Managing poison

It's quite common for characters to get poisoned during the course of playing, especially at low levels. Around level 70 I started building up a bit of an immunity (idea for devs: if you get poisoned so many times you should start to build up an immunity to that particular poison - e.g. grass snake) against regular snake poison - they still poison me, but the effect seems less devastating than before. Scorpions and spiders still poison me on occasion, but their poison is also less devastating than before.

Mountain Snakes and Grass Snakes still bite with a nasty poison. What I've found is that the poison doesn't actually kill you, it just reduces you to a very low amount of hit points. I have around 600hp and usually get reduced to 20-29hp when poisoned by grass snakes. If you get poisoned try to stay away from mobs of monsters or fast moving monsters that hit quickly. If a monster only does 1 or 2 points of damage you can usually slay the monster while poisoned, but avoid groups because 4 or 5 hp strikes can be deadly when you're poisoned.

Hello=) world and the case of the dying skulls

With 55 Dex and a similar amount of Strength I'm still very much toast against Fire and Poison Skulls. For the last number of levels I found fighting skulls quite frustrating, I seemed to miss them almost all the time, and if I got a pot shot or two in I ended up only getting between 250 - 500 experience per skull, hardly worth the amount of iron potions and healing items I was consuming... That was until the magic users switched from using Lightning to summoning maggots. The maggots would swarm the skulls doing minor damage allowing the fighters like me to swoop in and do some better damage, the result between 2000 and 4500 experience per skull, a remarkable difference! I'm not sure what the magic users were getting for experience, but I sure appreciated the amount of experience I was getting from the skull kills and the fact that the maggot distraction seemed to allow my fighter to hit more often.

Both Hello=) and Jim Morrison helped out a great deal.