I'd like to correct/educate you a bit here.

>Invis is useless, because
>anyone who can kill you is going to be able to see invis.

Not true in all cases. For example, a low level giant warrior who is or wants to be a member of the Battle cabal won't have detect invis to hunt your lowbie mage with, even though he could probably kill you easily if he could see you. I agree, however, that it's best to err on the side of paranoia and assume all of your enemies have detect invis.

However:

>Hide
>is ... not quite as useless, but again, anyone who can kill
>you is going to have some way to see you hiding.

This isn't really true at all. In fact, you can always tell just by looking at the who list whether someone can see hidden or not.

It's slightly more complicated than this, but the following list is good enough for your purposes:

If someone is

1) A duergar,
2) A thief,
3) An assassin, or
4) An on-duty Tribunal (i.e., you see TRIBUNAL in front of their name)

they can see hidden. Otherwise, they can't, and there's no way* for them to get detect hidden.

>Accept the
>temporary setback with good grace, and in the long run you'll
>be a better player if you decide CF is still your cup of tea.
>And yes, I'm speaking from personal experience. It ain't fun
>to die in under 5 hits.... repeatedly, but at least you don't
>lose xp. (How do these lowbie players explain having access to
>uber eq if they are indeed supposed to act like they don't
>have any friends coming into this world?)

You'd be amazed what you can get 100% by yourself even from a very low level, once you know the game a little better.

* Yes, yes, there's that one thing, and that one other thing, and those other things, but none of those are especially relevant for relative newbies.