Fortress talisman

Version 0.34: This article is up to date for the latest stable release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

A miniature battlement, carved from a piece of shell. Transforms the user into a heavily armoured crab, fusing whatever body armour they are wearing into the shell in the process. In this form, they are slow-moving, but well-defended and even capable of wielding a weapon in their large main claw. They can also breathe clouds of rust at the cost of their own HP, which corrode and weaken enemies.

A fortress talisman is a talisman that changes you into a heavily-armoured crab.

Useful Info

When eVoked, a fortress talisman turns you into Fortress Crab Form, which lasts until you end the form. Entering or exiting a form takes 5 turns.

Fortress Crab Form has the following effects:

Offensive traits

• Unarmed Combat: 8-13 base damage, depending on your Shapeshifting skill.
• You can breath clouds of rust, which corrode and weaken enemies. The cost is 12 HP + 12% max HP. The size of the cloud is 9-25 tiles, depending on your Shapeshifing skill. Note that there is no breath timer for this ability.

Defensive traits

• Body armour base AC increased by 70%-135%, depending on your Shapeshifting skill.
• Doubles the effect of body armor egos.
• Poison vulnerability
• Corrosion resistance (rCorr)
• Innate AC: 3 AC

Restrictions

• Melded Gear: Offhand, helmet, gloves, boots, barding, cloak
• Suppressed mutations: Anatomy, bones
• You are slow (-30% move speed).
• You can't use a shield, but you can equip any 2 handed weapon your base form can use.

Fortress Crab Form has a minimum Shapeshifting skill of 12, and the maximum skill is 20.

Strategy

Fortress Crab Form has many downsides, making it niche at best:

• The loss of aux slots reduces the effective AC given by this form and prevents you from gaining egos/artefact properties from those slots. The loss of a shield lowers defenses further.
• It has slow movement speed.
• It requires significant investment in Shapeshifting, as well as Armour and other melee skills. In addition, most other talisman forms meld the body armour slot, making this investment spread awkward to pursue.

It is seemingly best on a heavy armour character in the mid-game who hasn't filled many of the aux armour slots yet, which is unlikely, and preferably has prior investment in Shapeshifting. That said, this form can be used to reach over 100 AC with the right gear and skilling.

The doubling of your Armor Ego means that wearing, for example, a Chain Mail of Poison Resist will result in rP+ even when in form and despite the form's inherent poison vulnerability. However, 1. other resistances have diminishing returns (rF+, rC+, rN+) and, 2. other egos boost unrelated skills like Summonings, which splits your XP between multiple unsynergistic skills unlikely to be used by a Fortress-form using character: that skill, Shapeshifting, and Armour.

Note that there is no synergy with Awaken Armour; that spell uses the base AC from the armour type without accounting for the form bonus.

Fortress Crab Form	Gargoyle

History

• Fortress talismans were added in 0.33.