Spoilers for final quest.

I just beat the first two forms of the sorceress, only to discover that I'd forgotten my wand. http://www.cellar.org/images/newsmilies/mecry.gifAll those star throwing stars and green pixel potions down the drain.

Honestly, the best items I've found for beating the Sorceress are the Plot Hole and the Cast. Both have a pretty high success rate against the Naughty One, and the former has a nice side effect of occasionally confusing her to the point where she takes no action that turn. I just finished battling her a moment ago, and hit the second form with five or six in a row.

In a nutshell, I use mostly standard attacks against the first form, letting my Acid-Squirting Flower and Pickle do the heavy work of damaging; once I'm down 40 or 50 HP from my max, I start using Casts every turn to get back up to full strength. This lets me go into the second form with 75-100% of my HP intact, and then I bomb her with Plot Holes or whatever else is handy when I run out.

Oh, and Ronin is only _600_ turns now. Yow.

Hmmm, farming for casts could also be more lucrative than stars... But fewer stat gains. Same with plot holes and potions, but better stat gains... I still don't have the cash to feel comfortable buying enough sorceress battle items to get through the fight, unless casts are cheap.

Unfortunately, my current sorceress challenger is a disco bandit, so the standard attack uses MP; hence the green potions. And he doesn't have a pickle yet.

I think Jick said that Ronin will eventually level off at 500. It will probably be at that point that I will be able to take advantage, since I am doing a few hardcores now to get the extra adventure items from pastamancer runs.

:P Out of Ronin. Kmail Nataya the character name you want one for.

The former are. (Current Mall price: 100 meat.) I usually accumulate a dozen or two of them while plowing through their area, as they're very common drops and I generally spend a lot of early-game time in that area. Even if the Sorceress interrupts half of them, you'll still likely come out ahead on HP.

The other item I mentioned is pricier, but since that's my main endgame-levelling area, I tend to accumulate a bunch.

In a typical Ascension, I never even _see_ the Hole in the Sky. By the time I'm powerful enough to adventure there, the Sorceress is dead and I'm on to my next time through, and you can purchase all six of the necessary items from that area from the Mall on a one-time basis. That's the hat, pants, buckler, a weapon, familiar and key, for those playing at home.

We really need to get Toad to implement mouse-over spoiler tags.

Also, the DB's standard attack doesn't use MPs, though Moxious Maneuver does. Yes, I really attack the first form with the Wand.

Yikes! You really do rely on your pickle!

I wonder if they offer a course in KoL?

Brought to my attention: if you can't afford a TPS and don't have the Disco Bandit's Cocktailcrafting skill, try Eggnog ((Bottle of Rum + Spices) + Ghuol Egg). 3 drunkenness, ~7-8 adventures and some nice stat gains, and all three ingredients are common.

Current status:
Char #1 (TT->PM->SA->TT->DB->DB->TT->AT->SC->AT) is in position to Ascend on Day 4, now that Ronin has been dropped to 600. Damn.

EDIT: Yep, beat the Sorceress on Turn 688. Up to 2.7 million meat.

Char #2 (SC->DB->TT->PM->DB->TT->AT->DB->TT->SA) is growing more slowly; he benefitted from the Moxie days, but obviously not as much as the AT did. In the Orc Chasm now, probably two days away from Ascending again.

Both need to go through PM again to pick up Leash of Linguini so that I never have to go to the Cake-Shaped Arena again.

Neat trick of the day for Ascenders...

If you are on a "normal" ascension path, you will get Liver of Steel from the Deep Fat Friars (boosting your too-drunk-to-continue limit from 15 to 20). If you are on a Teetotaller path, you get Stomach of Steel instead (boosting your maximum food intake per day from 15 to 20), but can't drink alcohol.

So when you Ascend, select a Teetotaller path. Stay on it just long enough to clear the Friars quest and get Stomach of Steel... then go into Account info and go back to a normal path. You can now eat four Chow Meins per day instead of three and still drink, which will more than compensate for the 15-drunkenness limit. (About 10 adv and 80 substat points per day extra, on average.)

I _so_ need a <a href="http://store.asymmetric.net/">Sabre-Toothed Lime T-Shirt.</a>

I had been wondering for a while (couple years, actually, but I never cared enough to actually check until I remembered to do so today) why your links don't spawn a new iteration of the browser. Now I know why, but I still wonder why you do that ...

Because when I first learned HTML, I used "a href" tags to generate links, and haven't found any compelling reason since then to do it any other way.

Both of my characters are now hardcore pastamancers... Annoying, but I have only myself to blame. I want the solitaires!

Eleven times each now. I'm starting to feel like Ric Flair.

Two casters, each of which didn't cast a single spell-attack until the final battle. Three Kickback Cookbooks/Enchanted Toothpicks + Stream of Sauce/Minor Ray of Something == one dead Sorceress with ease.

Two Muscle days coming up. Sounds like a good time to pick up Lunging Thrust-Smack (to go with Eye of the Stoat) and maybe Astral Shell, since there's been indications that the Moxie-centric combat system may be tweaked in the future.

Muscle day _and_ Extremely Salty Dogs in the Gnomes' Microbrewery. Good day.