Magical staff

Version 0.30: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Name	Magical staff (type varies)
Skill	Staves
Damage	5
Accuracy	+5
Base delay (%)	12 (120%)
Min delay	6 at skill 12
Hands	1H
Size	Large
Ranged?	No

A staff improved with arcane powers of unknown nature.

A magical staff is a device which increases the power of a certain school of spells. It can also be used as a melee weapon, with magical effects.

Useful Info

Magical staves are spell enhancers, increasing spell power of a given school by up to +50%. Due to a stepdown in calculations, you'll generally receive less than +50%, especially if power is already high.

Unlike normal weapons, magical staves cannot be enchanted or branded in any way. Instead, they can deal elemental damage, based on skill in Evocations and the corresponding magic school.

Damage Dealt: 0 to 1.25×(School+[Evocations/2])
Chance to Activate: (Evocations + School/2)×6.66% per hit

• Staff of fire (Fire Magic): Fire damage, grants rF+.
• Staff of cold (Ice Magic): Cold damage, grants rC+.
• Staff of earth (Earth Magic): Physical damage, which is strongly reduced by armour.
• Staff of air (Air Magic): Electricity damage, grants rElec.
• Staff of poison (Poison Magic): 50 + Poison Magic×12.5% chance to poison the target (can even affect poison-resistant living targets, but has to pass a Poison/16 chance), grants rPois.
• Staff of death (Necromancy): 12.5 + Necromancy×12.5% chance of negative energy damage (does not affect targets with negative energy resistance or drain the target), grants rN+.
• Staff of conjuration (Conjurations): Irresistible damage, which is reduced once by AC. No resistance.

There are also a number of artefact staves, but they are technically classified as weapons rather than magical staves. See here for more details.

	Image
Standard
Artefact

History

• Prior to 0.30, magical staves could not be randarts.
• Prior to 0.27, magical staves could be cursed, like other weapons.
• In 0.26, staves of summoning, wizardry, and energy were removed. Staves of conjuration got the melee effect of staves of earth (irresistible damage that's reduced by AC once); staves of earth got a higher base damage, but with the shrapnel effect of being affected 3 times by AC.
• In 0.25, staves of power were removed.
• Prior to 0.19, staves of fire, earth, air, and cold would act as negative spell enhancers for their opposing elemental school.
• Prior to 0.18, staves of summoning granted the warding property.
• Prior to 0.17, staves of summoning could abjure summoned creatures in melee.
• In 0.13, the Staff of channeling was removed. Its ability to channel MP was given to staves of energy.
• In 0.12, the Staff of enchantment, which enhanced the power of Hexes and Charms, was removed.
• Prior to 0.8, the chance of a magical staff auto-identifying when wielded depended on the skill of the wielder in its corresponding school (or Spellcasting if none applied).

See Also

• Staves
• Rods and List of rods
• Evocable staves
• Unrandart staves