Buddy23Lee's Mummy Fighter guide

The following article is a character guide. This article contains advice from other players, which may be subjective, outdated, inaccurate or ill-advised. Read at your own risk and alter to fit your play style as necessary!

Version 0.14: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

With their limitless ability to channel magical energy and a permanent hunger-free spellcasting, mummies are known as worthwhile spellcasters, but fewer take the time to pair their unique abilities with the pursuits of a melee fighter. In this walkthrough, we take a look at those potentials and find what remarkable warriors these undead characters can actually become.

Getting started

The only meaningful decision to make when starting out with a mummy fighter is weapon selection. Normally, at least a bit of leeway can be given to one’s personal preferences and playstyle, but in the early game, your mummy will be especially weak, so he’ll need every advantage he can get.

One of those advantages is keeping a shield, at least for a substantial chunk of the game, to help make up for a lack of immediate healing abilities (more blocking = less hit points to worry about healing). With that in mind, axes and polearms should generally be avoided, as both of their one-handed options are generally inferior to our other possibilities. Essentially, it comes down to long blades and maces & flails. In terms of speed and damage, both of their most powerful one-handed options are comparable (the bastard sword and eveningstar, respectively) but that bastard sword still uses 30% more dexterity than the bulky eveningstar. Since your mummy will only be marginal in dexterity but pretty good on strength, it leaves maces & flails as the superlative selection.

Remember, even if you find a great mace or the like early on, wielding it will often lead to your demise as you’ll be giving up that extra layer of protection without a shield and your low maces & flails skill will mean you’ll be attacking slowly with it. Save the two-handed options for later.

Getting started

• ‘Maces & flails’ is the most compatible weapon type for a mummy fighter
• Focus your ‘maces & flails’ skill so you can skillfully use increasingly heavier weapons

Extra-conservative gameplay

It’s already a maxim in dungeon crawl to avoid danger when possible, and this (unsurprisingly) rings all the more true for your mummy fighter, particularly in the early game.

Your success is going to be predicated on item acquirement and skill progression rather than spells and innate abilities. As such, and for the time being, you need to play as if you were more of an assassin than a fighter. That is, luring enemies to you, facing them one-on-one, and avoiding groups when possible. Perhaps this is clichéd advice that you already practice, but there are some general strategies that might be a waste of food for a mortal character to constantly practice, but are never uneconomical for your timeless mummy.

Triple visitation

Triple visitation means not only finding all three downstairs, as most do, but using all three to separately journey down and take a peak around before fully engaging the new level. This isn’t always a practical strategy for other characters, primarily when they are facing a tough food shortage. Obviously, your mummy is impervious to this plight, and should make a general habit of this tactic. Individual and weak enemies can certainly be brought back upstairs and finished off under controlled conditions.

Getting comfortable with this tactic makes portals and branch beginnings feel a bit more harrowing than they normally would, as you’ll obviously have only one entry point.

Noise can be your friend

Contrary to the advice of some, noise can sometimes be your friend. Each time you first travel downstairs, particularly if there are no monsters in your line-of-sight, give a shout and see what shouts, croaks, or moans back at you. Not only does this give you some idea of what might be out there and from which staircase you might begin your exploration, but it also awakens nearby sleeping groups of monsters, many of whom might wander off from their group and be faced one-on-one, either immediately or further in.

Pathway of (un)life

Normally auto-explore is a good practice, particularly when you have a vulnerable character who might be ‘one-shot’ killed with just one wrong step. While it’s true that underneath all that armor you're still just a desiccated corpse held together by wrappings, you're also not a flimsy spellcaster, so insta-death isn’t a usual concern.

What is a concern however, is finding a good safe place to undertake your slow but otherwise free healing when you need it. As you also know, few immediate places are better than at the top of those upstairs you’ve established. As such, before you consider doing any algorithmically-based searching, I would suggest you manually map out a connection between those three upstairs. Once again, this might be a waste of food for any other character, but your mummy can never have too much access to what functions as a free healing oasis.

Extra-conservative gameplay

• Triple visitation – once you’ve cleared a level, visit the next one using each of the three downstairs before deciding which one you want to start further exploration from.
• Shout – Each time you go downstairs and are not immediately threatened by monsters, shout and see what shouts back. You can always scurry back upstairs if you awaken something unmanageable.
• Pathway of (un)life – once you do decide where to enter the next level, immediately connect the three upstairs together on your map. Three stairs are better than one.

God selection

Assuming something terrible (and often fire-related) doesn’t happen first, careful gameplay should most often bring your mummy into contact with the altars of one or more gods. Thus, you must decide which deity you wish to give your allegiance, at least for the time being.

