Petrify, Earthquake, and Dupin' Rarez

I have a few curiosities after my last game:

1. I found out Petrify doesn't summon guards or Curse you when you use it to kill a shopkeeper, although it does take a while to stick. Are there any other good "free" ways to kill shopkeepers?
2. Earthquake doesn't work on "special" levels, OK, I get that. In the process of spamming it as I walked my Wizard up from D:50, there were a couple of what appeared to be totally normal levels where it failed. My best guesses are "where the wall of fire used to be" and "where the Eternal Guardian used to be," but I'm really not sure. Does anyone else have any better ideas? I burned a couple of Blessed Scrolls of Magic Map, so I know there was nothing hidden.
3. I have frequently seen wands duplicate themselves when manipulated, usually in the process of failed last-charge-wrenching. Does anyone know what causes this, or how to reproduce it reliably?

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Originally Posted by DreadArchon

I found out Petrify doesn't summon guards or Curse you when you use it to kill a shopkeeper, although it does take a while to stick. Are there any other good "free" ways to kill shopkeepers?

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Attempted petrification will also turn Thrundarr hostile without alarming the entire town. I believe this is a bug, and I've listed as such in my notes file.

Anyway, about killing shopkeepers scot-free, you can make them (and only them) hostile shooting a bolt spell at them while they're outside of your LOS, or with you surrounded by darkness. gut made a commented demo of a relatively low-level character killing Waldenbrook this way, which you can find on the ADOM Guidebook's homepage.

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Earthquake doesn't work on "special" levels, OK, I get that. In the process of spamming it as I walked my Wizard up from D:50, there were a couple of what appeared to be totally normal levels where it failed. My best guesses are "where the wall of fire used to be" and "where the Eternal Guardian used to be," but I'm really not sure. Does anyone else have any better ideas? I burned a couple of Blessed Scrolls of Magic Map, so I know there was nothing hidden.

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Outside of the CoC, I know it also doesn't work on SMC, ID, VD, DD and VDDL. I was surprised about the ID. There are probably more, but I couldn't tell you because I never use Earthquake. Despite its rarity and cost it's one of the most useless spells as I see it.

Here's a list of "special" levels in the CoC, you may want to try it on each one and check the results.

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I have frequently seen wands duplicate themselves when manipulated, usually in the process of failed last-charge-wrenching. Does anyone know what causes this, or how to reproduce it reliably?

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Can you elaborate on this? I've never experienced anything similar.

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Originally Posted by anon123

Here's a list of "special" levels in the CoC, you may want to try it on each one and check the results.

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Ah, I bet it was the Wall of Fire level and the Portal Level. I forgot about the Dwarven Door.

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Can you elaborate on this? I've never experienced anything similar.

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Oh. I thought it unlikely that I could find something new or unusual.

I frequently notice, during attempts to wrench a charge from uncursed wands of Door Creation or Trap Detection, that failed attempts add new copies of the wand to my inventory. I think it may have happened with a Digging once or twice and perhaps even a Fireballs and a Wonder, but normally I only notice it with junk wands because most of the time I can recharge wands I like.

My Wizard, however, was blessed with an early Mana Battery corruption that I preserved. This made the effect highly conspicuous, and it was here that I realized how common it was. I also noticed that I never had more than two copies of a given wand.

The new wands appear next to the old wands in the item list.

Here is an example: I had only one (drained, uncursed) Wand of Trap Detection going into the Mana Temple, but Alertness and Detect Traps were both at 100 and I had a Ring of Searching, so meh. I tried twice to fire the Wand for the first hallway (unsuccessfully) and then noticed that I now had two identical (drained, uncursed) Wands of Trap Detection next to each other where previously I had had one. It took me a couple of tries to wrench a charge out, bringing me down to one wand.

At the next corner, that one duplicated itself before I wrenched a charge out successfully.

At the third corner, the same occurred.

At the last corner, it happened again, and I eventually left the Mana Temple with a Wand of Trap Detection still available in my inventory. Handy, but weird.

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Originally Posted by DreadArchon

Here is an example: I had only one (drained, uncursed) Wand of Trap Detection going into the Mana Temple, but Alertness and Detect Traps were both at 100 and I had a Ring of Searching, so meh. I tried twice to fire the Wand for the first hallway (unsuccessfully) and then noticed that I now had two identical (drained, uncursed) Wands of Trap Detection next to each other where previously I had had one. It took me a couple of tries to wrench a charge out, bringing me down to one wand.

