I'm in the Briny Deepers, adventuring. I beat up someone, and a stupid dolphin keeps coming by and getting my loot because I am super slow in the water.
Is there a way to beat him that doesn't involve me becoming faster in the water?
How to keep this stupid dolphin from stealing from me
kingdom-of-loathing
Related Solutions
The thing about the Nemesis fights is that they require a specific class-tuned strategy. For Saucerors, Lumpy (your Nemesis) has a special attack that he'll unleash every now and then. If you don't have a Saucesphere to protect you, it will OHKO you. But if you do have a Saucesphere, Lumpy will absorb the sphere and then hit you with more damage on the second round.
Taking this in mind, the most important stats to worry about are Mysticality and HP. With Lumpy's massive 500 HP stat, you aren't going to take him down unless you have enough Mysticality to cast 100+ damage Saucemageddons. You'll need to maximize your HP as well as you can so you can survive long enough to cast 5 Saucemageddons. You can look here to find some tips on increasing your HP efficiently. However, most of your bonus HP will probably come from effects as most of the best equipment for bonus HP isn't wearable until aftercore.
Don't forget that HP also scales with Muscle. Grab Muscle-boosting equipment and effects like Ferrigno's Elixir of Power to boost your Muscle. And since you're a Mysticality class, use an oil of expertise (cherry cooked with scrumptious reagent) to boost Muscle and Moxie to equal your unbuffed Mysticality.
Lumpy is a simple tank-and-cast fight, so once you have enough Muscle/HP to survive his onslaught, it should be matter of just clicking through.
Adventuring underwater takes longer, so each adventure you go on costs 2 turns.
This can be temporarily removed with the fishy buff so that underwater adventuring only takes the normal single turn. With that said, unless you want to spend a lot of real time and meat tracking down sources of fishy (most of which have per day limits), you are better off just dealing with the turn loss.
Underwater adventuring has some other effects in addition to the double turns, including lower item and meat drops because of pressure penalties. These penalties are reduced by using equipment that "makes you a better diver". There are also specific gear and buffs that drastically improve underwater meat and item drops to counter the penalties as well. Most of that gear can be found in underwater zones, but you can also pick it up for meat at the mall.
Best Answer
Dolphins don't actually steal anything. Even without the dolphins you still usually wouldn't get the item. The dolphins mostly steal the items that the pressure penalty would've prevented you from getting anyway.
In fact dolphins are a good thing as without them you wouldn't know that you could have gotten an item and they also provide a means to get that item back (by beating up the dolphin as Dragonrage explained).
If you aren't in hardcore you can buy sand dollars from the mall in order to get a dolphin whistle to get your items back.
A higher +item% will also help in avoiding the dolphins, as even without a pressure penalty there is still a chance for dolphins to appear.