, but locking his doors ensured that I was only fighting him for the first few turns and by the time the golems or wyrm found me he was dead. Not having to worry about their spells and having max Healing combined with a crown ring of regeneration plus loads of blessed troll blood potions in my system made it pretty easy after that around lvl 32 or 33 with my scrolled up phase dagger. Tried it with Wyrmlance once after pumping up my polearms skill to 10 or 11 to match daggers, but that went poorly. As a crowned lawful character, the one drawback of backstabbing that I found was that I couldn't take the alignment hit for cleaning out all of the scribes in one go. I ended up saving after every couple of kills after I went from L to L and then reloading after I got the indignant message and angry summoned creatures all around me. Hey, not my fault, I'm just rebelling because I was crowned with a sucky gift. Leave, wear my amulet of order, do a bunch of nice things while killing bad things, come back again once I'm solidly , repeat the process 2 or 3X to get through all the scribes. For a non-scummy game I can only imagine the number of trips this would take for a crowned character because you'd need to be significantly more conservative about those alignment hits. Still, it was the best guild fight experience I think I've ever had.