I've recently started playing ADOM (it was on my list of roguelikes to try out, and I was frustrated with my progress in DCSS...), and I've made faster progress than expected (already found both Jharrod and Yriggs, in my first non-tutorial game), but now I have a question, concerning item identification. I looked up identification on the wiki, and it supplied some factual information (e.g., that there are scrolls and a spell of identify in the game), but very little strategic advice, so I'm looking for just a general pointer in the right overall direction.

To give my question some context, I'm going to contrast how one does identification in two other games that fall on more or less opposite ends of a spectrum: Brogue and NetHack.

In Brogue, the main way to identify items is to use them. There's a lot more strategy to this than one might expect, in terms of when and where to use unidentified items and in what order, and there are tradeoffs (e.g., safety versus efficient use of resources -- for example, it's safer to do identification on a cleared level, but that risks wasting the effect of certain valuable consumables). It's not perfect: weapons and armor, in particular, are problematic: it is never practical to identify most of the ones you encounter, so if the RNG happens to give you a really good one, like a +3 dagger of quietus or a splint mail of respiration) you'll probably never know. But in general, it works pretty well, in Brogue. There are items that can make identification of other items easier or safer, once you identify them, but for the most part you identify potions by drinking them, scrolls by reading them, etc.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is NetHack, wherein identifying random items by using them is extremely dangerous and highly disrecommended unless you have partial information already and really know exactly what you are doing. An unidentified scroll is almost as likely to destroy your armor outright as to enchant it, or could cause amnesia, etc. Drinking an unidentified potion could cause hundreds of turns of hallucination, which is very likely to prove fatal, especially for a beginner. And so on. Unidentified items are quite dangerous to attempt to use, EVEN if known not to be cursed.

Instead, there are dozens of various tricks you pick up for identifying various items in the early game, until you eventually get enough sources of formal identification (a good stack of blessed scrolls, or the spell) to not need to do that any more. You curse-test almost everything (at least with a pet, if you can't find an altar), engrave-test wands, price-check scrolls (looking for 20zm ones, which are scrolls of identify, which you bless before using to maximize the number of items they'll ID for you, and also for 80zm ones...), price-check rings (because any worth less than 200zm aren't worth identifying, and 300zm ones are potentially very important but dangerous to ID by wearing), wear-test non-cursed armor only, and carefully prioritize which items to ID first when you get scrolls of identify, starting typically with any 300zm rings you've found... The Wiki article on Identification, which only covers the _basics_, is some twenty or thirty screenfuls, and that's not counting the article on Price Identification or the articles on the various kinds of items, many of which discuss identification strategies... it's complex, but the short rule of thumb is, you don't use unidentified stuff unless you have a very good idea what you're doing.

So my question is, where, roughly, does Adom fall on this spectrum? I know that some roguelikes pre-identify scrolls of identify. Should I be reading unidentified scrolls looking for scrolls of identify, or not? Should I be trying to work out strategies for identifying items by using them, or should I be patiently waiting, hauling all my loot to a safe area, and looking for other clues about item identities? At the moment, I'm mainly looking for an overall strategy to get me started here, not all the fine points. (I feel like I can't start learning the details until I have some kind of mental framework to attach them to.)