u/_kvltworx_

In recent runs, I seem to have come across what seems like a higher than average number of spawn camped staircases upon first going down (and in the worst case scenarios, all the stairs are in one LOS area)

In the second pic, I was a midgame PoEn with really high stealth and everything was still immediately awake!

As a mediocre player I usually brute force it by just burning through consumables, but obviously this seems suboptimal, wondering what everyone’s favorite strategies/tricks for beating these spawn camped floor/branch entries are?

Edit: I should say on midgame characters especially since a late game blaster can just Chain Lightning/Shatter their way out obviously

Morgue:

https://crawl.dcss.io/crawl/morgue/stinkchinker/morgue-stinkchinker-20260424-212915.txt

I wanted to try Oni again, as that was my 2nd ever win (and was basically carried by the fact that I got Skullcrusher), and had also never done a serious CA run. It turns out Oni have to be one of the strongest hybrid species in the game!

The new Parchment system really pushes you to adapt to spell drops in a very Gnoll-like fashion so early on getting Clockwork Bee and Blazeheart pushed me towards FC. Never did find Tampering or Sawblades sadly and didn’t get Lightning Spire until Zot (where it still put in work! gotta be one of the best Lvl4 summons)

Casting got me through Lair/Orc and didn’t find too much spellwise after that, so handled most of the S branches with melee, Detonation Catalyst was great in the Swamp to get the steam clouds when I hit things over water to limit LOS on big groups. With lots of evokable/large rock use managed to get through all the nasty uniques that spawn in the S branches.

I’m dumb and kept forgetting to abandon Ignis when it was “safe” (at a branch level where shafting/having no rF isn’t too dangerous, etc) so when Vaults came around I decided to just see if I could finish the run with Ignis as Paragon was almost castable - only to run into the most brutal Depths 3 jump scare of multiple Wyrmholes, Grunn, Juggernauts and of course being Howled and then subsequently miasma’d by Hell summons, going down to close to single digit HP multiple times, Oni potion attack saved me both there and also in V:5 when going down a hatch still put me by the damn stairs.

Paragon with Freezing Executioner’s Axe did what you would expect to Draconian mobs in Zot, and funnily having Ignis meant the OOW Ostracise attack basically did nothing. Burned the last of my blink scrolls on the orb run to escape the usual Pan lord/Seraph chase and finally used Rising Flame on D1 to escape! I like to think this character became a missionary of Ignis after leaving haha