Wednesday, 14th June 2017, 08:02 by duvessa
duvessa's spell guide for cool people
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
So this isn't 100% complete; it's missing exact information for some things on some spells, and might even be missing a couple of spells, but I'm posting it now because almost all the important parts are done.
This is a guide to player spells only, monster spells are not covered and I don't plan to cover them.
This is up to date for 0.20.0. I can't promise it will be accurate for later versions.
If you disagree with something feel free to argue it, but please, no anecdotes. It doesn't matter that your sword and board naga caster toon of Chei used Bolt of Magma and almost made it to Shoals:3.
Of course, if you find any errors in this please tell me so I can fix them.
Foundational stuff
Level 1 spells
Level 2 spells
Level 3 spells
Level 4 spells
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
This guide is severely out of date (0.20.0). Do not use it.
So this isn't 100% complete; it's missing exact information for some things on some spells, and might even be missing a couple of spells, but I'm posting it now because almost all the important parts are done.
This is a guide to player spells only, monster spells are not covered and I don't plan to cover them.
This is up to date for 0.20.0. I can't promise it will be accurate for later versions.
If you disagree with something feel free to argue it, but please, no anecdotes. It doesn't matter that your sword and board naga caster toon of Chei used Bolt of Magma and almost made it to Shoals:3.
Of course, if you find any errors in this please tell me so I can fix them.
Foundational stuff
Spoiler: show
How to read damage, duration, etc. formulas
"power" means your spell power.
"XdY" means roll X dice with Y sides each. The way I use it, "d" comes before arithmetic in order of operations, so 2d6/2 means "roll two six-sided dice and divide the result by 2". 2d(6/2) would mean "roll two three-sided dice". Also, 1d3.4 means "60% of the time, roll 1d3, the other 40%, roll 1d4".
"random2(X)" usually means 1dX-1, so random2(3) produces either 0, 1, or 2. The reason I sometimes use random2(X) instead of 1dX-1 is that random2(0) results in 0, whereas 1d0-1 does not. Yes, it is possible to cast spells with 0 power.
Similarly, you can usually translate "random2avg(X,Y)" to dice as floor((1dX+(Y-1)d(X+1)-Y)/Y). It looks stupid when you express it as dice, but it produces the same mean as random2(X) with a lower variance (increasing with higher Y).
"floor(X)" means X truncated to an integer. You will see this a lot, since Crawl uses integer division a lot.
"min(X,Y)" means the smaller of X or Y.
"max(X,Y)" means the larger of X or Y.
"2.7 randomly rounded" means a 70% chance of 3 and a 30% chance of 2.
I try to require as little math and programming knowledge as possible, which means converting multiple lines of code into single-line formulas that often look stupid. I do assume that the reader knows what a mean and median are.
Approximate formula for spell power:
1. Start with (Spellcasting+4*[average spell school skill]+[12 if brilliant])*intelligence/20
2. Apply further multiplicative bonuses, if applicable:
Multiply by 1.5^[enhancer level] if positive enhancement, or 0.5^[-enhancer level] if negative enhancement
If you have wild magic 1/2/3, increase by 30%/60%/90%. For subdued magic 1/2/3, decrease by 23%/38%/47%.
If you have augmentation amount 1/2/3, increase by 40%/80%/120%.
If you have horror amount 1/2/3, decrease by 9%/23%/29%.
3. If the result is over 50, set it to 50*log2(1+power/50). Round to an integer.
4. Apply the spell's power cap. This is your final spell power.
Takeaways from this:
- Pre-stepdown power increases linearly with spell skill level, and linearly with intelligence. Since they are multiplied together, increasing both spell skill level and intelligence would naively provide superlinear returns. (1*1 = 1, 2*2 = 4, 3*3 = 9...)
- HOWEVER, as soon as you reach 50 power, the actual-spellpower return you get on pre-stepdown spellpower becomes logarithmic...and so the same is true of the actual-spellpower returns for increasing spell skill level or intelligence.
- Furthermore, higher skill levels cost more. So the returns on training skills for spell power become pretty bad pretty fast. That said, rushing Freeze to maximum power is still a good idea. It's just not a good idea for Throw Icicle, let alone power cap 200 spells.
- Subdued magic is really bad
Summon duration
This is always either 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. The resulting durations are:
1: 40 to 140 aut (40+random2avg(101,2))
2: 80 to 280 aut (80+random2avg(201,2))
3: 120 to 420 aut (etc...)
4: 160 to 560 aut
5: 360 to 1260 aut
6: 760 to 2660 aut
Other
Direct damage spells' damage and to-hit formulas usually have both a constant part and a part that is linear with spell power. The relative size of these parts varies, and some spells are exceptions that have unusual returns on spell power.
Noise numbers can be taken as an approximation of how far the noise will travel on a level with an ambient noise value of 0, provided no walls get in the way. So a spell with noise 8 will probably wake up stuff in LOS, but not much stuff outside of LOS, unless you're in Tomb or Crypt. This is a simplification; actual noise mechanics are more complicated. Shouting with no mutations or forms makes 12 noise.
Power caps are not listed when the cap is 200 or power doesn't affect the spell.
"power" means your spell power.
"XdY" means roll X dice with Y sides each. The way I use it, "d" comes before arithmetic in order of operations, so 2d6/2 means "roll two six-sided dice and divide the result by 2". 2d(6/2) would mean "roll two three-sided dice". Also, 1d3.4 means "60% of the time, roll 1d3, the other 40%, roll 1d4".
"random2(X)" usually means 1dX-1, so random2(3) produces either 0, 1, or 2. The reason I sometimes use random2(X) instead of 1dX-1 is that random2(0) results in 0, whereas 1d0-1 does not. Yes, it is possible to cast spells with 0 power.
Similarly, you can usually translate "random2avg(X,Y)" to dice as floor((1dX+(Y-1)d(X+1)-Y)/Y). It looks stupid when you express it as dice, but it produces the same mean as random2(X) with a lower variance (increasing with higher Y).
"floor(X)" means X truncated to an integer. You will see this a lot, since Crawl uses integer division a lot.
"min(X,Y)" means the smaller of X or Y.
"max(X,Y)" means the larger of X or Y.
"2.7 randomly rounded" means a 70% chance of 3 and a 30% chance of 2.
I try to require as little math and programming knowledge as possible, which means converting multiple lines of code into single-line formulas that often look stupid. I do assume that the reader knows what a mean and median are.
Approximate formula for spell power:
1. Start with (Spellcasting+4*[average spell school skill]+[12 if brilliant])*intelligence/20
2. Apply further multiplicative bonuses, if applicable:
Multiply by 1.5^[enhancer level] if positive enhancement, or 0.5^[-enhancer level] if negative enhancement
If you have wild magic 1/2/3, increase by 30%/60%/90%. For subdued magic 1/2/3, decrease by 23%/38%/47%.
If you have augmentation amount 1/2/3, increase by 40%/80%/120%.
If you have horror amount 1/2/3, decrease by 9%/23%/29%.
3. If the result is over 50, set it to 50*log2(1+power/50). Round to an integer.
4. Apply the spell's power cap. This is your final spell power.
Takeaways from this:
- Pre-stepdown power increases linearly with spell skill level, and linearly with intelligence. Since they are multiplied together, increasing both spell skill level and intelligence would naively provide superlinear returns. (1*1 = 1, 2*2 = 4, 3*3 = 9...)
- HOWEVER, as soon as you reach 50 power, the actual-spellpower return you get on pre-stepdown spellpower becomes logarithmic...and so the same is true of the actual-spellpower returns for increasing spell skill level or intelligence.
- Furthermore, higher skill levels cost more. So the returns on training skills for spell power become pretty bad pretty fast. That said, rushing Freeze to maximum power is still a good idea. It's just not a good idea for Throw Icicle, let alone power cap 200 spells.
- Subdued magic is really bad
Summon duration
This is always either 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. The resulting durations are:
1: 40 to 140 aut (40+random2avg(101,2))
2: 80 to 280 aut (80+random2avg(201,2))
3: 120 to 420 aut (etc...)
4: 160 to 560 aut
5: 360 to 1260 aut
6: 760 to 2660 aut
Other
Direct damage spells' damage and to-hit formulas usually have both a constant part and a part that is linear with spell power. The relative size of these parts varies, and some spells are exceptions that have unusual returns on spell power.
Noise numbers can be taken as an approximation of how far the noise will travel on a level with an ambient noise value of 0, provided no walls get in the way. So a spell with noise 8 will probably wake up stuff in LOS, but not much stuff outside of LOS, unless you're in Tomb or Crypt. This is a simplification; actual noise mechanics are more complicated. Shouting with no mutations or forms makes 12 noise.
Power caps are not listed when the cap is 200 or power doesn't affect the spell.
Level 1 spells
Spoiler: show
Animate Skeleton
Turns a corpse or skeleton into an allied skeleton with a summon duration of 6. Remembers the original monster's HD; animating an orc corpse from an orc warlord will give you an orc skeleton with 15 HD (or even more if the orc warlord had leveled up) and corresponding HP, although its melee damage will still be 4. Fails to create an ally if used on a headless hydra corpse/skeleton, but still wastes a turn and destroys the corpse/skeleton.
The nerf is overblown, this is still the best level 1 spell in the game by far. It gives you great allies basically for free, with a really long duration and no summon cap. Even if you hate allies you likely want to learn it just so that you can close doors that you accidentally killed a monster on top of.
Noise: 1 at your location
Apportation
Any character that uses spells at all wants to memorize this. Apporting an item is simply better than walking over to it, it's faster and safer. Also, you can cast Apportation on a monster trapped in a throwing net to free the monster and save the net from destruction. Very useful if one of your allies gets netted. Note that apporting the Orb of Zot makes 30 noise, starts the orb run, and has a 1 in 3 chance of failing.
Noise: 1 at your location, and 30 at the Orb's location if you try to apport it.
Beastly Appendage
Duration is min(60,8+2d(power))*10 aut.
Temporarily gives you level either level 2 horns or level 3 talons, if you aren't wearing a helmet or boots, respectively, and don't already have a body slot mutation there. If you have both slots free, you may want to end and recast until you get the desired one: horns have 11 base damage whereas talons have only 9, but talons activate 50% more often than horns, so they outdamage horns in reasonable scenarios. This is a good spell for weapon-based melee characters all game. Aux attacks are good, especially with slaying, and can easily be worth taking off your boots/helmet. For unarmed melee characters, it is obsoleted by Blade Hands, and Spider Form is also unambiguously better during the early game, so on Tm specifically you will stop using this spell at XL3 (unless you decided to use a weapon instead of forms for some reason, I guess).
NOTE: There is a bug from 0.16 to 0.20 that causes talons (and all other kicks) to have 5 less base damage than they should, so in those versions you should always recast until you get horns.
Power cap: 50
Noise: 1 at your location
Confusing Touch
Duration is min(20,10+random2(power)/5)*10 aut. Unlike most buffs, recasting Confusing Touch doesn't add this value to the existing duration, it just replaces the existing duration if the new roll is higher.
Makes your unarmed attacks do 0 damage, but adds random2(dexterity) to your to-hit with them. When you hit with an unarmed attack while Confusing Touch active, there is a floor(80*(24-HD)/24)% chance of confusing the monster and ending Confusing Touch.
This spell is still very strong and very dumb and should be very removed.
Power cap: 50
Noise: 2 at your location
Corona
Effectively an increase to your damage against monsters with positive EV, but tedious to use so you'll probably stop using it as soon as you can get away with stopping. It's also a bad way to reveal invisible monsters.
