On Dying And How To Avoid It

[bpat]

Autoexplore: It's much faster and easier, but you're gambling on not getting oneshot. It doesn't even take a rare to oneshot you out of autoexplore, a simple orc master assassin can do the trick. If you want to guarantee a win, always use your scout (Precognition, Track, a summon you can control or send at range, a large radius ball spell you can cast around corners, even Volcano can work in a pinch). That said, I prefer to just autoexplore and eat the occasional unfair oneshot rather than slog through the game without it.

Resting: If you're resting and you don't have sight of every single tile in LOS, you run the risk of something teleporting and then nuking you while resting. Try to backtrack to a safe place to rest rather than just resting wherever you just finished fighting.

Botched psychoports: Psychoport has no minimum radius. Sometimes it can just teleport you right next to the thing you were trying to get away from, wasting a turn and possibly killing you. It'll save your life 99% of the time, but try not to lean on it too hard.

Elandar: He just has the potential to do way too much burst damage unless you dispel Essence of Speed right away. You can hope that he'll target Aeryn, or not crit with his strongest spells consecutively, but you have to dispel Essence of Speed for a guaranteed victory. (oh, or you could just be invincible-- see Aegis or Bloodthirst)

You're absolutely correct about resting and Psychoport risks. With regards to Elandar, he is definitely the more scary (and less tanky) of the final bosses. If possible, you should always try to take him down as quickly as possible. On Normal, this is usually not very problematic since you can actually tank his damage and he only has about 10,000 health with mediocre resists (I've killed him in under two turns on Normal twice, once as Arcane Blade and once as Corruptor). From my experience, the mechanics that are notably bad in this fight compared to the rest of the game are Block and summoning, since Elandar will often just walk away instead of attacking if you try to Block in melee range and your summons will get killed really quickly. Despite these issues, this fight is probably easier than some of the stuff you had to beat to get this far so I wouldn't get too worried about it.