Use ranged weapons, or just get a few levels under your belt. My melee characters can handle them before descending to level two. Mages should not get near them, though. They hit pretty hard.
1: Drink a lot of Booze. 2: Spam Deathly Hex. 3: Mutual Extinction. Also you can Knightly Leap around them, knock them back with a Mr. Handy Wand, or even get lucky with a Mathemagic teleport. Inky Hoglantern works on everything as well.
They are basically stationary and can't hurt you unless you let them. So you can just walk away. Fighting an Eely on floor 1 (or pretty much any floor) is like fighting the Black Knight from Monty Python, really.
The specific reason this is mentioned is because there's a special room that shows up on floor 1 which lets you get a lutefisk cube if you can beat or bypass a couple of eelies. If you don't need your -- let's face it, rather pointless* -- cube right away, you can just ignore them. * I've never gotten anything good from a lutefisk shrine, even if I max it out, which is significantly more difficult now anyway. I've switched to just ignoring the cube now; it just seems to be there to placate the players who think they're Dredmor's maid service.
I've been getting quite good artifact spears from it, but that doesn't help my character, since he uses swords anyhow. Still, better than what I used to get! And it's not terribly hard to get ~500 lutefisk, especially with burglary.
And lo, the clouds broke, and the god of lutefisks didst smile upon his beloved, and upon him bestowed a weapon of unsurpassable might. Ok, maybe it's not that good for my char, but it's still more usable than most Krong 'chants.
I feel like I almost prefer the steel ratchet crossbow with the dodge reduction chance on a melee build I did end up using a clockwork bolt thrower that I found from an evil chest or uberchest or whatever that also granted like, 16 extra holy damage
I pretty much never miss, even with only 28 dodge reduction. Good point, though. I had a pretty crappy bow prior to this. Just never upgraded it.
Just grab a stack of bolts or softballs and range him to death. It might take a bit, but you'll eventually kill him. He can't get into range to attack you.
If you see an Eely on level 1 and you are still in your newbie suit without ranged attacks, then leave and come back later when you are better prepared. That's really the only time when they are difficult to deal with.
I've found that level 1 is long enough that you can level a couple of times, and also find enough consumables to make beating the Eels manageable. Just don't think you have to tackle them right away when you first encounter them. It's not like they're going anywhere!
Yep, and they'll just stop moving entirely. In fact, the game will occasionally generate eelies on land (IIRC only if they're named monsters). Magma eelies are still dangerous in this case because they can spit fireballs at you, but the regular kind just sits there and watches you.
