The Tavern

It's guarding a pile of treasure, and is tempting me. I have a ring of flight and wands of fire, but throwing bolts of fire over the water from land just dissipates them and creates steam. I feel like evoking flight and flying to its island will be the end of me as it blasts me with its spells en route. The treasure looks so very shiny though, anyone have any suggestions to destroy this thing and get the loot?

Huh, I didn't know bolts of fire were dissipated by passing over water. I actually think they aren't.

But:

1: Get rC or lots of HP
2: Kill statue

This:

http://crawl.develz.org/info/index.php?q=ice+statue

suggests they don't see invisible, either.

Fire blasts traveling over water do not dissipate, though they do cause steam. The steam is purely additional. In fact, it will work to your advantage here, because it will often prevent the statue from firing back at you.

If you want to save fire wands, and if you have at least one pip of resist cold and reasonably good melee, you should be able to drop your potions and melee the statue to death. Make sure to keep a scroll of blinking in case you get in over your head.

Edited for clarity.

Leave it alone, learn apportation, don't risk your life.

A good thing about the statues is that they're statues : they don't regen.
So you can wait at the limit of LoS for steam to get away and just blast it, taking your time

Or you can fire in a cardianl direction that will hit it with flaming arrows or the like, and the steam will stop it from seeing you and firing back.

Invisibility works, if you have a potion or two and a way to kill the statue reasonably fast. Apportation works to yoink the loot. I've used wands of fireball before to kill them with splash damage.

Bolts of fire do have their range reduced when they destroy freezing clouds. Maybe that's what was happening?

Thanks for your replies, will try some of the suggestions and report back

Good point. I think they're simply terminated completely upon contacting and destroying a single freezing cloud, so even at very close range there's no point in trying to fire through freezing clouds.

Just shot bolts of fire at it, retreated from it's LOS, then repeated until dead. The bolts actually were going over the water, the steam just had me confused. Thanks guys!