Power cap: 90 (wtf)
Noise: 1 at your location
Flame Tongue
Damage is 1d(8+power/4), to-hit is 11+power/6. Good enough for what it is. If not for its bizarre split power cap, it would be the most unremarkable level 1 spell.
Range: 2 at minimum power, 5 at maximum power
Power cap: 40 for range, but only 25 for damage
Noise: 1 at the destination followed by 1 at your location
Freeze
Does 1d(3+floor(power/3)) cold damage. (Yes, power 24 and 25 are the same.)
Easily the best level 1 direct damage spell. High AC-ignoring damage and it even slows adders for you. Decent even in Lair since there are so many cold-blooded monsters (there are better options against hydras, though). Not really useful after that.
Range: 1
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at your location
Infusion
Every time you hit something in melee, does an additional 2+power/25 damage (randomly rounded) that is reduced by AC separately from the original attack's damage - like a staff of earth. This costs 1 MP per attack. Duration is (8+2d(power))*10 aut and cannot be extended past 1000 aut. Extra melee damage is good, so if you use melee and don't need MP for something else, you should keep this on all game. Yes, it usually does nothing against high-AC monsters but there are lots of monsters with low AC throughout the game.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at your location
Magic Dart
Damage is 1d(3+power/5), always hits. Not much to say about magic dart, it's good by level 1 conjuration standards and probably the most convenient way to selectively wake up monsters or explode ball lightning.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at the dart's destination followed by 1 at your location
Pain
Damage is 1d(4+power/5). It's like a magic dart that has shorter range and makes you lose 1 hp, in exchange for usually having higher mean damage (it ignores AC and doesn't get resisted that often). And not working against orc wizards with robes of positive energy.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at the beam's destination followed by 1 at your location
Sandblast
Damage is 2d(4+power/3), to-hit is 13+power/10. This is extremely high damage for a level 1 spell, although monsters get to apply AC thrice. Consumes one stone with every cast.
For a level 1 damage spell, Sandblast remains useful for a long time, since its damage is better than Stone Arrow's against low AC monsters. Great in Lair. Unfortunately, if you run out of stones before XL3 as an EE, you are in an awful situation, so if you can safely melee a monster, do that instead of sandblasting it, particularly if it is a giant cockroach.
Power cap: 50
Noise: 2 at the projectile's destination followed by 1 at your location
Shock
Damage is 1d(3+power/4), to-hit is 8+power/7. Great damage for a level 1 direct damage spell, since it hits twice, and it has LOS range, but you do need a wall. I think Shock is better than Magic Dart but worse than Freeze. As a BEAM_ELECTRICITY spell, only half of AC applies to each hit, so AC is about as good against Shock as it is against anything else.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at the bolt's final destination followed by 1 at your location
Sting
Damage is 1d(3+power/5) pure poison, to-hit is 8+power/5. Probably the worst level 1 spell; it has magic dart's damage roll but it has two schools (so less power), less range, and can miss. If Sting still manages to deal damage after AC and resistances, it has a 2/3 chance of attempting to poison the monster; if the monster has rPois+ or rPois++, this only has a 1/3 chance of succeeding. So the damage is awful but it will sometimes poison the monster...but only if the monster doesn't reduce the awful damage to 0. Which they will, a lot. Sting is sufficient to kill most early-game monsters, but it is excruciatingly slow at it, and it rapidly becomes crap as the game continues.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at the sting's destination followed by 1 at your location
Summon Butterflies
Summons min(8,2+1d3+floor(random2(power)/10)) butterflies with a summon duration of 3. Excellent for clogging corridors and blocking line of fire; any character that can cast spells should learn this spell. Butterflies do have 25 EV, so they don't reliably block projectiles.
Summon cap: 8
Power cap: 100
Noise: 1 at your location
Summon Small Mammal
Summons a bat or rat (equal probability) with a 10/(power+1) chance, otherwise summons a quokka. Summon duration is always 3.
Summoning spells are overpowered starting from level 1. Very few pre-Lair monsters can deal with mammal spam. Quokkas alone are very strong against other monsters.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at your location
Summon cap: 4
Turns a corpse or skeleton into an allied skeleton with a summon duration of 6. Remembers the original monster's HD; animating an orc corpse from an orc warlord will give you an orc skeleton with 15 HD (or even more if the orc warlord had leveled up) and corresponding HP, although its melee damage will still be 4. Fails to create an ally if used on a headless hydra corpse/skeleton, but still wastes a turn and destroys the corpse/skeleton.
The nerf is overblown, this is still the best level 1 spell in the game by far. It gives you great allies basically for free, with a really long duration and no summon cap. Even if you hate allies you likely want to learn it just so that you can close doors that you accidentally killed a monster on top of.
Noise: 1 at your location
Apportation
Any character that uses spells at all wants to memorize this. Apporting an item is simply better than walking over to it, it's faster and safer. Also, you can cast Apportation on a monster trapped in a throwing net to free the monster and save the net from destruction. Very useful if one of your allies gets netted. Note that apporting the Orb of Zot makes 30 noise, starts the orb run, and has a 1 in 3 chance of failing.
Noise: 1 at your location, and 30 at the Orb's location if you try to apport it.
Beastly Appendage
Duration is min(60,8+2d(power))*10 aut.
Temporarily gives you level either level 2 horns or level 3 talons, if you aren't wearing a helmet or boots, respectively, and don't already have a body slot mutation there. If you have both slots free, you may want to end and recast until you get the desired one: horns have 11 base damage whereas talons have only 9, but talons activate 50% more often than horns, so they outdamage horns in reasonable scenarios. This is a good spell for weapon-based melee characters all game. Aux attacks are good, especially with slaying, and can easily be worth taking off your boots/helmet. For unarmed melee characters, it is obsoleted by Blade Hands, and Spider Form is also unambiguously better during the early game, so on Tm specifically you will stop using this spell at XL3 (unless you decided to use a weapon instead of forms for some reason, I guess).
NOTE: There is a bug from 0.16 to 0.20 that causes talons (and all other kicks) to have 5 less base damage than they should, so in those versions you should always recast until you get horns.
Power cap: 50
Noise: 1 at your location
Confusing Touch
Duration is min(20,10+random2(power)/5)*10 aut. Unlike most buffs, recasting Confusing Touch doesn't add this value to the existing duration, it just replaces the existing duration if the new roll is higher.
Makes your unarmed attacks do 0 damage, but adds random2(dexterity) to your to-hit with them. When you hit with an unarmed attack while Confusing Touch active, there is a floor(80*(24-HD)/24)% chance of confusing the monster and ending Confusing Touch.
This spell is still very strong and very dumb and should be very removed.
Power cap: 50
Noise: 2 at your location
Corona
Effectively an increase to your damage against monsters with positive EV, but tedious to use so you'll probably stop using it as soon as you can get away with stopping. It's also a bad way to reveal invisible monsters.
Power cap: 90 (wtf)
Noise: 1 at your location
Flame Tongue
Damage is 1d(8+power/4), to-hit is 11+power/6. Good enough for what it is. If not for its bizarre split power cap, it would be the most unremarkable level 1 spell.
Range: 2 at minimum power, 5 at maximum power
Power cap: 40 for range, but only 25 for damage
Noise: 1 at the destination followed by 1 at your location
Freeze
Does 1d(3+floor(power/3)) cold damage. (Yes, power 24 and 25 are the same.)
Easily the best level 1 direct damage spell. High AC-ignoring damage and it even slows adders for you. Decent even in Lair since there are so many cold-blooded monsters (there are better options against hydras, though). Not really useful after that.
Range: 1
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at your location
Infusion
Every time you hit something in melee, does an additional 2+power/25 damage (randomly rounded) that is reduced by AC separately from the original attack's damage - like a staff of earth. This costs 1 MP per attack. Duration is (8+2d(power))*10 aut and cannot be extended past 1000 aut. Extra melee damage is good, so if you use melee and don't need MP for something else, you should keep this on all game. Yes, it usually does nothing against high-AC monsters but there are lots of monsters with low AC throughout the game.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at your location
Magic Dart
Damage is 1d(3+power/5), always hits. Not much to say about magic dart, it's good by level 1 conjuration standards and probably the most convenient way to selectively wake up monsters or explode ball lightning.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at the dart's destination followed by 1 at your location
Pain
Damage is 1d(4+power/5). It's like a magic dart that has shorter range and makes you lose 1 hp, in exchange for usually having higher mean damage (it ignores AC and doesn't get resisted that often). And not working against orc wizards with robes of positive energy.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at the beam's destination followed by 1 at your location
Sandblast
Damage is 2d(4+power/3), to-hit is 13+power/10. This is extremely high damage for a level 1 spell, although monsters get to apply AC thrice. Consumes one stone with every cast.
For a level 1 damage spell, Sandblast remains useful for a long time, since its damage is better than Stone Arrow's against low AC monsters. Great in Lair. Unfortunately, if you run out of stones before XL3 as an EE, you are in an awful situation, so if you can safely melee a monster, do that instead of sandblasting it, particularly if it is a giant cockroach.
Power cap: 50
Noise: 2 at the projectile's destination followed by 1 at your location
Shock
Damage is 1d(3+power/4), to-hit is 8+power/7. Great damage for a level 1 direct damage spell, since it hits twice, and it has LOS range, but you do need a wall. I think Shock is better than Magic Dart but worse than Freeze. As a BEAM_ELECTRICITY spell, only half of AC applies to each hit, so AC is about as good against Shock as it is against anything else.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at the bolt's final destination followed by 1 at your location
Sting
Damage is 1d(3+power/5) pure poison, to-hit is 8+power/5. Probably the worst level 1 spell; it has magic dart's damage roll but it has two schools (so less power), less range, and can miss. If Sting still manages to deal damage after AC and resistances, it has a 2/3 chance of attempting to poison the monster; if the monster has rPois+ or rPois++, this only has a 1/3 chance of succeeding. So the damage is awful but it will sometimes poison the monster...but only if the monster doesn't reduce the awful damage to 0. Which they will, a lot. Sting is sufficient to kill most early-game monsters, but it is excruciatingly slow at it, and it rapidly becomes crap as the game continues.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at the sting's destination followed by 1 at your location
Summon Butterflies
Summons min(8,2+1d3+floor(random2(power)/10)) butterflies with a summon duration of 3. Excellent for clogging corridors and blocking line of fire; any character that can cast spells should learn this spell. Butterflies do have 25 EV, so they don't reliably block projectiles.
Summon cap: 8
Power cap: 100
Noise: 1 at your location
Summon Small Mammal
Summons a bat or rat (equal probability) with a 10/(power+1) chance, otherwise summons a quokka. Summon duration is always 3.
Summoning spells are overpowered starting from level 1. Very few pre-Lair monsters can deal with mammal spam. Quokkas alone are very strong against other monsters.
Power cap: 25
Noise: 1 at your location
Summon cap: 4
Level 2 spells
Spoiler: show
Blink
Characters that can already cast this spell should memorize it. It's a useful way to move a little faster when your LOS positioning is good.
Noise: 2 at your new location after the blink.
Call Imp
Summons a crimson, white, or shadow imp with a summon duration of min(2+floor(random2(power)/4), 6). 5/18ths of the imps are white. Otherwise, if random2(power) >= 46 or a 3/13 chance succeeds, you get an iron imp with a 1/3 chance and a shadow imp otherwise. If all of those chances fail, you get a crimson imp.
Like almost all summons this is a very strong spell, but it's annoying to use even by summon standards as you want to cast it far in advance so that you aren't screwed by getting the wrong imp. Can get extremely long durations, but you can't tell when it gets a long duration, so that isn't too useful. Also, be careful about putting monsters between a white imp and you, the white imp could miss the monster with throw frost and do 3d5 damage to you.
