I had already done runs where every possible upgrade went into a Throwing Stone or Studded Gloves. I wanted to try maxing out the Mage’s Staff. Normally I would only ever upgrade it to about +12. At +8 you get the max 10 zaps, and upgrading higher is just for damage.

The trick to get max upgrades was to not upgrade the staff until I met the Troll Blacksmith and I could put two of his upgrades into it before spending any scrolls, but you can actually do better than that.

The Old Wandmaker gave me a +3 Wand of Lightning! Perfect! In all of my hundreds of games, I have literally never used the feature where you imbue a higher level wand into the staff for “free” upgrades. I would always dump the first 7 upgrades I found into the staff to smooth out the early game and kill bosses.

This time I waited until I found the troll on Floor 12 and suffered with a +0 staff until then. That was the only real challenge in this mode of play. Then I had the Troll do one upgrade on the staff before I imbued the +3 wand into it, resulting in a +4 staff. Excellent start! Them I dumped 7 upgrade scrolls into it. Now I was suddenly a beast, one-shotting almost everything.

On floor 24 my staff was +19. Just murdering everything. Elemental Blast with Lightning is really good, BTW. Stuns everything in a radius for a long time. And then I made a critical mistake!

I’m so used to doing these challenges with melee characters that I had the brilliant idea to Curse Infuse my staff. That made it +23! Nice! Time to go fight Yog. I try to zap him and paralytic gas comes out. What have I done!? I had no scrolls of Remove Curse. I had to do the whole fight with melee only. Not gonna lie, a +23 staff hits for a lot. My curse was Flashing, and I had Eye of Newt, so it wasn’t even a bad curse.

I decided to try the ascent, and it was tough. The imp didn’t have any scrolls either. I had already bought and used them. The enemies during the ascent get so much evasion. I used a lot of healing pots. On floor 2 there was an unused Well of Health, so I uncursed my staff so I could have fun zapping things again on floor 1. I must have killed 40 rats just for fun.

Now I want to try this exact run again, Curse Infusion and all, but with Wonderous Resin! I’ll have to find a seed that has the resin and another +3 wand. Actually, I’m not even sure that’d be interesting. It would still only shoot cursed zaps, and they would be neutral at worst. That still means I would get a lot of bubbles, paralytic gas, random teleports, and probably not a lot of damage. I dunno. Worth a try.