Lightning rod

Version 0.17: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Type	Rod
Name	Lightning rod
Icon

Once, a wizard ignorant of the workings of mundane items misunderstood the purpose of lightning rods. Instead of making one that merely drew lightning, he made one that created it instead. This rod shoots continuous lightning: the discharge is sustained, and can be redirected to new targets by evoking the rod in subsequent turns (failing to do so will release the trigger). The rod takes a moment to warm up, making short bursts rather ineffective. Once the zap is active, one can wave the rod, creating impressive and damaging arcs of electricity.

The lightning rod is a powerful source of area-of-effect electricity damage, though it requires multiple turns to use properly. The first time you evoke it, it fires a weak, medium-range Lightning Bolt, almost as though you'd just evoked a less-powerful wand of lightning. However, if your next action is to evoke it a second time, the effect is different: targeting the same tile you initially attacked will create a more powerful bolt, while targeting a different tile will create a wide spray of unavoidable lightning, damaging everything in between. Doing anything except for evoking the rod again will reset the rod, causing the next bolt you fire to be another low-power bolt.

The MP cost of firing this rod is 2 for the initial zap, and 5 for any consecutive zap (although you may evoke it with less than 5 charges remaining, creating a proportionally weaker effect). The damage of this rod depends on three parameters: your Evocations skill, how many charges are being consumed by the current use, and the length of the current arc. The damage of this rod is inversely proportional to the area covered; the larger the area you spray, the less damage dealt to each target.

Damage: NdM, where N is the mana cost of this zap, and M is (30 + Rod_power/6)/(2+arc_length)

To-hit: 10 + Rod_power/20, for the initial use; 1000, after that.

Note: Rod_power = 5 + 3 × Evocations; Arc_length is the aperture of the beam in tiles at the given radius. Its value is always at least 1.

Strategy

• Lightning rods can deal heavy damage to single targets, but are also excellent for wiping out large packs of enemies, such as ugly things and slime creatures. To maximize damage, try to minimize the area you affect. Ignoring one monster that's several tiles away from the body of the pack may leave it unharmed, but you'll do much more damage to all the other monsters.

History

Lightning rods were added to Crawl in 0.11.