Noise: 2 at your location
Power cap: 100
Summon cap: 3
Corpse Rot
Turns one corpse in every corpse stack in LOS into a miasma cloud with a duration of (4+random2avg(16,3))*10 aut. Spell power has no effect.
A really stupid spell. If you use Kiku to carry bad combos then you'll want to get used to this spell. Basically, kill one monster then lure another monster to the corpse to kill it with the miasma cloud and repeat. Or use deliver corpses if you need to.
Noise: 2 at your location
Ensorcelled Hibernation
If successful, makes a monster instantly go to sleep. There's no timeout on this, so you can hibernate a monster and leave LOS and it will stay asleep forever unless it hears a noise. The monster also stops constricting, if applicable. After being affected by hibernation, the monster loses 10 "stealth awareness" while asleep, for (8+random2avg(21,2))*10 aut, but the monster is also immune to being hibernated again during this time, so either finish your food or leave for a while. For comparison, monsters lose 75 "stealth awareness" if you're invisible to them.
Monsters can't wake up immediately upon being hibernated, so if you hibernate an adjacent monster you'll always get to stab it. However, you may prefer to hibernate monsters from further away so that they don't get melee attacks if you fail to beat their MR. Monsters that are undead, nonliving, plants, berserk, already asleep, have rC+, or have clarity (what) cannot be hibernated.
This spell is basically "I get to kill susceptible monsters for free" if you have any significant stabbing capability at all, with the only limitation being the pool of susceptible monsters (remember it has a low power cap). It's a lot less annoying than chasing confused monsters around, too.
Power cap: 50
Noise: Completely silent
Passwall
Mainly for stabbing; usually too slow to be a better escape option than walking away. Excellent for muckrobin as it allows you to hide in some arrival vaults, protecting you from most OOD spawns.
Noise: Completely silent
Portal Projectile
Casting gives you the portal projectile status, or refreshes an existing status, with a duration of (3+random2(floor(power/2))+random2(floor(power/5)))*10 aut, but no greater than 500 aut. This adds random2(floor(power/4)) to your to-hit* whenever you throw or launch a projectile, and makes it more smitey. The power used here is the power at the time portal projectile was most recently cast, not the power at the time of the shot. Also stops the returning ego from working. Every projectile fired under portal projectile deducts 1 MP; if you fire a projectile with 0 MP, it just gets fired normally without the portal projectile effect.
Provided your spell power isn't rock bottom, this is a significant effective damage increase for any missile character, and the smite targeting is convenient too, or downright amazing if you use allies. It works on awkwardly thrown items too, but since Trog doesn't like it when you cast Portal Projectile and you can't throw the Orb of Zot anymore, the usefulness of this is questionable.
*In case you don't know how to-hit works, this does nothing if your power is less than 8, and is otherwise basically like having +floor(power/4)-1 to your enchantment for accuracy purposes only.
Power cap: 50
Noise: 3 at your location
Searing Ray
The first and second rays do 2d(3+power/13) damage and have a to-hit of 10+power/9.
The third ray does 3d(3+power/12) damage and has a to-hit of 11+power/8.
The fourth ray does 4d(3+power/12) damage and has a to-hit of 12+power/7. It's also a penetrating beam, but this is unlikely to be relevant.
This is a really good damage spell for its level. The fourth ray does about as much damage as IMB at the same power. On the downside, its gimmick is dumb (make sure you always attack enemies in cardinal or diagonal directions!) and its interface is bad.
Range: 4
Noise: 2 at your location on the initial cast, and 2 wherever each beam stops
Power cap: 50.
Shroud of Golubria
Duration is min(50,7+2d[power])*10 aut, power cap is 50.
While the enchantment is active, it has a 2/3 chance of trying to block each melee attack. This has a damage/(damage+10) chance of breaking the shroud, and otherwise the damage is negated. So it's equivalent to +10 hp on average, assuming you last long enough for it to break. Optimally you keep this up for the whole game.
Noise: 2 at your location
Power cap: 50.
Slow
Not really anything to say about this spell. It's good but kind of annoying to use since it's an extra action that doesn't directly contribute to killing the monster (unless it's in a cloud or something).
Noise: 2 at your location
Song of Slaying
The duration is (20+random2avg(power,2))*10 aut. Every direct kill by you (not allies) of an XP-awarding monster while the song is active will increase the slaying bonus by 1, to a maximum of 9.
8 noise per turn isn't that bad, it's not Qazlal or anything, but neither is +1 slaying per kill very good when you can't extend the effect without resetting it. Fighting large numbers of monsters at once isn't good, and you don't really want to explore with this spell active, so it's most charitably described as overly situational and most accurately described as bad.
Noise: 2 at your location upon casting, and 8 at your location on every one of your turns while it is active
Sticks to Snakes
Converts 1+min(6,floor(random2(power)/15)) arrows into snakes. With a one in 5-min(4,power/50) chance, the snake has a floor(power/3)% chance to be a water moccasin and is otherwise an adder. If that one in 5-min(4,power/50) chance failed, you get a ball python instead. Summon duration is min(5,3+floor(random2(power)/20)) per cast, so if a single cast makes multiple snakes they all get the same summon duration.
No summon cap, and the snakes aren't quite real summons so you can use inner flame on them and they can't be abjured. A typical game has, ballpark, about 2000 arrows in it. This is an extremely overpowered spell, even by summon standards. Not many monsters will win against concentrated snake spam, even late in the game.
Power cap: 100
Noise: 2 at your location
Sublimation of Blood
Increases MP and decreases HP according to the following steps:
1. Pick a "minimum HP" value equal to your current HP divided by 10, randomly rounded to an integer, and no smaller than 1 HP.
2. Increase MP by 1.
3. Decrease HP by 1. If HP is no longer greater than the chosen minimum HP, abort.
4. With a 6/power chance, decrease HP by 1 again. If HP is no longer greater than the chosen minimum HP, abort. Repeat this step two more times for a total of three potential HP losses.
5. With a 6/power chance, abort.
6. Repeat from step 2.
So you lose between 1 and 4 HP per MP point, but the spell will never directly kill you or reduce your HP below 10% of its current value rounded down.
Can't be cast by mummies, with less than 3 HP, with full MP, during Death's Door, or by vampires that are Thirsty or below.
Sort of the MP equivalent of the Regeneration spell. Sublimation is usually only useful in combat if you're playing badly or in a ziggurat (otherwise you should not be running out of MP), but it saves turns. It is even more annoying to use than Regeneration is, though.
Noise: 2 at your location
Swiftness
Gives you the Swift status for min(30,12+floor(random2(power)/2)*10 aut. This status decreases your move delay by 25%, rounding randomly on each move, but never taking it below 0.6 (player spriggan move delay). When Swift expires it inflicts -Swift for an equal amount of time, which increases your move delay by 50%.
This spell is still extremely overpowered. A huge movement speed boost now, in exchange for an equivalent movement speed penalty later...after you've already made it to better terrain and no longer need to move. It's not as broken as the old version since you don't want it on while exploring anymore, but it isn't really less powerful than the old version unless your spellpower is exceptionally bad. For questionable flavour reasons, the Swift effect is suppressed while in water or Leda's.
Power cap: 100
Noise: 2 at your location
Throw Flame
Damage is 2d(4+power/10), to-hit is 8+power/10. Every FE should learn this, it has LOS range and better damage than flame tongue.
Range: LOS
Power cap: 50
Noise: 2 wherever the projectile ends, followed by 2 at your location
Throw Frost
Damage is 2d(4+power/10), to-hit is 8+power/10. IE should learn this since it's their longest-ranged attack. It does check AC and EV, so it's often worse than Freeze in melee range even at max power, but that says more about Freeze being amazing than anything else.
Range: 6
Power cap: 50
Noise: 2 wherever the projectile ends, followed by 2 at your location
Characters that can already cast this spell should memorize it. It's a useful way to move a little faster when your LOS positioning is good.
Noise: 2 at your new location after the blink.
Call Imp
Summons a crimson, white, or shadow imp with a summon duration of min(2+floor(random2(power)/4), 6). 5/18ths of the imps are white. Otherwise, if random2(power) >= 46 or a 3/13 chance succeeds, you get an iron imp with a 1/3 chance and a shadow imp otherwise. If all of those chances fail, you get a crimson imp.
Like almost all summons this is a very strong spell, but it's annoying to use even by summon standards as you want to cast it far in advance so that you aren't screwed by getting the wrong imp. Can get extremely long durations, but you can't tell when it gets a long duration, so that isn't too useful. Also, be careful about putting monsters between a white imp and you, the white imp could miss the monster with throw frost and do 3d5 damage to you.
Noise: 2 at your location
Power cap: 100
Summon cap: 3
Corpse Rot
Turns one corpse in every corpse stack in LOS into a miasma cloud with a duration of (4+random2avg(16,3))*10 aut. Spell power has no effect.
A really stupid spell. If you use Kiku to carry bad combos then you'll want to get used to this spell. Basically, kill one monster then lure another monster to the corpse to kill it with the miasma cloud and repeat. Or use deliver corpses if you need to.
Noise: 2 at your location
Ensorcelled Hibernation
If successful, makes a monster instantly go to sleep. There's no timeout on this, so you can hibernate a monster and leave LOS and it will stay asleep forever unless it hears a noise. The monster also stops constricting, if applicable. After being affected by hibernation, the monster loses 10 "stealth awareness" while asleep, for (8+random2avg(21,2))*10 aut, but the monster is also immune to being hibernated again during this time, so either finish your food or leave for a while. For comparison, monsters lose 75 "stealth awareness" if you're invisible to them.
Monsters can't wake up immediately upon being hibernated, so if you hibernate an adjacent monster you'll always get to stab it. However, you may prefer to hibernate monsters from further away so that they don't get melee attacks if you fail to beat their MR. Monsters that are undead, nonliving, plants, berserk, already asleep, have rC+, or have clarity (what) cannot be hibernated.
This spell is basically "I get to kill susceptible monsters for free" if you have any significant stabbing capability at all, with the only limitation being the pool of susceptible monsters (remember it has a low power cap). It's a lot less annoying than chasing confused monsters around, too.
Power cap: 50
Noise: Completely silent
Passwall
Mainly for stabbing; usually too slow to be a better escape option than walking away. Excellent for muckrobin as it allows you to hide in some arrival vaults, protecting you from most OOD spawns.
Noise: Completely silent
Portal Projectile
Casting gives you the portal projectile status, or refreshes an existing status, with a duration of (3+random2(floor(power/2))+random2(floor(power/5)))*10 aut, but no greater than 500 aut. This adds random2(floor(power/4)) to your to-hit* whenever you throw or launch a projectile, and makes it more smitey. The power used here is the power at the time portal projectile was most recently cast, not the power at the time of the shot. Also stops the returning ego from working. Every projectile fired under portal projectile deducts 1 MP; if you fire a projectile with 0 MP, it just gets fired normally without the portal projectile effect.
Provided your spell power isn't rock bottom, this is a significant effective damage increase for any missile character, and the smite targeting is convenient too, or downright amazing if you use allies. It works on awkwardly thrown items too, but since Trog doesn't like it when you cast Portal Projectile and you can't throw the Orb of Zot anymore, the usefulness of this is questionable.
*In case you don't know how to-hit works, this does nothing if your power is less than 8, and is otherwise basically like having +floor(power/4)-1 to your enchantment for accuracy purposes only.
Power cap: 50
Noise: 3 at your location
Searing Ray
The first and second rays do 2d(3+power/13) damage and have a to-hit of 10+power/9.