Being the reviled undead character you are, you already have limited options. A couple prayers to Fedhas Madash and you’d probably end up a pile of dirt!

If you find an early altar to a god you particularly enjoy, consider using it. After all, even if it doesn’t work out, you can easily get another mummy fighter to dungeon level 2 or 3. However, assuming you don’t, or are particularly mindful of longevity, there is one generally superior option.

Returning again to what was mentioned regarding your mummies reliance on items and skills, no god will provide you a better boon for both than Okawaru. Trog might make a close second, but assuming you haven’t found a good weapon and body armor just lying around, you’re going to need an immediate combat boost to help you strip both off forthcoming monsters. Normally, Trog provides this with his gift of rage, but not for your lifeless ass. Obviously, this gap can’t be bridged with potions either.

Admittedly, being devoted to a deity means you are now somewhat tied to a ‘piety clock’ rather than ‘food clock’, and as such time now does have some bearing upon you, but for the most part this is manageable. While food isn’t always regularly assured in Dungeon Crawl, you will never lack for monsters to kill or corpses to sacrifice.

Perhaps the only perceptible investment with Okawaru is the invocations skill to make your finesse ability reliable, but remember that this requires no more than a few levels and only needs to happen at or beyond the fifth star of piety.

God selection

• If you find an early altar to Ashenzari, Cheibriados, Xom, Makhleb, Nemelex Xobeh, Trog, or Yredelemnul and and you enjoy worshiping them, you should consider doing so.
• If you reach the temple first, or want what is arguably the best god for you mummy fighter, worship Okawaru.
• If you do worship Okawaru, make sure you get a few levels of invocations skill to make your finesse ability reliable.
• Remember that the gods dislike inactivity, so if you do choose to worship one, kiss goodbye either your ability to scum or finding any favor with that god.

Transition to mid-game

Unless you score some lucky item finds which bolster you early on, avoid orc warriors, most uniques, and other similar problems until you’ve earned your heroism ability. Along with a requisitely high enough experience level, this boon will permit you to slay most of these problems even with mediocre gear. Thus, your first priority once you get heroism is to seek out orc warriors with their choice gear and forcibly remove it from them. Although it might take a few, you’re ultimately aiming for plate armor and a morningstar, provided you don’t find any nice artifacts or particularly enchanted items prior to.

One other item to particularly keep an eye out for is an amulet of faith. While these can easily be double-edged devices, there are fewer amulets that are useful to a mummy than most other characters. Certainly rage and gourmand are out of the question, but even warding and resist mutation are not going to be particularly useful, at least during this part of the game.

What’s important is the weapon and armor gifts that Okawaru is presumably going to shower upon you, and the amulet of faith makes those occur 33% faster. Getting better gear in most other equipable item slots is likely well worth this use of your amulet slot.

Branch hopping

Sometimes making the journey from one branch to another can burn through a fair amount of food, especially if you make these trips regularly. Since this is not an issue for your mummy you should be particularly liberal in undertaking these expeditions. Whenever your danger sense alerts you that things are getting rough, and particularly if you encounter a decent unique, back out and take your game somewhere else. There will always be other branches available, and when there isn’t, you’ve reached the late game!

Transition to mid-game

• Gain the heroism ability and use it to slay an orc warrior to get plate armor and a morningstar, if you don’t have them already.
• Consider the use of an amulet of faith to speed up piety gain and increase the frequency of Okawaru’s gifts
• Branch hop as needed between the early and middle game branches, as listed in the walkthrough, especially if you run into a dangerous unique monster.

Transition to late game

If you’ve reached the late game you arguably don’t need a guide, at least not one particularly specific to your mummy fighter; you will be much more well-rounded by this point. Nonetheless, reaching that point requires, yet again, items and skills.

Skills

In terms of skills, you should have reached level 16 maces & flails long ago, or at least stopped training it no sooner than that level, presuming you haven’t made a transition to a heavier and slower two-handed weapon. If your shield is magical enough to warrant keeping, train your shields skill to level 15, unless you have a large shield, which requires skill level 25.

Once those are finished, bring both your fighting and armour skill to a high level. Also strongly consider working on a ranged attack skill. If you keep you shield on, you should probably consider between throwing, slings, and evocations for wand zapping.

Items

With enough time, there is a good chance that Okawaru will gift you either an eveningstar, crystal plate armor, or both. Presuming you’re keeping your shield around, these are the excellent and desired replacements for your plate armor and morningstar. Dragon armors are certainly worthy as well, and you should keep any extras in your inventory or stash for all those needed resistances (most certainly including fire-resistance).

Obviously, there are many other viable options and assortments as well, just try to keep your guaranteed damage reduction in mind, you're still a slow-healing mummy after all...