http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Nagnazul/morgue-Nagnazul-20170625-000934.txt

I did it!

28 hours, 162000 turns, two weeks later, I got my first ever 15 rune win - with a Centaur Hunter, worshipping Nemelex the whole way through.

Some highlights/lessons learned:

-The game never generated a single centaur barding - the one I wore came from a scroll of acquirement I found in Swamp:4. It did, however, generate plenty of Naga Barding, including the Lightning Scales.

-I wore a 5 amulet of reflection for 90% of the game - the game never generated a single good amulet artefact amulet. The one I wore at the end was found in Tartarus 7, just before picking up the 14th rune.

-I chose dex for all my stat increases, assuming it was the better choice for a bow-user. Testing with fsim revealed that dex has minimal effect on damage output, and str leads to much better results ( 5 strength leads to 11.1% increase in damage, whereas 5 dex leads to 0.2% increase in damage)

-I started putting points into Spellcasting, Translocation and Hexes around Depths 3 to learn Portal Projectile - from there, I picked up several other spells which were immensely helpful. All-stars were Apportation, Renegeration, Sublimation of Blood, Portal Projectile and Shroud of Golubria.

-Apportation is no joke - I entered an abyss vault with a half-dozen monsters between me and the Abyssal Rune. I apported the rune and picked it up - the Abyss teleported me to a different area the very next turn. It was also immensely helpful to minimize the amount of turns and exploration necessary to pick up arrows after a fight - surprisingly important in the Abyss and Hells.

-Regeneration is immensely helpful in Hell - I kept it up virtually all the time I was there, minimizing the amount of turns I needed to rest. Sublimation of Blood combos very well with it.

-Portal Projectile was a godsend - letting me summon an army with Decks of Summoning, and then hanging back to snipe at key targets. For example, this is how I took down Ereshkigal:

http://imgur.com/a/Rp5Kx

(Ereshkigal clones from Phantom Mirrors - always pick up Phantom Mirrors and use them against bosses.)

-While clearing Dis (the third Hell I tackled) I realized I wasn't going to have enough arrows to carry me through the rest of the game - Each Hell consumed ~200 arrows, and I had less than 400 going into Dis, which would leave me with no arrows for Tomb. So I picked up Cerebov's Sword, and to my great surprise, even at minimal skill, it hits like a truck. Enemies that took 5 arrows to kill were going down in 2-3 turns to Cerebov's Blade, so I switched over to Long Blades despite having used Bows all game.

-Tartarus is definitely the hardest of all the hells, possibly even harder than Tomb. Ereshkigal very nearly killed me the first time I attacked her, and her aura of Silence made retreat impossible. Even with rN , Torment will get you down to critical health extremely quickly. I never found a good answer to Torment, other than "kill anything that Torments as soon as you see it".

-Nemelex decks are very, very potent tools. A deck of summoning will give you enough allies to overwhelm any fight in the game - not to mention it sometimes summons Catoplebas, whose attack can and will Petrify any enemy up to and including Cerebov. I sniped at Cerebov for 20 turns while he sat there uselessly in a Catoplebas cloud.

-Decks of destruction will wreck any large group of enemies, as long as you're willing to make a lot of noise in the process. Common effects include blowing all nearby enemies away, summoning a ring of thunderclouds and creating random explosions on top of every single enemy.

-Decks of escape aren't the best thing to use when you're in deep trouble, but a max-invocations Elixir card will take you from empty to full HP and MP in the space of a few turns. A stacked Legendary deck of Escape is a very useful tool.

-I never used Triple Draw, but I used plenty of Deal Four on destruction decks. Stack Five seems best used on Decks of Escape, to guarantee that Elixir card when you need it.

This was fun, although incredibly stressful at times and very time-consuming. This was my third win in a row, and probably my last for a while. Maybe I'll try some spellcasters next, maybe an Octopode Transmuter...

Player profile: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/nagnazul.html