The third ray does 3d(3+power/12) damage and has a to-hit of 11+power/8.
The fourth ray does 4d(3+power/12) damage and has a to-hit of 12+power/7. It's also a penetrating beam, but this is unlikely to be relevant.
This is a really good damage spell for its level. The fourth ray does about as much damage as IMB at the same power. On the downside, its gimmick is dumb (make sure you always attack enemies in cardinal or diagonal directions!) and its interface is bad.
Range: 4
Noise: 2 at your location on the initial cast, and 2 wherever each beam stops
Power cap: 50.
Shroud of Golubria
Duration is min(50,7+2d[power])*10 aut, power cap is 50.
While the enchantment is active, it has a 2/3 chance of trying to block each melee attack. This has a damage/(damage+10) chance of breaking the shroud, and otherwise the damage is negated. So it's equivalent to +10 hp on average, assuming you last long enough for it to break. Optimally you keep this up for the whole game.
Noise: 2 at your location
Power cap: 50.
Slow
Not really anything to say about this spell. It's good but kind of annoying to use since it's an extra action that doesn't directly contribute to killing the monster (unless it's in a cloud or something).
Noise: 2 at your location
Song of Slaying
The duration is (20+random2avg(power,2))*10 aut. Every direct kill by you (not allies) of an XP-awarding monster while the song is active will increase the slaying bonus by 1, to a maximum of 9.
8 noise per turn isn't that bad, it's not Qazlal or anything, but neither is +1 slaying per kill very good when you can't extend the effect without resetting it. Fighting large numbers of monsters at once isn't good, and you don't really want to explore with this spell active, so it's most charitably described as overly situational and most accurately described as bad.
Noise: 2 at your location upon casting, and 8 at your location on every one of your turns while it is active
Sticks to Snakes
Converts 1+min(6,floor(random2(power)/15)) arrows into snakes. With a one in 5-min(4,power/50) chance, the snake has a floor(power/3)% chance to be a water moccasin and is otherwise an adder. If that one in 5-min(4,power/50) chance failed, you get a ball python instead. Summon duration is min(5,3+floor(random2(power)/20)) per cast, so if a single cast makes multiple snakes they all get the same summon duration.
No summon cap, and the snakes aren't quite real summons so you can use inner flame on them and they can't be abjured. A typical game has, ballpark, about 2000 arrows in it. This is an extremely overpowered spell, even by summon standards. Not many monsters will win against concentrated snake spam, even late in the game.
Power cap: 100
Noise: 2 at your location
Sublimation of Blood
Increases MP and decreases HP according to the following steps:
1. Pick a "minimum HP" value equal to your current HP divided by 10, randomly rounded to an integer, and no smaller than 1 HP.
2. Increase MP by 1.
3. Decrease HP by 1. If HP is no longer greater than the chosen minimum HP, abort.
4. With a 6/power chance, decrease HP by 1 again. If HP is no longer greater than the chosen minimum HP, abort. Repeat this step two more times for a total of three potential HP losses.
5. With a 6/power chance, abort.
6. Repeat from step 2.
So you lose between 1 and 4 HP per MP point, but the spell will never directly kill you or reduce your HP below 10% of its current value rounded down.
Can't be cast by mummies, with less than 3 HP, with full MP, during Death's Door, or by vampires that are Thirsty or below.
Sort of the MP equivalent of the Regeneration spell. Sublimation is usually only useful in combat if you're playing badly or in a ziggurat (otherwise you should not be running out of MP), but it saves turns. It is even more annoying to use than Regeneration is, though.
Noise: 2 at your location
Swiftness
Gives you the Swift status for min(30,12+floor(random2(power)/2)*10 aut. This status decreases your move delay by 25%, rounding randomly on each move, but never taking it below 0.6 (player spriggan move delay). When Swift expires it inflicts -Swift for an equal amount of time, which increases your move delay by 50%.
This spell is still extremely overpowered. A huge movement speed boost now, in exchange for an equivalent movement speed penalty later...after you've already made it to better terrain and no longer need to move. It's not as broken as the old version since you don't want it on while exploring anymore, but it isn't really less powerful than the old version unless your spellpower is exceptionally bad. For questionable flavour reasons, the Swift effect is suppressed while in water or Leda's.
Power cap: 100
Noise: 2 at your location
Throw Flame
Damage is 2d(4+power/10), to-hit is 8+power/10. Every FE should learn this, it has LOS range and better damage than flame tongue.
Range: LOS
Power cap: 50
Noise: 2 wherever the projectile ends, followed by 2 at your location
Throw Frost
Damage is 2d(4+power/10), to-hit is 8+power/10. IE should learn this since it's their longest-ranged attack. It does check AC and EV, so it's often worse than Freeze in melee range even at max power, but that says more about Freeze being amazing than anything else.
Range: 6
Power cap: 50
Noise: 2 wherever the projectile ends, followed by 2 at your location
Level 3 spells
Spoiler: show
Call Canine Familiar
Summons a canine with a summon duration of min(6, 2+floor(random2(power)/4)). To determine which canine you get, take power+1d21-11. If this number is at least 60, you get a warg. Otherwise, if it's at least 40, you get a wolf. Otherwise, you get a hound. Note that while wargs have the highest damage per aut, they are also the slowest of these monsters (wolves are the fastest). Generic decent summoning spell, notable for having see invisible.
Power cap: 100
Summon cap: 1
Noise: 3 at your location
Confuse
Successfully confusing a monster is basically like killing it, since it can no longer do damage to you (unless you stand next to it, which is easy not to do) or cast spells. You do need to spend a few turns to actually kill it after confusing it, of course, so fight monsters one at a time instead of in groups. On stabbers you use this against anything that EH won't work against (either because of immunity or having MR too high for EH's low power cap). Confuse is also a useful spell to have when scumming Xom, as it gives you an easy way to fall down stairs, avoiding Xom boredom entirely. When not actively scumming, the effect of Xom boredom is too small to matter.
Range: LOS
Noise: 3 at your location
Conjure Flame
In my opinion, this is the strongest damage spell in the game, i.e. seriously overpowered. It's nearly silent, and either blocks monsters or does 5+2d16/2 damage to them every 10 aut. Plus, you can use it to never get hit by bolt of cold (although you can already never get hit by bolt of cold just by staying out of its range...)
Since this spell is amazing even with terrible spellpower, almost any character that can cast it should memorize it. Monsters will happily walk into any cloud if they are already in a cloud that they consider harmful. So if a monster won't walk into a flame cloud, but you want it to, you can cast meph or poisonous vapours or corpse rot or breathe steam at it, and it will immediately walk into the flame cloud (unless it's immune to the new cloud, of course). Note that whether a monster is willing to walk into a flame cloud is randomized for every action. So a monster might spend 3 turns doing nothing, then decide to walk into the flame cloud, even if its hp hasn't changed.
Range: 3
Noise: 2 at the target location and 3 at your location.
Dazzling Spray
Has a bizarre cone-shaped targeting that I still don't understand. Damage is 2d(3+power/8). To-hit is 9+power/7. If a monster hit by dazzling spray is susceptible to blindness, not nonliving, not a plant, and not undead, it has a (19-HD)/20 chance of being blinded for (3+1d5)*10 aut. Good for stabbing or if you want to leave a stupidly lethal ghost. The damage is really low, however.
Range: 5
Power cap: 50
Noise: 3 at your location and 3 at the end of every spray projectile.
Gell's Gravitas
Sucks monsters towards the center. Does 2d(1+floor(power/10)) damage to monsters that collide with each other (or somehow manage to collide with a wall), checking AC as normal. It's very difficult to move monsters out of LOS with it so it's not much good for moving monsters, and the damage is bad even for a level 3 spell. Sucks.
Range: LOS
Noise: 3 at the target location. Collisions do not make noise.
Ignite Poison
Does (levels of poison * 2)d(12+power*0.06) fire damage to all poisoned monsters in LOS, removing the poison. This is "roughly 2x to 3x" as much damage as just letting the poison run its course, according to a comment. This sounds nice, but if you are poisoning monsters that means you're probably already killing non-rPois monsters easily enough.
Its other use is that it converts clouds of poison or noxious fumes into flame clouds, and sets their duration to 29+1d(20+power) when it does so. This is somewhat more useful, since it allows you to use Mephitic Cloud and Poisonous Vapours as mostly inferior Conjure Flame replacements.
Noise: 4 at your location
Inner Flame
A line-of-fire enchantment that applies the inner flame status. Duration is (24+1d11)*10 aut.
Monsters that die while inner flamed will explode for 3d15 fire damage in a radius of 1 if tiny, 3d25 in a radius of 2 if giant or bigger, and 3d20 in a radius of 1 otherwise. Each adjacent square has an 80% chance of getting a flame cloud placed on it with duration (9+1d10)*10 aut, unless it already has a cloud. Note that while giant monsters make bigger explosions, they still only place flame clouds on adjacent squares.
Most bad spells are bad because their damage sucks, or they have some crippling downside, or they just don't offer enough returns for their spell level. Inner Flame is bad simply because it's impractical. The damage is good, but to damage a monster with inner flame, you have to do all of the following:
1. Find a monster that will be adjacent to the monster you want to damage.
2. Have line of fire to that monster.
3. Use at least one of your turns to inner flame it (possibly multiple, if you fail to beat MR).
4. Kill the inner flamed monster while it's adjacent to the monster you want to damage.
If any of these steps go wrong, you're out several turns and you have at least two monsters on the screen. Even if it works, you just made a ton of noise. It's usually a lot easier and faster to just attack the first monster directly. The best case you can make for the spell is probably using it on allies. It doesn't work on true summons, but you can use it on skeletons, zombies, simulacra, and Sticks to Snakes snakes. That way, you don't have to spend time killing the inner flamed monster since hostile monsters will do it for you, although the positioning is still awkward.
You could say it's good for saving MP against packs but FE already has excellent MP efficiency with conjure flame and sticky flame, and AM doesn't exactly need a lot of MP.
Noise: 3 at your location, 15 at the center of the explosion.
Lesser Beckoning
I learn this spell in case I ever want to get a ranged monster next to me and I don't have a corner. I almost never end up casting it because that almost never actually happens to me, and it is significantly inferior to using a corner. It's good if you're enough of a masochist to play melee-based Chei characters though. You can also cast it on allies without angering them, which is almost completely useless.
Noise: 2 at your location
Mephitic Cloud
Makes a 3x3 explosion that creates a cloud of noxious fumes at the center, and has a (125+power)/225) chance of creating a cloud on each adjacent square (the chance is individual for each square). The clouds last for 2d(3+floor(power/20))*10 aut. Mephitic clouds only affect players and monsters without rPois or unbreathing. Every time the player is affected, you will resist confusion if 1d27 is less than your experience level. Every time a monster is affected, it will resist confusion with an HD in 21 chance, or a 49 in 50 chance if its HD is 21 or higher.
Additionally, mephitic clouds do 1d3-1 damage per 10 aut to susceptible actors.
The noise on this spell is a big deal, since you generally need extra turns to actually kill the confused monsters.
Range: 4
Noise: 3 at your location, 15 at the center of the explosion
Power cap: 100
Ozocubu's Armour
Duration is 39+1d11 and cannot be increased past 50. Gives 5+floor(power/12.5) AC.
Ridiculously overpowered spell, it's easy to cast out of Spellcasting skill alone and gives you a bunch of free AC. Finding it instantly makes the majority of the game's body armour items obsolete (I'd say only stuff with 10+ base AC or improbably good enchantment is worth using over Ozo's). The AC is based on the power at the time you cast it, so before going down staircases etc., put on two rings of ice and a staff of cold if available, cast Ozo's, then switch back to your regular items.
