http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Nagnazul/morgue-Nagnazul-20181225-071450.txt

Warning: Massive brain dump ahead.

Gozag is incredibly good. Potion Petition gives you access to effectively unlimited amounts of potions, negating one of the major downsides of being a Mummy. You can hit Potion Petition pretty liberally (the extended end-game gives you effectively infinite cash) and you'll generally be offered Haste, and sometimes Haste will come with a free bonus of Brilliance, Agility, Resistance or some other nice perk.

Beyond that, the gold distraction perk is crazy strong. Enemies waste turns over and over just sitting there confused - in a lot of cases, this is pretty close to having permanent haste, since you're getting more turns than your enemies are getting. You can use it to run away, you can use to regen MP (staff of energy!), buff up (potion petition!) or kill more urgent threats.

Shop calling is very, very strong over the course of a long game. The dump speaks for itself:

You collected 75702 gold pieces.

You spent 17837 gold pieces at shops.

You paid 46506 gold pieces to Gozag.

Some highlight of bought items:

d - the 3 shield "Qalios" (worn) {*Corrode Inv rC Int 9} (You bought it in a shop on level 5 of the Depths)

I - the 3 hat of Pondering (worn) {ponderous, MR MP 10 Int 5} (You bought it in a shop on level 13 of the Dungeon)

0 pair of boots of running (You bought it in a shop on level 13 of the Dungeon)

And Bribe is, well...insane. I didn't use it in Zot (didn't really need to) - used it for the first time when I breached the Tomb, and it made the scariest area in the game into a cakewalk (Torment immunity helped). It does make spamming Shatter less good, but bribing a branch makes it massively easier for a relatively low cost.

Being a Mummy is sweet (once you get through the early-game). Torment-immunity and Mutation-immunity makes the end-game a very different beast. Monsters that would terrify a normal character (Tormentor! Ice Fiend! Neqoxec! Cacodemon!) become mildly annoying sacks of HP. Tomb loses a lot of its teeth when you're not getting Tormented every other turn. The only meaningful threats you face are:

-Damnation (that vault with 6 Brimstone Fiends in Gehenna was pretty scary, just as I started getting cocky)

-Dispel Undead (mostly Tzitzimitl - Revenants died to a single cast of Shatter.)

And that's it. Hell's Mysterious Force throwing confusion at you is pretty bad (you can't quaff Curing), but it never seemed to happen when I was surrounded.

Speaking of Shatter, let's talk about it. It's amazing. It made Tomb 1 into a joke -I cleared it as soon as I found it in the Crypts, at XL24, killing everything including the walls. When I came back for Tomb 2, taking the side-stairs meant I landed in a very safe location rather than the fully exposed center of the room, so Tomb 2 was very safe as well.

I think Shatter changed in some recent version - I remember it dealing no damage to insubstantial monsters in the past, but this time around it dealt some damage to everything I cast it at. It definitely deals a lot less damage to flying things, but it definitely damages everything - I used it to kill The Royal Jelly after softening it up with a Torment scroll.

Shatter is really good for sitting on up stairs, casting it over and over until you run out of MP, then go up, regen mana and go down into a different set of stairs. Repeat until the entire floor is cleared. The noise brings in a constant stream of monsters, and stairs mean you're never in any real danger of dying. This tactic works in pretty much everywhere, except maybe Pandemonium.

Where Shatter struggles is killing bosses. Even with a full mana bar, 8 casts of Shatter wasn't enough to kill Gloorx Vloq, which can leave you in a pretty scary position. Iron Shot is definitely better for straight single-target damage, but the limited range is problematic. Orb of Destruction was a reasonable spell for dealing damage at max range, but it's fairly unreliable - it misses a lot, and tends to hit walls if you're standing in a tight area. LRD is good, if you can find a wall to use, but it struggles against high-AC targets. Ultimately there's not really one damage spell that works well in every circumstance - you'll want a few different ones to solve different problems. Fire Storm is the closest thing to an all-purpose nuke, but its damage suffers against fire-immune things.

