Drained

[spayc]

I'm level 11 and had all my skills drained to 0. Is this normal or a bug? What do I do to survive?

[archaeo]

It's not a bug. You ran into an enemy with a weapon/attack with the Drain brand, and then you kept fighting it until it drained your skills completely. You can remove draining by killing enemies, but that might be tough now that you have 0 skills. Try to fight the easiest enemies you can find to rebuild your skill. IIRC, heavy levels of draining go away more quickly. If you're wearing extremely heavy armour or using a particularly slow weapon or relying on casting spells, consider ctrl-f'ing for a good zero-skill weapon if one is available, like a venom/elec dagger/whip.

In the likely event that you die, you learned an important lesson: if something can drain you, and you can't kill it quickly, you shouldn't allow it to attack you.

[seren]

Some monsters have draining attack.

You can avoid it by wearing a ring of sustain attribute.

Your stats will revert to normal as you experience by killing monsters. However with all stats at zero you are severly handicapped and I am not sure you can make it.

[spayc]

I could of swore in earlier versions of crawl monsters could not drain you so much. Seems very important to carry a ring of negative resistance now.

[njvack]

Some monsters have draining attack.

You can avoid it by wearing a ring of sustain attribute.

I think you want rN, not sustain attributes, to mitigate draining attacks.

[archaeo]

seren, I think you're confused. spayc is talking about getting his skills drained, the effect of getting hit by Bolt of Draining or the {Drain} brand (and probably some other things, knowing Crawl), which is resisted by rN. I'm not even really sure how a level 11 character could reasonably get every stat to zero; maybe an octopode who found a ton of cursed rings of int/dex/str-6?

spayc, afaik, there haven't been any changes to draining. There's also rarely a need for an rN+ ring, given that light draining is pretty trivial and you shouldn't have to fight things that can heavily drain you. I've honestly never seen someone get all of their skills drained; what monster were you fighting that got you that deep in the hole? Admittedly, if you run into a drainer, and you have rN+ available, toss it on, but good tactics are more than enough to avoid getting in an unrecoverable draining situation.

[ydeve]

The last time this happened, someone was meleeing Sonja (with a draining dagger). Seriously, don't melee Sonja.

[infinitevox]

The last time this happened, someone was meleeing Sonja (with a draining dagger). Seriously, don't melee Sonja.

I've had this happen to me now in 3 fairly recent games, which to me is often enough to wonder if the spawn weight on the draining brand on Sonja's weapon should be toned down some.
You come into LoS, she hits you with curare, you read !tele immediately, and still get hit with like 8 draining attacks.
I got drained down to 0 because my teleport unfortunately placed me back in her LoS xD
It was a LONG slow climb to get out of draining

[Rast]

There needs to be diminishing returns on draining, already.

[Sprucery]

Sonja only has MR 10 so hex wands are good against her.

[TonberryJam]

Slowly kill monsters one at a time. It might help to go back to easier levels where a few monsters have spawned. If I remember correctly, ring of neg resistance only helps if it's equipped before you become drained.

About Sonja, I learned yesterday that you can one hit her with Chei's Slouch ability. I had invocations around 15 at the time. Pretty neat, considering how Sonja is difficult every time she has a branded weapon.