The movement delay exists to discourage you from keeping this up while exploring and does a passable job of that. It's not significant in combat.
Noise: 3 at your location
Poisonous Vapours
Puts a poisonous cloud on a square that has a non-rPois monster on it. Can refresh an existing poisonous cloud, but not replace other clouds. The cloud's duration is max(1,floor((1d(power+1)-1)/10))*10 aut. Basically what Sting would be if it were actually good. An easy, reliable way to kill non-rPois monsters. It's even smite-targeted. You can cast it on non-rPois allies, but not yourself. This is a good way to turn allies hostile under Beogh, Okawaru, etc. without actually incurring penance (the prompt lies about this), so it can substitute for Conjure Flame as your weak orc killing spell.
Range: LOS
Power cap: 50
Noise: 2 at your location. Makes no noise at the target location, and harmless clouds don't wake up monsters, so casting it on an rPois monster wouldn't wake it up even if it were possible.
Recall
If you have allies and don't have an equivalent god ability, you should memorize this spell just so you don't want to kill yourself as much. It doesn't really provide much extra character power but waiting for allies to catch up to you, manually stopping them from killing themselves in vault clouds, etc. is the worst.
Noise: 3 at your location
Regeneration
If you can cast this spell you should memorize it. Regeneration doesn't do much in combat. If you rush it early it does provide significant healing in combat but you'll take significantly more damage in combat since you wasted your xp on getting Regeneration early, instead of being able to kill things. What it does do is save a lot of turns, which is useful for survival because it means saving a lot of piety. It's also good when you don't have stairs available, though that shouldn't really be happening outside of Vaults:$ and extended.
Noise: 3 at your location
Spectral Weapon
Summon duration is 2+1d(power/25), capped at 4. The spectral weapon's stats are:
HD: 2+power/4, randomly rounded
Damage: floor([weapon base damage]*floor(37500/(50+power)+125)/floor(37500/(50+power))) ; at 0 power this is 1.17x base damage and at 100 power it is 1.83x base damage
Speed: 30
EV: 10+power/10, randomly rounded
AC: 2+power/10, randomly rounded
HP: 10+power/3, randomly rounded
The spectral weapon attacks whenever you do, and gets to apply the weapon's enchantment and brand. Spectral weapon is forbidden for a subset of fixedarts that changes too frequently for me to want to check; according to the learndb it's currently Singing Sword, Mace of Variability, Sword of Power, Staff of Wucad Mu, Sceptre of Torment, Sword of Zonguldrok, and Devastator.
Whenever something damages the spectral weapon, the damage is split evenly between you and the spectral weapon, so it effectively has twice its actual HP. Since most monsters don't get to attack both you and the weapon at once, the weapon has good resistances, and you can always dismiss it in a mere 3 aut by unwielding your weapon, this really isn't a big disadvantage.
One of the most broken spells in the game, and easily the stupidest spell in the game in my opinion. It's a ridiculously huge damage boost for anyone that uses melee. It is also a huge pain in the ass to use with any weapon that isn't a polearm. God I hate this spell so much.
Power cap: 100
Noise: 3 at your location
Spider Form
Despite repeated nerfs, this is still an excellent form. Reaching XL3 takes Tm's melee ability from crappy to amazing (second only to Be), and it has a big defense boost on top of that. The rPois- is an annoyance rather than a real disadvantage and I wish it wasn't a thing. Doesn't meaningfully scale with power.
Noise: 2 at your location
Static Discharge
Creates up to 1d(1d3+floor(power/20)) arcs, one arc to each adjacent non-rElec monster. Each arc hits the monster, then has a 31/40 chance of arcing to another adjacent creature if its power is 10 or greater, or a 1/10 chance of arcing to another adjacent creature if its power is between 3 and 9. When it arcs to another creature, its power is divided by 1+1d2 and rounded down. Static Discharge cannot arc to monsters with rElec, but it can arc to players with rElec just fine.
When an arc hits the caster, it does 1d(3+floor(power/15)) electric damage. When it hits anything else, it does 2+1d(4+floor(power/10)+1d(floor(random2(power)/10)) electric damage. This damage ignores AC, but remember that you can't use the spell against rElec monsters at all.
This spell does excellent damage for its level, hampered by the fact that it's melee range and also significantly damages you. Having rElec makes it much better just because the self-damage is so high.
The damage a single arc does to a single monster will obviously be lower when there are more monsters around. However, since the spell can make multiple arcs, being adjacent to two monsters with at least 20 power will provide better mean damage to the individual monsters, because you are usually getting two arcs between three targets instead of one arc between two targets (as you would get if you just stood adjacent to one monster). The same applies to being adjacent to even more monsters with sufficient power. Sadly, the power is capped at 100, so you're never getting that stupid nested dice roll higher than 1d(1d3+5).
Of course, since additional arcs are only created for adjacent monsters, you want to avoid having monsters that are adjacent to the other monsters but not adjacent to you, since those monsters will soak up arcs without allowing you to create extra arcs.
Power cap: 100
Noise: 3 at your location
Stone Arrow
Damage is 3d(5+power/8), to-hit is 8+power/10, power cap is 50. Good for EE since it only checks AC once, doesn't require stones, and isn't really loud. The damage falls off around Lair even compared to other level 3 spells because of the low power cap, and LRD quickly becomes better against even high-AC targets.
Noise: 3 at the projectile's destination followed by 3 at your location
Teleport Other
This is a really bad hex, but a really bad hex is still pretty good. Unlike other hexes it doesn't help you kill the monster but it does have a good chance of temporarily getting rid of it after a few turns.
Noise: 3 at your location
Tukima's Dance
Despite being both a summon and a hex, this spell is only moderately overpowered. Good against basically anything with a weapon.
Noise: 3 at your location
Vampiric Draining
Damage is 2+2d9/2+random2(power)/7, capped at the amount of HP you're missing. The hp you actually regain is half of the damage dealt, randomly rounded. You might notice that this usually outperforms actual melee, as long as you're missing some HP. So this is a borderline broken spell that Ne can coast on for a very long time if they don't want to use allies.
Noise: 3 at your location
Summons a canine with a summon duration of min(6, 2+floor(random2(power)/4)). To determine which canine you get, take power+1d21-11. If this number is at least 60, you get a warg. Otherwise, if it's at least 40, you get a wolf. Otherwise, you get a hound. Note that while wargs have the highest damage per aut, they are also the slowest of these monsters (wolves are the fastest). Generic decent summoning spell, notable for having see invisible.
Power cap: 100
Summon cap: 1
Noise: 3 at your location
Confuse
Successfully confusing a monster is basically like killing it, since it can no longer do damage to you (unless you stand next to it, which is easy not to do) or cast spells. You do need to spend a few turns to actually kill it after confusing it, of course, so fight monsters one at a time instead of in groups. On stabbers you use this against anything that EH won't work against (either because of immunity or having MR too high for EH's low power cap). Confuse is also a useful spell to have when scumming Xom, as it gives you an easy way to fall down stairs, avoiding Xom boredom entirely. When not actively scumming, the effect of Xom boredom is too small to matter.
Range: LOS
Noise: 3 at your location
Conjure Flame
In my opinion, this is the strongest damage spell in the game, i.e. seriously overpowered. It's nearly silent, and either blocks monsters or does 5+2d16/2 damage to them every 10 aut. Plus, you can use it to never get hit by bolt of cold (although you can already never get hit by bolt of cold just by staying out of its range...)
Since this spell is amazing even with terrible spellpower, almost any character that can cast it should memorize it. Monsters will happily walk into any cloud if they are already in a cloud that they consider harmful. So if a monster won't walk into a flame cloud, but you want it to, you can cast meph or poisonous vapours or corpse rot or breathe steam at it, and it will immediately walk into the flame cloud (unless it's immune to the new cloud, of course). Note that whether a monster is willing to walk into a flame cloud is randomized for every action. So a monster might spend 3 turns doing nothing, then decide to walk into the flame cloud, even if its hp hasn't changed.
Range: 3
Noise: 2 at the target location and 3 at your location.
Dazzling Spray
Has a bizarre cone-shaped targeting that I still don't understand. Damage is 2d(3+power/8). To-hit is 9+power/7. If a monster hit by dazzling spray is susceptible to blindness, not nonliving, not a plant, and not undead, it has a (19-HD)/20 chance of being blinded for (3+1d5)*10 aut. Good for stabbing or if you want to leave a stupidly lethal ghost. The damage is really low, however.
Range: 5
Power cap: 50
Noise: 3 at your location and 3 at the end of every spray projectile.
Gell's Gravitas
Sucks monsters towards the center. Does 2d(1+floor(power/10)) damage to monsters that collide with each other (or somehow manage to collide with a wall), checking AC as normal. It's very difficult to move monsters out of LOS with it so it's not much good for moving monsters, and the damage is bad even for a level 3 spell. Sucks.
Range: LOS
Noise: 3 at the target location. Collisions do not make noise.
Ignite Poison
Does (levels of poison * 2)d(12+power*0.06) fire damage to all poisoned monsters in LOS, removing the poison. This is "roughly 2x to 3x" as much damage as just letting the poison run its course, according to a comment. This sounds nice, but if you are poisoning monsters that means you're probably already killing non-rPois monsters easily enough.
Its other use is that it converts clouds of poison or noxious fumes into flame clouds, and sets their duration to 29+1d(20+power) when it does so. This is somewhat more useful, since it allows you to use Mephitic Cloud and Poisonous Vapours as mostly inferior Conjure Flame replacements.
Noise: 4 at your location
Inner Flame
A line-of-fire enchantment that applies the inner flame status. Duration is (24+1d11)*10 aut.
Monsters that die while inner flamed will explode for 3d15 fire damage in a radius of 1 if tiny, 3d25 in a radius of 2 if giant or bigger, and 3d20 in a radius of 1 otherwise. Each adjacent square has an 80% chance of getting a flame cloud placed on it with duration (9+1d10)*10 aut, unless it already has a cloud. Note that while giant monsters make bigger explosions, they still only place flame clouds on adjacent squares.
Most bad spells are bad because their damage sucks, or they have some crippling downside, or they just don't offer enough returns for their spell level. Inner Flame is bad simply because it's impractical. The damage is good, but to damage a monster with inner flame, you have to do all of the following:
1. Find a monster that will be adjacent to the monster you want to damage.
2. Have line of fire to that monster.
3. Use at least one of your turns to inner flame it (possibly multiple, if you fail to beat MR).
4. Kill the inner flamed monster while it's adjacent to the monster you want to damage.
If any of these steps go wrong, you're out several turns and you have at least two monsters on the screen. Even if it works, you just made a ton of noise. It's usually a lot easier and faster to just attack the first monster directly. The best case you can make for the spell is probably using it on allies. It doesn't work on true summons, but you can use it on skeletons, zombies, simulacra, and Sticks to Snakes snakes. That way, you don't have to spend time killing the inner flamed monster since hostile monsters will do it for you, although the positioning is still awkward.
You could say it's good for saving MP against packs but FE already has excellent MP efficiency with conjure flame and sticky flame, and AM doesn't exactly need a lot of MP.
Noise: 3 at your location, 15 at the center of the explosion.
Lesser Beckoning
I learn this spell in case I ever want to get a ranged monster next to me and I don't have a corner. I almost never end up casting it because that almost never actually happens to me, and it is significantly inferior to using a corner. It's good if you're enough of a masochist to play melee-based Chei characters though. You can also cast it on allies without angering them, which is almost completely useless.
