"worn silver wand" vs jellies?

[BTA]

It turned out to be a wand of slowing, but would an artifact weapon that is "silver" when unidentified do extra damage to jellies? Can't use a wand as a weapon, but I am still wondering.

[dpeg]

No, not really. The idea is nifty, but this kind of feature is Nethack's thing. If you insist too much on this, all that'll happen is that "silver" gets removed from the list of randomised wand identifiers

[njvack]

And the answer is doubly no, as silver only does added damage to chaotic monsters and jellies aren't chaotic. (Does it affect malmutated monsters too?)

Writ larger, I kind of feel silver is at a really awkward design point -- it's hard to guess what monsters are chaotic, there aren't very many of them outside of Abyss, most of the chaotic monsters you find in the dungeon aren't particularly difficult for their depth. But there's one super scary monster that happens to be chaotic so silver ammo is still kinda relevant sometimes.

Hm. I guess I feel like Silver should either be more of a thing, or less of a thing. It almost feels to me like Silver and Holy Wrath should combine.

[savageorange]

^ and of course, there is also the fact that if you follow Jiyva, Silver is sure to do more damage to you, so it's a little odd for it not to do more damage to jellies.

[jejorda2]

Jellies are formless and ought to be chaotic. I think whisps and vortexes should be chaotic. I haven't looked up what is chaotic in a long time.

I could go for adding kobold astounders who have a chaotic burst spell that randomly casts shock/sting/throw frost/throw fire/magic dart/blink and kobold irritants whose unarmed melee is chaos branded to the early dungeon so there is more chaos.

[njvack]

^ and of course, there is also the fact that if you follow Jiyva, Silver is sure to do more damage to you, so it's a little odd for it not to do more damage to jellies.

Also both TRJ and Dissolution are vulnerable to silver damage, for some reason or other.

[adozu]

well, TRJ and dissolution are flavored to have been members of some lost civilization (human or otherwise) so they are *very* heavily mutated and silver should do damage to them. Common jellies are born like that so i guess Zin is ok with them?

[Quazifuji]

Writ larger, I kind of feel silver is at a really awkward design point -- it's hard to guess what monsters are chaotic, there aren't very many of them outside of Abyss, most of the chaotic monsters you find in the dungeon aren't particularly difficult for their depth. But there's one super scary monster that happens to be chaotic so silver ammo is still kinda relevant sometimes.

Hm. I guess I feel like Silver should either be more of a thing, or less of a thing. It almost feels to me like Silver and Holy Wrath should combine.

Silver and Holy Wrath both feel like relics from when Crawl's design cared much more about flavor and RPG-tropes rather than the current focused gameplay-oriented design-philosophy. I wouldn't mind both being straight-up removed, but Holy Wrath does have a more significant role in the game right now due to its prominence in extended and relation to TSO, so there's an argument in favor of keeping it. Silver, on the other hand, seems to fall purely in the "kind of awkward/spoilery mechanics that are barely ever even relevant" category. It mostly just seems to mean Sling users have a bit less trouble against OoFs than they otherwise would. I think it could easily be removed. Combining it with Holy Wrath could also be an option, but I worry that just makes holy wrath more awkward and complex without actually making it more interesting.