Things went MUCH smoother than expected. I finished with 60ish turns left (full organs). I started out thinking, I need a bunch of stuff, so it’ll take a day to finish the war, and then maybe 1/2 a day to do the tower… except the war went smooth, so it went from maybe 1/2 way though to the start of tomorrow….and then it got really good and I thought, well maybe I’ll save a borrowed time just to maybe finish early….
by the time I finished the war, I needed to powerlevel about 2000 substats. I needed a g-string for the tower, but also messed up on shoring and didn’t pick up a 6th floor item. The second gate needed a handsomeness potion, so i found myself south of the boarder (while still on the trail of zombies, bah) with +100ish items. I came across a marachici that dropped the g-string and didn’t think much of it, as I was looking for a handsomeness potion. The hansome marachici finally shows up, and I go to yellow ray him… but find myself short a yellow ray. I’m already on the trail of something else, so I can’t sniff him, and the potion is a 20% drop – between pickpocket and my item bonus, it’s less than a 50% shot – but I managed to pickpocket the potion! So, I run off to do my tower, get ready to blast el diablo with my fire fist, when i realize that I have the gimick, and I can save 5 turns and blast the level 6 monster instead.
Also, the entire run, I was worried about needing the stone marachici instruments – drum, guitar and accordian. well, I was only worried about the drum and the guitar. but guess which one I didn’t have? the accordian. luckily, i had amassed a small fortune (5k) and could afford the chewing gum to find an AT starting weapon.
Overall, the run was a blast, I got to do stuff that I wouldn’t have otherwise in Normal, like use Emilio, or get ice shards from the shower(shards save more turns than stats when you have a difficult time killing stuff). I didn’t worry when the temple took 35 turns and the desert(unhydrated) took 8. or when I messed up something, because eh, it wasn’t a serious run. It was Very relaxing, and worth nearly the same karma per day as my regular 3 day runs.
6/1200 HC is just as good as 3/600 softcore, right? I think it is.