Noise: 2 at your location
Mephitic Cloud
Makes a 3x3 explosion that creates a cloud of noxious fumes at the center, and has a (125+power)/225) chance of creating a cloud on each adjacent square (the chance is individual for each square). The clouds last for 2d(3+floor(power/20))*10 aut. Mephitic clouds only affect players and monsters without rPois or unbreathing. Every time the player is affected, you will resist confusion if 1d27 is less than your experience level. Every time a monster is affected, it will resist confusion with an HD in 21 chance, or a 49 in 50 chance if its HD is 21 or higher.
Additionally, mephitic clouds do 1d3-1 damage per 10 aut to susceptible actors.
The noise on this spell is a big deal, since you generally need extra turns to actually kill the confused monsters.
Range: 4
Noise: 3 at your location, 15 at the center of the explosion
Power cap: 100
Ozocubu's Armour
Duration is 39+1d11 and cannot be increased past 50. Gives 5+floor(power/12.5) AC.
Ridiculously overpowered spell, it's easy to cast out of Spellcasting skill alone and gives you a bunch of free AC. Finding it instantly makes the majority of the game's body armour items obsolete (I'd say only stuff with 10+ base AC or improbably good enchantment is worth using over Ozo's). The AC is based on the power at the time you cast it, so before going down staircases etc., put on two rings of ice and a staff of cold if available, cast Ozo's, then switch back to your regular items.
The movement delay exists to discourage you from keeping this up while exploring and does a passable job of that. It's not significant in combat.
Noise: 3 at your location
Poisonous Vapours
Puts a poisonous cloud on a square that has a non-rPois monster on it. Can refresh an existing poisonous cloud, but not replace other clouds. The cloud's duration is max(1,floor((1d(power+1)-1)/10))*10 aut. Basically what Sting would be if it were actually good. An easy, reliable way to kill non-rPois monsters. It's even smite-targeted. You can cast it on non-rPois allies, but not yourself. This is a good way to turn allies hostile under Beogh, Okawaru, etc. without actually incurring penance (the prompt lies about this), so it can substitute for Conjure Flame as your weak orc killing spell.
Range: LOS
Power cap: 50
Noise: 2 at your location. Makes no noise at the target location, and harmless clouds don't wake up monsters, so casting it on an rPois monster wouldn't wake it up even if it were possible.
Recall
If you have allies and don't have an equivalent god ability, you should memorize this spell just so you don't want to kill yourself as much. It doesn't really provide much extra character power but waiting for allies to catch up to you, manually stopping them from killing themselves in vault clouds, etc. is the worst.
Noise: 3 at your location
Regeneration
If you can cast this spell you should memorize it. Regeneration doesn't do much in combat. If you rush it early it does provide significant healing in combat but you'll take significantly more damage in combat since you wasted your xp on getting Regeneration early, instead of being able to kill things. What it does do is save a lot of turns, which is useful for survival because it means saving a lot of piety. It's also good when you don't have stairs available, though that shouldn't really be happening outside of Vaults:$ and extended.
Noise: 3 at your location
Spectral Weapon
Summon duration is 2+1d(power/25), capped at 4. The spectral weapon's stats are:
HD: 2+power/4, randomly rounded
Damage: floor([weapon base damage]*floor(37500/(50+power)+125)/floor(37500/(50+power))) ; at 0 power this is 1.17x base damage and at 100 power it is 1.83x base damage
Speed: 30
EV: 10+power/10, randomly rounded
AC: 2+power/10, randomly rounded
HP: 10+power/3, randomly rounded
The spectral weapon attacks whenever you do, and gets to apply the weapon's enchantment and brand. Spectral weapon is forbidden for a subset of fixedarts that changes too frequently for me to want to check; according to the learndb it's currently Singing Sword, Mace of Variability, Sword of Power, Staff of Wucad Mu, Sceptre of Torment, Sword of Zonguldrok, and Devastator.
Whenever something damages the spectral weapon, the damage is split evenly between you and the spectral weapon, so it effectively has twice its actual HP. Since most monsters don't get to attack both you and the weapon at once, the weapon has good resistances, and you can always dismiss it in a mere 3 aut by unwielding your weapon, this really isn't a big disadvantage.
One of the most broken spells in the game, and easily the stupidest spell in the game in my opinion. It's a ridiculously huge damage boost for anyone that uses melee. It is also a huge pain in the ass to use with any weapon that isn't a polearm. God I hate this spell so much.
Power cap: 100
Noise: 3 at your location
Spider Form
Despite repeated nerfs, this is still an excellent form. Reaching XL3 takes Tm's melee ability from crappy to amazing (second only to Be), and it has a big defense boost on top of that. The rPois- is an annoyance rather than a real disadvantage and I wish it wasn't a thing. Doesn't meaningfully scale with power.
Noise: 2 at your location
Static Discharge
Creates up to 1d(1d3+floor(power/20)) arcs, one arc to each adjacent non-rElec monster. Each arc hits the monster, then has a 31/40 chance of arcing to another adjacent creature if its power is 10 or greater, or a 1/10 chance of arcing to another adjacent creature if its power is between 3 and 9. When it arcs to another creature, its power is divided by 1+1d2 and rounded down. Static Discharge cannot arc to monsters with rElec, but it can arc to players with rElec just fine.
When an arc hits the caster, it does 1d(3+floor(power/15)) electric damage. When it hits anything else, it does 2+1d(4+floor(power/10)+1d(floor(random2(power)/10)) electric damage. This damage ignores AC, but remember that you can't use the spell against rElec monsters at all.
This spell does excellent damage for its level, hampered by the fact that it's melee range and also significantly damages you. Having rElec makes it much better just because the self-damage is so high.
The damage a single arc does to a single monster will obviously be lower when there are more monsters around. However, since the spell can make multiple arcs, being adjacent to two monsters with at least 20 power will provide better mean damage to the individual monsters, because you are usually getting two arcs between three targets instead of one arc between two targets (as you would get if you just stood adjacent to one monster). The same applies to being adjacent to even more monsters with sufficient power. Sadly, the power is capped at 100, so you're never getting that stupid nested dice roll higher than 1d(1d3+5).
Of course, since additional arcs are only created for adjacent monsters, you want to avoid having monsters that are adjacent to the other monsters but not adjacent to you, since those monsters will soak up arcs without allowing you to create extra arcs.
Power cap: 100
Noise: 3 at your location
Stone Arrow
Damage is 3d(5+power/8), to-hit is 8+power/10, power cap is 50. Good for EE since it only checks AC once, doesn't require stones, and isn't really loud. The damage falls off around Lair even compared to other level 3 spells because of the low power cap, and LRD quickly becomes better against even high-AC targets.
Noise: 3 at the projectile's destination followed by 3 at your location
Teleport Other
This is a really bad hex, but a really bad hex is still pretty good. Unlike other hexes it doesn't help you kill the monster but it does have a good chance of temporarily getting rid of it after a few turns.
Noise: 3 at your location
Tukima's Dance
Despite being both a summon and a hex, this spell is only moderately overpowered. Good against basically anything with a weapon.
Noise: 3 at your location
Vampiric Draining
Damage is 2+2d9/2+random2(power)/7, capped at the amount of HP you're missing. The hp you actually regain is half of the damage dealt, randomly rounded. You might notice that this usually outperforms actual melee, as long as you're missing some HP. So this is a borderline broken spell that Ne can coast on for a very long time if they don't want to use allies.
Noise: 3 at your location
Level 4 spells
Spoiler: show
Animate Dead
This spell is still very overpowered, and ridiculous with Kiku. Good for allowing you to close doors, since you can't move skeletons otherwise. Not much else to say about it.
Noise: 3 at your location
Airstrike
Smite-targeted spell that does 8+random2(random2(4)+floor(random2(power)/6)+floor(random2(power)/7)) damage. Checks AC. Monsters that are flying take 50% more damage, rounded down, before they get to apply their AC.
Airstrike is known for its intimidating damage formula. I did a simple Monte Carlo analysis, 10,000,000 trials for each power level:
In other words, each point of power past 6 gives you about +0.08 mean damage and about +0.32 max damage, and the median isn't much lower than the mean. Not as complex as it looks! Note that the mode is always 8 (which is why it doesn't appear as a column in this table).
Does no damage to monsters with rWind; this notably includes ball lightning and air elementals. Air elementals have rWind so that you can use Tornado in conjunction with summoned air elementals from the removed Summon Elemental spell, or the removed fan of air elementals, or the fan of gales that no longer summons air elementals. They also have rWind so that they are really, really annoying for air elementalists to fight.
Enough about that. Airstrike is a good damage spell that's not particularly overpowered or underpowered compared to other damage spells. I'm surprised there are so many people calling for its removal, as it's very convenient to use and its smite targeting makes it one of the most unique damage spells; other smitey spells are all either boring cloud spells, or Fire Storm. I could do without the flying gimmick and the obtuse damage formula, though.
Noise: 4 at the target, 2 at your location. Exception: Airstrike makes no noise at the target if the target had rWind and you managed to cast Airstrike on it anyway (e.g. invisible air elemental).
Cause Fear
This is one of the best hexes in the game, and is borderline broken. It's a scroll of fear that you can use as many times as you want; allegedly it's the same as the scroll at 134 power and above. After the first few levels, AM almost never has to worry about things making it into melee range because they can just spam this, and it's just as good at getting rid of ranged monsters.
You should, however, avoid using Cause Fear on trivial item-using monsters, because feared monsters will destroy scrolls of blinking/teleportation/etc. in their inventory. Also, don't use it on bears since they go berserk when feared.
Noise: 3 at your location.
Control Undead
I'm pretty sure this is a pet spell for at least one dev because that's the only way I can explain it 1. replacing Dispel Undead on Ne, 2. being guaranteed by Kiku while Dispel Undead isn't, 3. still existing while Enslavement was removed despite it doing the same thing. So yeah, this spell is just as busted as Enslavement.
Force Lance
Damage is 2d(6+power/6), to-hit is 10+power/7. Monsters hit by force lance are knocked back based on a formula I don't care enough about to understand. If the knockback makes the monster hit something solid, the monster (as well as the monster it collided with, if any) takes 2d(1+floor(power/10)) damage, checking AC again.
This is just IMB with bad range and two schools, but with extra damage if you're willing to play a silly positioning minigame, kind of like bolt bouncing. Also it doesn't have a noisy explosion, which is nice. The knockback is not useful for anything other than the collision damage. It would be good if the spell had longer range since you could use it to push monsters out of LOS, but the the spell doesn't have that range, so...
Power cap: 100
Noise: 5 at your location and 5 wherever the projectile ends. Collisions do not make extra noise.
Fulminant Prism
The prism has power/10 HD, randomly rounded. The explosion does 3d(6+floor(HD*7/4)) in a radius of 2 if the prism was fully charged, and only 2d(6+floor(HD*7/4)) in a radius of 1 if the explosion was premature.
Basically a weird fireball variant that can be used to block a square like lightning spire. I don't have much to say about it.
Noise: 4 at your location, and 20 for the full-size explosion or 15 for the small explosion. Feeble detonations are silent.
Ice Form
Depending on your species and skill training, this may be either mostly better than Blade Hands or almost strictly inferior. +9 base damage over clawless untransformed, plus freezing brand; this is much better damage than spider or statue form, and with high unarmed skill it is as good as blade hands. Bad innate AC, but +20% HP and Ozocubu's Armour works during it, so if you have that spell it's nearly as good as Statue Form defensively, while offering better offense and a lower level. It's also large, so it effectively has a small EV penalty if you aren't already a large species.
