The Tavern

A while back I posted that at high evo, the rod of iron can be effective against orbs of fire and ancient liches and other high-AC foes. I believe that this was true when I tested it but I could be mistaken. However, it's definitely not true now. So, please disregard everything I said on that point.

Yeah, my trmo^pell isn't particularly in love with his supercharged iron rod.

Imho one of the things that makes 'learning crawl' so difficult isn't learning crawl in the first place, it's all the unlearning and relearning when things change. Not that I'm suggesting it should stop changing, but keeping with the different sets of rules over time is definitely challenging

My DDAr is quite a lot, it's like DoomRL. I mean, it one-shot anything who doesn't have ac, and still kill in one, two shot thing with medium armor and hp (like vault warden /sentinels).

Yeah it couldn't take down that bone dragon guarding the crypt but it's for those enemies that exist rod of inac, isn't it?

it was never true
from the very start the design of iron rod was that it checks AC a million times, of course it was never good against the highest AC monsters in the game

Sorry to get a bit off topic, but if this is true, which is the best rod to supercharge? I was super underwhelmed by both shadows and clouds.

Iron is still best, you can try Ignition though. You're likely more limited by the kinds of rods you have and their max charges, for example supercharging a 10/10 rod is much better than supercharging a 17/17 rod.

in my current game for offense I find I use lightning a lot, destruction some and swarm+shadows fairly often iron I use some, and while clouds is a great rod I concur that it isn't fanatic for spamming.

I would probably supercharge inaccuracy or lightning, were I to have the choices available.

Lightning uses variable charges, so more is nearly always better, inaccuracy has gets good advantage from lots of shots.

Did you sufficiently train evocations? Clouds include draining and corrode, the latter being useful even against OoFs. Being able to use the rod three times in a row makes it a very good candidate for supercharging.

Shadows can spawn OoFs and packs of draconians for you, so I don't understand what you find underwhelming about this rod either.

Basically choose the rod you are going to rely on a lot.

Shadows is probably the best rod in the game, if I had one I would supercharge it. It requires a lot of evo to be good tough, but at high skill (20+) you reliably get things like foo giant, with bonus like juggernaut, aliches of whatever. You could use only it to win the game.

Clouds is also one of my favorite because doesn't require to be spammed, but for that reasons I wouldn't supercharge it - usually with 1 or 2 shot it fill all the necessary LoS to kill anything.
It also requires lot of evo (15ish) to start to be very very good. Btw, at high evo you can get acid fog, which isn't resisted by practically anything in the game, does tons of damage and also corrodes, making the AC enemies much more susceptible to other forms of damage.

My suggestion would be to supercharge shadows/destruction/iron. I'm not a big spammer of lighting and ignition because they're too much loud, but they could also worth if you don't mind that drawback.
Inacc is great too but I wouldn't supercharge it because it's also extremely unreliable, so I'd prefer to use when possible something which is more predictable, but as Siegurt said it also have the bonus of getting lots of shot.

Lightning uses 2 charges on the initial warm-up zap, and 5 on every subsequent zap, so 18 is hardly better than 17, unlike say Iron.

What the hell is supercharging?

Pakellas' 6* power: you may set a single time a rod to +10 (18/18), or a wand to 4/3 its normal charge capacity.
Pakellas is a new god recently added in trunk.

Pakellas the Evoker's ultimate ability, fully charges a rod or gives a wand more maximum charges.

The rod of shadows uses the spell "weave shadows", which draws monsters from either D or Depths, depending on the spell power, so it can never give Zot branch monsters. Of course, at high power you can still get a juggernaut or an ancient lich and more insane things like an iron giant band or a caustic shrike band, so there's that.

I'd recommend iron or inaccuracy for supercharging. Clouds is a great rod, but I supercharged it and rarely found myself in a situation where I needed to lay down 3 separate clouds before it recharged.

personally i would wait until i get grayswandir and supercharge that

I haven't actually tried this god yet, but can concur Rod of Shadows has been amazing, at least in the past, at high Evocations power even against Oof's.

(experience derived from 0.15-0.16)

The iron rod appears to hit an n-headed hydra n times, which is really good because they don't have AC. So it's a nice thing to have in Lair with an edged weapon.

It doesn't really work that way; the number of projectiles is randomized and dependant on spell-power.

But yes, it does shred hydras, and anything else with low AC.