Excruciating Wounds

Version 0.28: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Excruciating Wounds

Excruciating Wounds is a level 5 Necromancy spell that temporarily infuses a weapon with the pain brand, but prevents you from unwielding the weapon and penalizes your spell success rate for the duration.

Effect

A wielded non-artefact melee weapon will gain the pain brand, temporarily overriding any existing brand. Launchers and unarmed attacks are not affected. While this spell is active, you are unable to unwield your weapon, and spells will be harder to cast (increasing raw spell failure by 10%).

Casting the spell at higher spell power will increase the effect's duration.

Strategy

In the hands of a skilled Necromancy practitioner, the pain brand can render a fast weapon extremely deadly to most natural monsters, and by the time a character is capable of casting Excruciating Wounds, they certainly qualify.

Followers of Kikubaaqudgha can choose to permanently brand a weapon of their choice with pain, but this spell allows Kiku worshipers to instead choose to learn several extremely powerful Necromancy spells, or for characters not worshiping Kiku to take advantage of the brand without having to find a good weapon of pain lying around somewhere. Just be aware that this brand is useless against opponents with any negative energy resistance: this includes all demonic, undead, nonliving, and holy opponents. Having the option to use your weapon's innate brand (removed by Kiku blessing) is another benefit of this spell.

Casting the spell is also quite loud, making it unwise to cast it while trying to sneak around sleeping opponents.

History

• Prior to 0.26, Excruciating Wounds was a Necromancy/Charms spell. It did not prevent you from unwielding your weapon, penalize your spell success rate, or make further noise during the spell. However, the initial cast was much louder.
• Prior to 0.16, this spell could not affect weapons that were already branded.
• Added in 0.2.