Wednesday, 6th February 2013, 17:42 by KoboldLord
The slaying ring is an excellent ring. An arbitrary deep elf caster might not be a good melee combatant, but with +5/+5 slaying it will quickly become one. It isn't like it will be a waste to pick up a few levels of staff skill and whack less-threatening targets with a quarterstaff; elemental staves are good melee weapons that simultaneously make you better at elemental casting, and you're bound to find one to upgrade to eventually.
Furthermore, none of the artefact rings mentioned are actually anything special. CTele is nice, and int bonuses are nice, but none of these things scream out, "Hey, this is such an excellent item I just found that I want to re-plan my skill development to take advantage of it!" The ring of slaying, on the other hand, is at least potentially game-changing.
Once your spellcaster has 5th and 6th level attack spells down, picking up melee is going to be a whole lot cheaper than making your way all the way up to 9th-level spells. It's also very good for dealing with a lot of monsters; many of them switch to artificially dumb AI if you close to melee range.