Shatter does make using allies impractical - Bribe, Lightning Spire and Death Channel all become much worse if Shatter is your primary spell. Still, if you can reliably cast Shatter, you probably don't need allies anymore.

Breaking level layouts with Shatter is very, very strong. Being able to slowly creep through a level, engaging every enemy from max range every time goes a long way towards ensuring your safety.

Passage of Golubria is sweet. Like, really, really sweet. I hadn't given it a fair shake before, but it's definitely worth the spell levels and the minimal Transloc requirement - it's a very, very reliable means of escape for minimal cost. It's definitely not as instantaneous and precise as a scroll of blinking, but if you can plan a few turns in advance that you want to bail out of a fight, it can get you out of melee range and towards the stairs consistently.

Heck, if you're clever, you can set it up before a tough fight, and if things go south you have an escape plan. That was my idea to deal with Ereshkigal's silence aura, except...I forgot to actually do it and just engaged carelessly. Whoops.

Let's talk about silence. Silence sucks. No spells. No scrolls. No god abilities. If you're a Mummy spellcaster, that's just about everything you have - you have no means of escape at that point, and you're at the mercy of whatever melee brute is smacking you down. Which is why you train evocations. I ended up taking down Ereshkigal purely through a pile of Evocation items - Phantom Mirrors, Boxes of beasts, Lamp of Fire, Phial of Floods, Lightning Rod - when you're out of MP, those items are very real offensive options. Lom Lobon ended up dying in a similar way after I expended all my MP blasting him with Iron Shot.

The main reason to train Evocations, though, is the Staff of Energy. Since you can't use Sublimation of Blood, Staff of Energy is your main way to consistently regenerate MP quickly. With decent Evocations training, it enables you to fight protracted battles of attrition, rather than having to retreat as soon as your mana bar runs out. Coupled with Shatter, you can clear an entire floor without ever really resting. Channeling MP is a very good action to take when monsters are distracted by gold, and it's a very good way to spend your turns while waiting for monsters to get in range of your Iron Shot.

Being able to fight protracted battles of attrition is completely mandatory if you're in the Abyss. And even if you're not planning to get the Abyss rune (I certainly wasn't) you will get cast into the Abyss at some point, and you might (like I was) get cast into Abyss:5. I don't know if this is a new feature, but both times I was Abyssed, I was directly placed into Abyss:5. It is a very, very scary place as a blaster-caster. Noisy spells attract an endless stream of semi-dangerous monsters, and you'll quickly run out of MP with no way to rest and recover. I ended up reading four teleportation scrolls in an attempt to run away, only to get teleported in a room with 9 liches and an Ancient Lich. And as I waited for another teleport scroll to kick in, I noticed one of the Liches was standing on top of the Abyssal Rune. I cast Apportation, picked it up and got ported out - the next few monsters I killed caused a way out to appear. Apportation saved my life. Memorize Apportation, folks.

If you're a spellcaster, your body armour situation is usually complicated. If you're just wearing whatever light artifact body armour you came across, you might be leaving a lot of potential AC on the table - I certainly was. I wore some middling leather armour for a long time because the next good artifact I had (chain mail) was too heavy to allow me to cast spells properly. The correct answer was actually to ignore all those artifacts, figure out what encumbrance rating would allow me to still cast all my spells (just try on leather armour, ring mail, scale mail, chain mail, plate, in that order and look at your spell success rate) and then find the heaviest dragon scales I could wear, as shown on this table:

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Armour#Body_Armour

Fully enchanted Swamp Dragon Scales, while they didn't have the pretty white name and the cool random bonus modifiers, did allow me to hit a very respectable 35 AC while maintaining full spellcasting ability. I would've preferred Fire Dragon Scales, but sadly Gozag means Dragons will never drop Scales.

Pandemonium these days is a lot less time-consuming than its previous incarnations. I entered a total of 4 Pandemonium floors that didn't hold a rune - in total, I saw 9 Pandemonium floors to collect all five runes. The demonic rune was the last I found.

Phew, I think that's all of it. Hope this is of help to some of you out there. Merry Christmas!