How to make copy of an artifact (instruction)

[Yermak]

I have crazy idea: you can get a copy of an item (even artifact). How?
One of the numerous chaos weapon effects is duplicating your enemy (its copy will have same equipment).
Here is the detailed instruction:

1. Find some chaos weapon with low base damage and of a type you aren't skilled with.
2. Make this weapon have +X,-5 enchantment by engaging lots of jellies (you can breed them beforehand).
3. Put on as many items with negative slaying bonus as you can (but try not to hurt your accuracy much).
4. Pick a monster interested in picking up the item you'd like to duplicate, let's call it Gordo (Gordo should be tough enough so you couldn't one-shot him with some unlucky effect of your weapon).
5. Make Gordo pick up that item and some heavy armour to make him more durable.
6. Fight Gordo (heal Gordo when he's damaged severely (by wand or by dropping healing pots) or leave him so he could regenerate) until he gets duplicated. I think fighting Gordo in the Temple will be the best:
   • Temple is small, you'll have no problems finding Gordo there after letting him to regenerate;
     
   • you won't be annoyed by shafting effects of your weapon;
     
   • you won't be screwed much by OOD monsters on D:4-7 when Gordo is regaining health in Temple.
   I think tediousness of luring Gordo to Temple is nothing compared to tediousness of fighting him.
7. Kill both Gordo and Gordo. Get your items.

Main problem here is that you can banish Gordo in the process. In this case you'll have to dive in Abyss to find Gordo and retrieve your item. Yikes!

What to duplicate? First of all, what kind of items do monsters pick up?

• Surely, armours and weapons. But do you really want to have two Plutonium swords or two Maxwell's Patent armours? No, unless you worship Beogh or Yred (or have a mercenary). (Though I like mental image of orcish army of clones roaming the dungeon.) Still, you can double your bundle of rare penetration or steel bolts or ammo of dispersal.
• Potions. No use here, since Gordo is likely to finish all of them before you clone him.
• Wands. Same, but at least you will have two empty wands.
• Scrolls. Only scrolls that monsters do pick up are blinking and teleportation. They use tele only when critically wounded and I never saw them using blinking one. So possible here.
• Jewellery. The main reason you may want to try to pull this, especially as an octopode. I do not know which monsters will be willing to pick up which jewellery, so if you have some experience with this, please share.

I made some calculations based on numbers got from code diving:

Spoiler: show

Chance to duplicate the target with chaos weapon: 0.15%.
Chance to banish the target with chaos weapon: 0.25%.
If Gordo has some resistances (natural or acquired via your item), numbers are a bit higher, but ratio is the same - 3/5 (unless Gordo is blink frog which makes him unable to pick up items).

So it's a bit more probable to banish Gordo than to duplicate. I don't know how problematic is to find certain abyssed creature but I suppose it will always be on Abyss:1. (Is there risk of not finding it at all? In this case you'd be in danger of losing your item forever.)

As been said this idea is crazy, so it shouldn't be tried in normal circumstances unless you want to have some scumming fun.

Edit: It looks like Gordo has to be some unique for not to get killed by banishment. Preferably Maurice, who can steal any of your items.
Also my theory explains this log: http://crawl.develz.org/morgues/0.9/xom ... 165025.txt

[godzilla]

Problem is, normal monsters aren't banished; they're just instantly killed and all their equipment destroyed. So Gordo would probably have to be Ijyb; and even then his equipment would probably get mulched (I have to check that, though.)

[Siegurt]

Also monsters don't pick up things that you drop (They pick up things other creatures drop, but not things you drop)

So um, you can get a duplicate of something a monster's picked up but you haven't, which means (by virtue of you never having seen it, and your instructions are about artifacts) that you're duplicating some un-identified artifact that you managed to find laying around on the floor, by luring a unique to it (since banishing a non-unique just kills them)

Which means for a colossal waste of time (and likely use of a number of consumables) you'll be able to duplicate some random thing, which might totally suck for all you know, out of a limited subset of items.

[wheals]

They most certainly do pick up items you drop (I have the only online death to the dark maul this way). They do not pick up items while chasing you, however.

Also, if a monster can use stairs and its HD is greater than 7 + 1d25, it does in fact go to the abyss, and retains its inventory.

[Siegurt]

I didn't realize that banished non-uniques could actually go to the abyss, I'd never noticed it happen before.
I forgot that the 'no pickup on drop' thing was only while chasing you. that does make it a little more feasable to do this in a productive way.

Now as to if you would *want* to, that's another story altogether.