My fourth match in the tournament, versus johnbloodythumbs, was sadly also my last.
You can watch the race from my perspective here, or check out the race stream here.
After the beginnings of my previous two races, I was extremely happy to see both HEAL and HURTMORE in my starting spell list. No difficult beginning! No grinding required at the outset! It was a good thing, too, because the starting strength was as abyssmal as the previous seed (My Agility and MP were fine, though).
Because of the fairly easy beginning, there isn’t much to say about my decision-making process this time around. I did take a few early gambles that didn’t pay off, most notably trying for the Hauksness item earlier than I probably should. That took me about 4 tries, after repeatedly either getting back attacked or missing a HURTMORE on the Armored Knight guarding the item. When I finally did beat him, it turned out he was guarding the Fairy Flute, which was not exactly what I wanted to see.
My big problem this time was in my map-making. Fairly early on, the scale of my map got thrown off, making it close to useless. The end result of this was that I walked by the Mountain Cave at least once, and possibly multiple times, thinking it was a cave I had already visited. When I finally went inside, and when it turned out to contain the Staff of Rain, the last item I was missing, I had a feeling I was in trouble.
As a last-ditch effort, I dove into Charlock, hoping for a level that would let me defeat the Dragonlord. It didn’t happen, and I’m not sure I would have won even if it did due to my being too far behind on experience. Right as I hit the level that I knew would let me win, JBT .doned, ending my tournament experience. At that point, I at least decided to have fun with my elimination, faking out the Dragonlord by saying “Yes” to his offer the first time before saying “No” to “really?”, then by going for a #SWAGOVERLOAD HURTMORE because I knew I had the MP to spare, and finally making a not-as-risky-as-it-seemed swing at the Dragonlord with a spare HEALMORE, as I was counting damage and knew I would win.
I’m not going to lie, it kind of hurts knowing that I could have won this race if not for my own incompetence with map-making. On the other hand, JBT did some grinding on the Armored Knight in Hauksness, whereas I stayed away from it once I got the Fairy Flute. That definitely didn’t help my cause regarding the experience race. It’s also a bit ironic that my fastest time of my four tournament races resulted in a loss. But such is the beauty of Randomizer.
In all, though, I’m happy I entered the tournament. It was great fun, and I’ll try and keep doing DWR races in the future.
-EE
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