Draconic Quylthulgs in Princess quest

[malice]

Mostly through luck I've managed to get an Archer to character level 38. I am on level 35 of Mordor and have come across a Princess quest to kill 7 Qs. The problem is I'm not too sure how I can take them out without getting myself into a world of hurt. Obviously wandering into their line of sight isn't going to help as they'll either blink away or summon, neither of which is desirable.

Here is a screenshot of the layout


Any suggestions?

[Yottle]

My first advice is to skip the level and come back later (or not at all). You can pay the Thunderlords to teleport to level 39. Princess rewards are unlikely to be much help to you at this stage.

It does matter what kind of Q they are. If they are greater foo Q, then forget it.

If you are determined to try to do the quest:

Make sure that you have some kind of monster detection. Most likely one or more of them will blink out of the room.

Use exploding ammo.

That is not necessarily bad, because maybe you will be able to get line of sight advantage on them and be able to shoot them at your leisure.

If you can grow trees, cast Stone Prison, or have some other way to fill up vacant squares you can adjust the terrain to your advantage.

If you have the ability to stop teleportation, then you can let them blink out and become separated, then hunt them down one at a time with anti-TP on.

Wield a dark sword, preferably one with negative to-hit and to-damage.

Note that this is likely to end badly unless you can totally prevent summoning. They can summon mildly out of depth monsters, which at level 38 in Mordor is almost certainly more than you can handle.

[malice]

Thanks Yottle, some great tips there.

My first advice is to skip the level and come back later (or not at all). You can pay the Thunderlords to teleport to level 39. Princess rewards are unlikely to be much help to you at this stage.

Don't I have to complete all the Princess/Fumblefingers quests in order to complete the game (not counting the main quest obviously)?

It does matter what kind of Q they are. If they are greater foo Q, then forget it.

No, they're Draconic Qs. Mind you I've already had to bolt out of the level a couple of times after nearly getting surrounded by dragons.

Make sure that you have some kind of monster detection. Most likely one or more of them will blink out of the room.

Yeah, this is what's proving quite awkward at the moment as all I've got is detection as provided by scrolls from the shop so once one of them blinks it becomes very time-consuming to track them down.

Use exploding ammo.

Yeah, I think this is probably my best bet. I'll go through my horded pile of elf skeletons and get some exploding ammo.

get line of sight advantage on them and be able to shoot them at your leisure.

I guess this is the root of the problem, I just don't quite know where to stand to get line of sight advantage.

If you can grow trees, cast Stone Prison, or have some other way to fill up vacant squares you can adjust the terrain to your advantage.

The only useful thing I've got is a wand of shake which hasn't helped too much so far unfortunately

[Yottle]

Princess quests have nothing to do with completing or winning the game. By level 30 the chance of getting a useful reward is pretty small. Fumblefinger quests aren't necessary either, but I never skip them- the reward is too great to pass up.

If you arrange things correctly you can target a monster but it can't target you. The simplest case is when it is next to a corner of a corridor and you are a step further down on the other side of the corner:

m##$
. . @.
###$

This works great for monsters that can't move, like Qs. The same thing can be set up sometimes at longer distances, but I don't know the exact algorithm.

[Lord Estraven]

If you're lucky, you could eventually get exploding ammo with the Gravity damage type. I wouldn't recommend scumming ammo creation though, it's a waste of time (and I mean real time).

If you could get Antimagic from Fumblefingers and find a Dark Sword of Nothingness somewhere, you might have shot at it (so to speak). Otherwise I'd recommend skipping it, and maybe never going back.

Also BTW - exploding ammo does not do a whole lot of damage to start with, and IIRC the damage drops with distance from where it hits.

(IMHO, archers and archery are kind of underpowered in ToME, especially for characters that don't get some kind of magical skill from FF. Archers combine the worst qualities of other classes - they have no utility spells to start with, are poor at melee, and depend largely on item quality to inflict sufficient damage.)