Since it melds all your armour, you are unlikely to get an AC increase from Ice Form after the early game. It is a form you use for damage and convenient rC+++. Probably the form most likely to be useful for conjurers/summoners since it's easy to cast, you get extra HP, and it has no penalties to your spells. It also makes Ozocubu's Refrigeration and Freezing Cloud more convenient to use. Most conjurers and summoners don't really benefit from it though.
Noise: 3 at your location
Iskenderun's Mystic Blast
Damage is 2d(6+power/6), to-hit is 10+power/7. This spell used to be great, then its damage was nerfed into oblivion and it got a useless but noisy explosion. Now it's not very good, though at least it has range.
Range: 6
Power cap: 100
Noise: 10 at the destination if it explodes, followed by 4 at the destination whether it exploded or not, followed by 4 at your location.
Leda's Liquefaction
Makes nearby squares act a lot like shallow water, except nothing swims in Leda's. So monsters and you both and fumble your melee attacks just as they would in shallow water (so a 1 in 4 chance for monsters), and monsters get a big randomized movement penalty. Strangely, you only get 3 added to your movement delay instead of the normal (larger) shallow water penalty, so you can use this to outrun non-flying monsters...until they leave the radius of the spell. Also, you can't fly during Leda's, but monsters can. This means that trying to melee during Leda's is incredibly bad. Thus the spell is only useful if you're about to use a bunch of ranged attacks or teleport, or really need to make a few squares of distance between you and monsters. Like Silence, it has a decaying radius, and even the initial radius is pretty bad unless you have improbably high spellpower. Dragon Form and Tornado can cancel Leda's.
I don't like this spell because my ranged characters are always characters that want to move a lot, but if you're going to use ranged attacks against non-flying melee monsters and aren't going to actually kite them, I suppose this spell would significantly reduce the damage they do to you.
Noise: 3 at your location
Olgreb's Toxic Radiance
This is a pretty good spell now. It's a good option for killing non-rPois monsters through Lair, Orc, and Spider, and marginally useful afterwards.
Noise: 2 at your location
Passage of Golubria
This spell has two main uses:
1. The new semicontrolled blink. It's useful for all the things semicontrolled blink was useful for, with two complications: it makes moderate noise when the portals close, and monsters can stumble into the portals. The former restricts its use for stabbing but is otherwise ignorable outside of quiet branches. The latter is relevant, though; you need to plan your moves so you won't lead monsters into the portal (except the ones you want stepping through it) and this can be a big complication if you cast it from a corridor or whatever.
2. When doing a teleport swagjack or the like, cast it before your teleport goes off, and if your teleport puts you in a bad place, cast it again so you can go back to your original location.
For some reason it works for formicids, but not under Orb status. Players that do more speedruns and swagjacks could tell you more about the spell than I can.
Noise: 3 at your location. Whenever a portal disappers, it makes 8 noise at its location.
Petrify
This is sort of like a version of Confuse that's worse in every way. It's higher level, dual-school, incapacitates the monster less (it gets a few actions before fully petrifying), and improves the monster's defenses instead of reducing them. So if you're a hexes character it's unlikely that you have any interest in petrify. However, EE may want to learn it since it still disables monsters, even if it doesn't do so as well as Confuse. Petrify+LRD is almost always inferior to just using a wall, but it does have a niche against monsters with abnormally high AC (usually orcs in heavy armour), and is mildly useful in Swamp.
Sticky Flame
Ever since becoming melee range this spell hasn't been as good as Conjure Flame, but it's still very good, even after the duration nerf. If you use melee and can cast this spell you should probably always apply it before you start making actual melee attacks, but that's annoying. It's also a good way to reveal invisible monsters.
Noise: 1 at the target followed by 4 at your location
Summon Guardian Golem
Summons a guardian golem with a summon duration of 3 and 4+power/16 HD, randomly rounded. On average, it gets about 8 HP per HD. Half the damage dealt to your other allies (not you) is redirected to the guardian golem, and every time it acts while below half of its max HP, it has a 1/4 chance of getting the inner flame enchantment with infinite duration ("overheating").
You can try to use it to shield your allies, but it doesn't have much HP at low power and you need to position it so it doesn't blow up your allies or you. You can try to use it to blow up enemies but since it has no attack and may die without exploding, you'll likely kill the enemies just as fast (and with less noise) by using other summons. Basically this is the one summon spell in the game that manages to be kind of bad.
Noise: 3 at your location, and of course if it explodes it'll make 15 noise.
Summon cap: 1
Summon Ice Beast
Summon duration is 2+floor(random2(power)/4), capped at 4. Summons an ice beast with 3+power/13 HD, randomly rounded. For comparison, regular ice beasts have 5 HD.
Apparently beating D, Lair, and Orc for free isn't enough for IE because it also has this spell. Optimally you'd keep some ice beasts around while exploring. Very few monsters before Depths can win against three ice beasts; they're a great example of an anti-monster monster, even though they probably weren't intended that way.
Noise: 3 at your location
Summon Lightning Spire
Summon duration is always 2. The spire's HD is 1+power/10, randomly rounded, and the electrical bolts do 3d(3+HD) damage with a to-hit of 35. That's 3d(4+power/10) damage. Not only does the spire fire very often, do good damage (especially if you bother to set up bolt bouncing), and have absurdly high to-hit, the ability to put an immobile monster on a specific square is extremely powerful. You can:
- reliably block all line-of-fire effects including enchantments, malmutate, fireball...
- almost-reliably block missiles and reduce beam ranges by 1, since the spire has 3 EV
- and, of course, you can reliably stall a melee monster, but other summons already do that.
It's the higher-level, better version of Summon Butterflies in this respect and you should be casting it in Zot.
Range: 2 for the summon, the spire's bolts have LOS range
Noise: 2 at your location ("An electric hum fills the air" is a lie). The lightning spire makes 5 noise at its location whenever it fires, but the electrical beam itself appears to be silent.
Throw Icicle
Damage is 3d(3.33+power/6), to-hit is 9+power/12. Decent range and good damage for its level (same as fireball up to its power cap). Similar to old IMB, i.e. good, but poor against monsters with rC.
Range: 5
Power cap: 100
Noise: 4 at the destination followed by 4 at your location
This spell is still very overpowered, and ridiculous with Kiku. Good for allowing you to close doors, since you can't move skeletons otherwise. Not much else to say about it.
Noise: 3 at your location
Airstrike
Smite-targeted spell that does 8+random2(random2(4)+floor(random2(power)/6)+floor(random2(power)/7)) damage. Checks AC. Monsters that are flying take 50% more damage, rounded down, before they get to apply their AC.
Airstrike is known for its intimidating damage formula. I did a simple Monte Carlo analysis, 10,000,000 trials for each power level:
- Code:
Power Mean Median Max Stdev
0 8.375 8 10 0.633
1 8.375 8 10 0.633
2 8.375 8 10 0.633
3 8.375 8 10 0.633
4 8.375 8 10 0.633
5 8.375 8 10 0.633
6 8.375 8 10 0.633
7 8.429 8 11 0.695
8 8.519 8 12 0.787
9 8.593 8 12 0.850
10 8.653 8 12 0.896
11 8.703 8 12 0.931
12 8.744 8 12 0.959
13 8.820 8 13 1.019
14 8.883 9 13 1.067
15 8.973 9 14 1.137
16 9.051 9 14 1.193
17 9.120 9 14 1.240
18 9.184 9 14 1.278
19 9.264 9 15 1.340
20 9.338 9 15 1.393
21 9.405 9 15 1.437
22 9.488 9 16 1.501
23 9.564 9 16 1.554
24 9.634 9 16 1.600
25 9.719 9 17 1.666
26 9.797 9 17 1.722
27 9.867 9 17 1.772
28 9.934 10 17 1.817
29 10.016 10 18 1.876
30 10.090 10 18 1.929
31 10.174 10 19 1.995
32 10.255 10 19 2.055
33 10.330 10 19 2.109
34 10.402 10 19 2.156
35 10.468 10 19 2.200
36 10.546 10 20 2.258
37 10.633 10 21 2.326
38 10.713 10 21 2.388
39 10.792 10 21 2.445
40 10.866 10 21 2.497
41 10.936 10 21 2.544
42 11.002 10 21 2.588
43 11.091 11 23 2.659
44 11.172 11 23 2.723
45 11.253 11 23 2.782
46 11.329 11 23 2.838
47 11.400 11 23 2.888
48 11.470 11 23 2.936
49 11.548 11 24 2.992
50 11.632 11 25 3.059
51 11.713 11 25 3.119
52 11.790 11 25 3.176
53 11.866 11 25 3.230
54 11.939 11 25 3.279
55 12.016 11 26 3.338
56 12.093 11 26 3.394
57 12.171 11 27 3.457
58 12.252 12 27 3.516
59 12.328 12 27 3.570
60 12.402 12 27 3.622
61 12.480 12 28 3.683
62 12.557 12 28 3.740
63 12.634 12 28 3.795
64 12.712 12 29 3.855
65 12.790 12 29 3.911
66 12.865 12 29 3.965
67 12.946 12 30 4.027
68 13.023 12 30 4.085
69 13.100 12 30 4.142
70 13.175 12 30 4.194
71 13.251 12 31 4.252
72 13.328 12 31 4.307
73 13.407 13 32 4.370
74 13.485 13 32 4.429
75 13.566 13 32 4.486
76 13.639 13 32 4.540
77 13.714 13 32 4.592
78 13.790 13 33 4.650
79 13.870 13 34 4.713
80 13.950 13 34 4.772
81 14.025 13 34 4.832
82 14.104 13 34 4.886
83 14.175 13 34 4.940
84 14.247 13 34 4.989
85 14.332 13 36 5.056
86 14.415 13 36 5.115
87 14.492 13 36 5.175
88 14.571 14 36 5.230
89 14.647 14 36 5.285
90 14.718 14 36 5.339
91 14.793 14 37 5.395
92 14.879 14 38 5.457
93 14.951 14 38 5.519
94 15.031 14 38 5.574
95 15.110 14 38 5.631
96 15.183 14 38 5.685
97 15.263 14 39 5.743
98 15.334 14 39 5.800
99 15.418 14 40 5.860
100 15.496 14 40 5.918
101 15.576 14 40 5.976
102 15.645 14 40 6.032
103 15.725 15 41 6.094
104 15.806 15 41 6.146
105 15.880 15 41 6.202
106 15.956 15 42 6.264
107 16.038 15 42 6.321
108 16.109 15 42 6.375
109 16.191 15 43 6.436
110 16.267 15 43 6.495
111 16.347 15 43 6.551
112 16.418 15 43 6.603
113 16.498 15 44 6.663
114 16.578 15 44 6.720
115 16.652 15 45 6.782
116 16.734 15 45 6.840
117 16.809 15 45 6.895
118 16.883 16 45 6.952
119 16.960 16 45 7.010
120 17.036 16 46 7.064
121 17.118 16 47 7.124
122 17.199 16 47 7.187
123 17.275 16 47 7.243
124 17.352 16 47 7.299
125 17.428 16 47 7.353
126 17.500 16 47 7.405
127 17.578 16 49 7.470
128 17.661 16 49 7.531
129 17.740 16 49 7.589
130 17.820 16 49 7.642
131 17.888 16 49 7.701
132 17.968 16 49 7.754
133 18.044 17 50 7.813
134 18.126 17 51 7.875
135 18.204 17 51 7.929
136 18.282 17 51 7.988
137 18.354 17 51 8.043
138 18.428 17 51 8.104
139 18.511 17 52 8.156
140 18.590 17 52 8.214
141 18.666 17 53 8.274
142 18.743 17 53 8.334
143 18.819 17 53 8.394
144 18.897 17 53 8.450
145 18.977 17 54 8.508
146 19.052 17 54 8.562
147 19.135 17 54 8.623
148 19.206 17 55 8.680
149 19.291 18 55 8.737
150 19.361 18 55 8.792
151 19.439 18 56 8.852
152 19.516 18 56 8.915
153 19.593 18 56 8.968
154 19.668 18 56 9.025
155 19.749 18 57 9.079
156 19.823 18 57 9.136
157 19.903 18 58 9.197
158 19.975 18 58 9.255
159 20.058 18 58 9.318
160 20.132 18 58 9.369
161 20.209 18 58 9.426
162 20.282 18 59 9.481
163 20.364 18 60 9.543
164 20.439 19 60 9.603
165 20.523 19 60 9.665
166 20.597 19 60 9.720
167 20.669 19 60 9.774
168 20.750 19 60 9.826
169 20.831 19 62 9.885
170 20.911 19 62 9.949
171 20.985 19 62 10.006
172 21.061 19 62 10.067
173 21.144 19 62 10.120
174 21.214 19 62 10.175
175 21.297 19 63 10.230
176 21.379 19 64 10.289
177 21.454 19 64 10.352
178 21.530 19 64 10.407
179 21.603 20 64 10.466
180 21.684 20 64 10.522
181 21.757 20 65 10.580
182 21.834 20 65 10.636
183 21.913 20 66 10.696
184 21.993 20 66 10.754
185 22.068 20 66 10.814
186 22.140 20 66 10.867
187 22.229 20 67 10.926
188 22.304 20 67 10.983
189 22.372 20 67 11.041
190 22.454 20 68 11.102
191 22.533 20 68 11.156
192 22.612 20 68 11.217
193 22.684 20 69 11.270
194 22.769 21 69 11.326
195 22.842 21 69 11.388
196 22.919 21 69 11.441
197 22.996 21 70 11.504
198 23.072 21 70 11.561
199 23.148 21 71 11.621
200 23.233 21 71 11.678
Does no damage to monsters with rWind; this notably includes ball lightning and air elementals. Air elementals have rWind so that you can use Tornado in conjunction with summoned air elementals from the removed Summon Elemental spell, or the removed fan of air elementals, or the fan of gales that no longer summons air elementals. They also have rWind so that they are really, really annoying for air elementalists to fight.
