Tactic for getting damn cold wand

[Dudley]

Moon sickle+ any potion
raw chaos+random wand=maybe cold...
risky tactic, is it worth it?

[Travis Prue]

Due to bad experiences with raw chaos, i would say NOOOOOOO

[fazisi]

I believe wands of cold can be generated in ID9-11 or deeper. Just jump between ID8-9 for non-corrupting scumming. If you don't like ID stair hopping and like having your character one-shot with a bad dip, use porc all you want.

[Dudley]

Of course, being careful hit points>300 just, whe you get bored scumming the level just up of it for a wand of cold...

[Twinge]

Raw Chaos is actually pretty safe if you know what you're doing, and probably my most favorite scummy tactic evah -- but that does often leave you with a restrictive set of what you can safely dip. In this case, go to CoC:3 and dip only: Poison, Monster Detection, Item Detection, Gold Detection, Fireballs, Earthquakes, or Destruction. your odds are about 5%.

[gut]

> Moon sickle+ any potion
> raw chaos+random wand=maybe cold...
> risky tactic, is it worth it?

I'd say no, but if memory serves, it can be used as
a way of 'recharging' a wand. It's only for the type
of situation that Twinge suggests, and it's not really
true recharging, as the type of wand will (hopefully)
change.

[Sami]

Usually it's easier to find an ogre magus and lure him to freeze the water for you.

[Dudley]

Didn't know you could do that Oo

[JellySlayer]

Didn't know you could do that Oo

It's ridiculously efficient, actually. The cold bolts shot by ogre magus freeze every square of water they cross, so they can easily freeze ~6 squares at once. You can freeze the entire lake within a few minutes. The tricky part is actually finding a helpful ogre magus.

Ice vortices work too, although you need pretty high willpower for them to get the range you'd probably want.

(Baby) white dragon breath, strangely enough, doesn't seem to work at all.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

White dragon breath seems to be a frost bolt just like the PC's, while the ogre magi spell is described (IIRC) as a "cone of cold", and is different from a frost bolt (for example it can be fired in any direction, like missiles, and not only in 8 directions). So it is not strange that the ogre magi bolt behaves differently to your own bolt when freezing lakes.

Now, why white dragon bolts behave differently from standard frost bolts... no idea, search me.

BTW, when I wasn't able to get a wand of cold with a melee char, I tried this idea of looking for an ogre magus but it's difficult to find one. I got bored and ended up bravely entering the ToEF without enough fire resistance, mindlessly bashing the ACW with the RCT, deciding to dive the CoC without the damned ring, and finally being aged to death by some ghost lords of something. It was fun.