Slaying

Version 0.31: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Slaying (Slay) is a property that increases your accuracy and damage in melee and ranged combat. It doesn't affect spells, wands, or anything else. It is functionally identical to weapon enchantment, but affects unarmed attacks and auxiliary attacks as well.

Mechanics

In short, +1 slaying adds +1 to both accuracy roll and damage roll. Slaying is identical to weapon enchantment, except it also affects auxiliary attacks.

Accuracy

Slaying bonuses add to the player's to-hit number.

A player's total to-hit is compared to EV to determine a hit. Therefore, slaying is not a flat increase to % to hit, but an increase in accuracy on average.

Damage

Slaying bonuses add to the damage roll of a weapon, unarmed combat, and auxiliary attacks. The player gets a damage bonus of uniform(enchant + slaying) (that is, a roll from 0 to <enchant + slaying>). Slaying is not impacted by skill or strength, but it is affected by brands like freezing and flaming.

Sources

There are a number of sources of slaying bonuses:

• A ring of slaying.
• Artefacts may provide a bonus or penalty, displayed as {Slay ±X}.
• The spell Fugue of the Fallen provides a variable amount of slaying, increasing by 1 for every monster killed.
• The Wu Jian Council's Heavenly Storm provides a variable slay and EV bonus, starting with 5 and increasing by 1 for every martial attack you perform.
• Gloves with hurling ego provide a +4 slaying bonus to Throwing weapons.

And sources of negative slaying:

• Sacrifice Courage's Horrified condition.

There are also a number of slaying-like effects:

• The Might status gives a flat +1d10 bonus to melee damage. This is added as a separate effect from slay/enchantment. For example, having Might and +10 slay (1d10 + 1d11 - 1) would be more consistent damage-wise than +20 slay (1d21 - 1) would be, even if the average increase in damage is roughly the same. It doesn't increase to-hit.
• Gloves with the Infusion ego give +4 to the damage bonus of only melee attacks (not auxiliary or ranged attacks), at the cost of 1 MP per strike. They don't increase to-hit.
• Corrosion lowers damage bonus and AC by 4 per rank of corrosion. It doesn't lower to-hit.
• Ru's Sacrifice Eye functions like a -5 to-hit malus, though it affects magic too, and doesn't lower damage.

Strategy

Melee and ranged characters will want as much slaying as they can afford. Slaying is relatively better for quicker weapons, as its damage is independent from weapon base damage. Be rational about it: a +2 slaying bonus does not make a -1 randart leather armour a worthwhile proposition on your MiBe.

Strength adds 2.5% damage from a weapon's (base damage * skill multiplier). For the purposes of damage only, 1 strength equals 1 slay when damage is 40 after accounting for skill, but before accounting for strength. The higher the pre-strength damage, the better strength is. However, slaying also increases your to-hit, while strength does not. Also, if you have aux attacks, slay becomes better. Aux attacks have low base damage, so the slay bonus is proportionally better than strength for auxes.

Slaying doesn't affect spells, except for spells that attack with your weapon, so it's not important for most casters.

History

• Prior to 0.15, there were separate slaying bonuses for accuracy and damage. Bonuses were shown in the form +x, +y, where x was the accuracy bonus, and y was the damage bonus
• Prior to 0.10, slaying bonuses for damage were added to the weapon's base damage, meaning that they would be increased by having high weapon/Fighting skill. When this was changed, slaying bonuses were generally increased to compensate.