Enough about that. Airstrike is a good damage spell that's not particularly overpowered or underpowered compared to other damage spells. I'm surprised there are so many people calling for its removal, as it's very convenient to use and its smite targeting makes it one of the most unique damage spells; other smitey spells are all either boring cloud spells, or Fire Storm. I could do without the flying gimmick and the obtuse damage formula, though.
Noise: 4 at the target, 2 at your location. Exception: Airstrike makes no noise at the target if the target had rWind and you managed to cast Airstrike on it anyway (e.g. invisible air elemental).
Cause Fear
This is one of the best hexes in the game, and is borderline broken. It's a scroll of fear that you can use as many times as you want; allegedly it's the same as the scroll at 134 power and above. After the first few levels, AM almost never has to worry about things making it into melee range because they can just spam this, and it's just as good at getting rid of ranged monsters.
You should, however, avoid using Cause Fear on trivial item-using monsters, because feared monsters will destroy scrolls of blinking/teleportation/etc. in their inventory. Also, don't use it on bears since they go berserk when feared.
Noise: 3 at your location.
Control Undead
I'm pretty sure this is a pet spell for at least one dev because that's the only way I can explain it 1. replacing Dispel Undead on Ne, 2. being guaranteed by Kiku while Dispel Undead isn't, 3. still existing while Enslavement was removed despite it doing the same thing. So yeah, this spell is just as busted as Enslavement.
Force Lance
Damage is 2d(6+power/6), to-hit is 10+power/7. Monsters hit by force lance are knocked back based on a formula I don't care enough about to understand. If the knockback makes the monster hit something solid, the monster (as well as the monster it collided with, if any) takes 2d(1+floor(power/10)) damage, checking AC again.
This is just IMB with bad range and two schools, but with extra damage if you're willing to play a silly positioning minigame, kind of like bolt bouncing. Also it doesn't have a noisy explosion, which is nice. The knockback is not useful for anything other than the collision damage. It would be good if the spell had longer range since you could use it to push monsters out of LOS, but the the spell doesn't have that range, so...
Power cap: 100
Noise: 5 at your location and 5 wherever the projectile ends. Collisions do not make extra noise.
Fulminant Prism
The prism has power/10 HD, randomly rounded. The explosion does 3d(6+floor(HD*7/4)) in a radius of 2 if the prism was fully charged, and only 2d(6+floor(HD*7/4)) in a radius of 1 if the explosion was premature.
Basically a weird fireball variant that can be used to block a square like lightning spire. I don't have much to say about it.
Noise: 4 at your location, and 20 for the full-size explosion or 15 for the small explosion. Feeble detonations are silent.
Ice Form
Depending on your species and skill training, this may be either mostly better than Blade Hands or almost strictly inferior. +9 base damage over clawless untransformed, plus freezing brand; this is much better damage than spider or statue form, and with high unarmed skill it is as good as blade hands. Bad innate AC, but +20% HP and Ozocubu's Armour works during it, so if you have that spell it's nearly as good as Statue Form defensively, while offering better offense and a lower level. It's also large, so it effectively has a small EV penalty if you aren't already a large species.
Since it melds all your armour, you are unlikely to get an AC increase from Ice Form after the early game. It is a form you use for damage and convenient rC+++. Probably the form most likely to be useful for conjurers/summoners since it's easy to cast, you get extra HP, and it has no penalties to your spells. It also makes Ozocubu's Refrigeration and Freezing Cloud more convenient to use. Most conjurers and summoners don't really benefit from it though.
Noise: 3 at your location
Iskenderun's Mystic Blast
Damage is 2d(6+power/6), to-hit is 10+power/7. This spell used to be great, then its damage was nerfed into oblivion and it got a useless but noisy explosion. Now it's not very good, though at least it has range.
Range: 6
Power cap: 100
Noise: 10 at the destination if it explodes, followed by 4 at the destination whether it exploded or not, followed by 4 at your location.
Leda's Liquefaction
Makes nearby squares act a lot like shallow water, except nothing swims in Leda's. So monsters and you both and fumble your melee attacks just as they would in shallow water (so a 1 in 4 chance for monsters), and monsters get a big randomized movement penalty. Strangely, you only get 3 added to your movement delay instead of the normal (larger) shallow water penalty, so you can use this to outrun non-flying monsters...until they leave the radius of the spell. Also, you can't fly during Leda's, but monsters can. This means that trying to melee during Leda's is incredibly bad. Thus the spell is only useful if you're about to use a bunch of ranged attacks or teleport, or really need to make a few squares of distance between you and monsters. Like Silence, it has a decaying radius, and even the initial radius is pretty bad unless you have improbably high spellpower. Dragon Form and Tornado can cancel Leda's.
I don't like this spell because my ranged characters are always characters that want to move a lot, but if you're going to use ranged attacks against non-flying melee monsters and aren't going to actually kite them, I suppose this spell would significantly reduce the damage they do to you.
Noise: 3 at your location
Olgreb's Toxic Radiance
This is a pretty good spell now. It's a good option for killing non-rPois monsters through Lair, Orc, and Spider, and marginally useful afterwards.
Noise: 2 at your location
Passage of Golubria
This spell has two main uses:
1. The new semicontrolled blink. It's useful for all the things semicontrolled blink was useful for, with two complications: it makes moderate noise when the portals close, and monsters can stumble into the portals. The former restricts its use for stabbing but is otherwise ignorable outside of quiet branches. The latter is relevant, though; you need to plan your moves so you won't lead monsters into the portal (except the ones you want stepping through it) and this can be a big complication if you cast it from a corridor or whatever.
2. When doing a teleport swagjack or the like, cast it before your teleport goes off, and if your teleport puts you in a bad place, cast it again so you can go back to your original location.
For some reason it works for formicids, but not under Orb status. Players that do more speedruns and swagjacks could tell you more about the spell than I can.
Noise: 3 at your location. Whenever a portal disappers, it makes 8 noise at its location.
Petrify
This is sort of like a version of Confuse that's worse in every way. It's higher level, dual-school, incapacitates the monster less (it gets a few actions before fully petrifying), and improves the monster's defenses instead of reducing them. So if you're a hexes character it's unlikely that you have any interest in petrify. However, EE may want to learn it since it still disables monsters, even if it doesn't do so as well as Confuse. Petrify+LRD is almost always inferior to just using a wall, but it does have a niche against monsters with abnormally high AC (usually orcs in heavy armour), and is mildly useful in Swamp.
Sticky Flame
Ever since becoming melee range this spell hasn't been as good as Conjure Flame, but it's still very good, even after the duration nerf. If you use melee and can cast this spell you should probably always apply it before you start making actual melee attacks, but that's annoying. It's also a good way to reveal invisible monsters.
Noise: 1 at the target followed by 4 at your location
Summon Guardian Golem
Summons a guardian golem with a summon duration of 3 and 4+power/16 HD, randomly rounded. On average, it gets about 8 HP per HD. Half the damage dealt to your other allies (not you) is redirected to the guardian golem, and every time it acts while below half of its max HP, it has a 1/4 chance of getting the inner flame enchantment with infinite duration ("overheating").
You can try to use it to shield your allies, but it doesn't have much HP at low power and you need to position it so it doesn't blow up your allies or you. You can try to use it to blow up enemies but since it has no attack and may die without exploding, you'll likely kill the enemies just as fast (and with less noise) by using other summons. Basically this is the one summon spell in the game that manages to be kind of bad.
Noise: 3 at your location, and of course if it explodes it'll make 15 noise.
Summon cap: 1
Summon Ice Beast
Summon duration is 2+floor(random2(power)/4), capped at 4. Summons an ice beast with 3+power/13 HD, randomly rounded. For comparison, regular ice beasts have 5 HD.
Apparently beating D, Lair, and Orc for free isn't enough for IE because it also has this spell. Optimally you'd keep some ice beasts around while exploring. Very few monsters before Depths can win against three ice beasts; they're a great example of an anti-monster monster, even though they probably weren't intended that way.
Noise: 3 at your location
Summon Lightning Spire
Summon duration is always 2. The spire's HD is 1+power/10, randomly rounded, and the electrical bolts do 3d(3+HD) damage with a to-hit of 35. That's 3d(4+power/10) damage. Not only does the spire fire very often, do good damage (especially if you bother to set up bolt bouncing), and have absurdly high to-hit, the ability to put an immobile monster on a specific square is extremely powerful. You can:
- reliably block all line-of-fire effects including enchantments, malmutate, fireball...
- almost-reliably block missiles and reduce beam ranges by 1, since the spire has 3 EV
- and, of course, you can reliably stall a melee monster, but other summons already do that.
It's the higher-level, better version of Summon Butterflies in this respect and you should be casting it in Zot.
Range: 2 for the summon, the spire's bolts have LOS range
Noise: 2 at your location ("An electric hum fills the air" is a lie). The lightning spire makes 5 noise at its location whenever it fires, but the electrical beam itself appears to be silent.
Throw Icicle
Damage is 3d(3.33+power/6), to-hit is 9+power/12. Decent range and good damage for its level (same as fireball up to its power cap). Similar to old IMB, i.e. good, but poor against monsters with rC.
Range: 5
Power cap: 100
Noise: 4 at the destination followed by 4 at your location
Last edited by duvessa on Saturday, 9th March 2019, 22:14, edited 13 times in total.