At the next corner, that one duplicated itself before I wrenched a charge out successfully.

At the third corner, the same occurred.

At the last corner, it happened again, and I eventually left the Mana Temple with a Wand of Trap Detection still available in my inventory. Handy, but weird.

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Since you say that was your only wand of trap detection, this definitely sounds like a bug, and a pretty abusable one at that. Depending on which wands can be affected, a wand of wishing with 0 charges could be abused for potentially infinite wishes by wrenching the second wand to destruction for a free wish, then duplicating the first one over and over. Furthermore, I think luck affects your chance of wrenching the last charge, so dooming could be used to avoid destroying the initial WoWi (if I'm right).

You should report this on the bug tracker. I'll see if I can reproduce it.

I wasn't able to duplicate any wands. Perhaps you have a savegame from a situation where you could easily trigger the bug?

I've been too busy to worry about it lately. I'll try later.

Have to ask... is it possible that you might have just had multiple copies of the same wand, but they weren't together in the stack? Items sometimes move around in your inventory, so if you've got a tonne of wands in your inventory, you might see others moving up and down the line.

I can't reproduce the bug.

As an aside, I have a hard time imagining any circumstance under which mana battery could be construed as a blessing. It is a dreadful corruption.

Wands of the same type will re-sequence pretty often; usually when you use one down to 0 charges it seems. If you have 2 wands of cold non-adjacent in a long list of wands, the second one will jump next to the first one when that first one is zapped down to 0 charges. Seems intentional, in effect helping players find similar wands they are using without having to scroll through a few pages of text... you probably had multiple wands of trap detection. There does seem to be a few weird nuances to this mechanic though, but its a welcomed convenience overall. :)

I still haven't had a chance to try to reproduce this, so for now I'm just going to assume I was tired (or whatever) and simply didn't see other wands in the list.

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Originally Posted by JellySlayer

As an aside, I have a hard time imagining any circumstance under which mana battery could be construed as a blessing. It is a dreadful corruption.

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If you don't need more than a few zaps of any given wand, then a spellslinger can really make good use of faster PP regen, cheaper spells, and hundreds of extra total PP.

My non-spellslingers would of course never keep Mana Battery.

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Originally Posted by DreadArchon

If you don't need more than a few zaps of any given wand, then a spellslinger can really make good use of faster PP regen, cheaper spells, and hundreds of extra total PP.

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Most of these effects don't apply to priests or wizards fully anyway though--the spell reduction is capped at 50 percent, so your class powers eventually cancel it out, and PP regeneration is capped at 1 PP per turn, which is mostly covered by concentration. I guess for a Necro or Druid who doesn't get these benefits, it might be more worthwhile.

The extra PP is nice, but in the mid-to-late game, you aren't limited by total PP anyway, but by PP regeneration. Your PP charge runs out pretty fast, then you just cast from HP for the rest of the game since HP is easier to recover quickly, and HPcasted spells are extremely cost-effective.

I didn't realize Battery was so limited.

Still, the PP cost reduction does reduce costs a little and make your PP charge run out that much slower. 1-5 points of PP saved per spell adds up fast if you're casting that spell every turn, like my Acid Balls in a greater undead vault.

I was worried about my Mana stat, so I tried to avoid HP casting. I had like 1200 PP by the time I got to the Mana Temple, so both there and on D:48 it was quite effective to pray for power.

Casting from HP in the endgame is so popular since the Mana score stops mattering. You don't need to preserve it anymore since the game is soon to be over anyway.

The easy answer is that mana battery is great if you don't have wands. The reason it's a poor answer is that most characters have wands, and all want to both use them and keep them (mana battery doesn't completely lock you out of wand use after all). But if you, let's say, play corruption trap lottery with a spellcaster such as an elementalist, you could probably make use of the extra PP. That is the contrived circumstance under which it is useful. It's much less contrived than it would have to be for stiff muscles.

My views on mana battery: it's one of the corruptions that makes me go "oh, f*** you, RNG" when I receive it. And I play wizards!

Also, I never cast from HP, that's one of my quirks. I guess I don't want to ruin the beautiful Mana score I built over the game, even if we're at its end. Moving my finger from the Escape key to press Y is also a small nuisance :p

If you cast from HP consistently from the ToEF to the end of the game, you shouldn't lose more than 1 or 2 points of Mana.

HP casting is ridiculously overpowered.