Amulet of Elemental Vulnerability

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Version 0.31: This article is up to date for the latest stable release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
A blue-steel amulet. Its creator, an exceedingly practical woman, designed it to provide powerful protection against mundane jabs, stabs and bites. It's worse than useless against fire and frost, but how often does anyone really need to worry about that?

Amulet of elemental vulnerability.png the amulet of Elemental Vulnerability

+8 AC
rPois
rC--
rF--

Desirability

The amulet of Elemental Vulnerability[1] is an odd piece of jewellery. Matching the ring of the Tortoise's amazing AC buff is great, and poison is the killer of many, many early characters. But even in the early Dungeon, there are many elemental threats.

Overall, this amulet will make 'average' encounters easier, but create entirely new threats in the process. It introduces a player-side risk -- if *you* forget you are vulnerable, you can take surprising spikes of damage. Therefore, it is great for weak characters, those who struggle with the average encounters. Strong characters benefit much less: you can handle average encounters on your own, but this amulet can make you take damage spikes from otherwise nonthreatening enemies.

This artefact is more likely to spawn in the early game, where it is more likely to be useful. By the time you reach Vaults and Depths, there are a large amount of fire/cold monsters, so it becomes a very questionable choice.

Notes

  • Vulnerabilities do not stack. Both rF-- and rF- give the same 150% damage from fire attacks and 200% damage from fire melee attacks.
  • AC protects against magic and most types of elemental damage, e.g. Throw Flame is reduced by AC. "Attack flavours" (such as ice beast cold melee) are not blocked by AC, however, the ice beast needs to deal at least 1 physical damage in order to trigger the cold attack flavour.
In the very early game, the AC bonus can mean you take less average damage from fire/ice attacks (though maximum damage increases):
  • An orc wizard's Throw Flame deals 3d5 on its own. That's 9 avg. damage, 15 max. damage.
  • With fire vulnerability, Throw Flame deals 3d5 * 1.5 damage. But the 8 AC reduces damage by an average of 4. That's 9.5 avg. damage, 23 max damage.

History

  • The amulet of Elemental Vulnerabilty was introduced in 0.29.

References