Something I've started noticing is that as you go down equipment starts to scale up, drinks start to scale up, but food really doesn't. I'm finding bunches of the same cheeses I was finding on the first floors on floors 7,8, and 9. However, things hit harder now and instead of recovering 10 health, I need to recover 50 health. With drinks you start finding the distilled forms of drinks mixed in. There isn't a lot of higher level food. Perhaps some more 20-25 turn food needs to be created to pepper the lower levels. Anyone else get the feeling that there isn't enough food to maintain health levels if you choose to melee in the lower levels?
What difficulty mode? I was able to keep my melee build on Dwarven alive with no problem. Had no escapes, or heal skills.
I admit food is the reason why I always pick vamp + healing on a melee. If I have to look for food each time I take damage, I think I will go crazy. Plus food takes up way too much inventory space, and I hate managing inventory as is.
My characters tend to hoard food; my last warrior had over 1400HP worth of food on entering level 10, granted that he got most of his healing from Crystal Healing in the psionics line. You can make omelets (60HP) and grilled cheese sandwiches (40HP) with the ingot press, no crafting skills required. The ingredients are, respectively, 4 diggle eggs, or 1 sliced bread and 1 "cheese" (only the base, 7HP-heal cheese item works). I haven't recently tried playing a character with no healing from skills though, whether that be vampirism, psionics, alchemy, wand lore, or fungal arts.
My GR/PD character also had tons of food. He had alchemy as well, but I didn't actually use very many health potions until DL10. It probably helped that he had MoA... often he would get attacked for no damage, which would trigger the MoA buff for faster healing. Combine that with food and he tended to be okay.
And the fact that Suit Up doesn't take a hit if you take a zero damage. It's actually really useful. I've cleared entire zoos, only having to recast that buff once or twice.
Depends on the build, but my last one, melee, had to hoard food. I tried not to eat -any- food before hitting 6-7th level or so. Food is a valuable resource. I have a macro that advances the game 10 steps at a time. One side effect is this can greatly increase the monster population as well. Depends on what I'm facing on the current level. If it's true undesirables (like corrupting creatures), I often seek stairs up to the previous level, ascend, sit there and heal, then return to my current level. Otherwise I remain there and do it- it's good for XP .
