Chaos

Chaos is a brand that weapons may have. It imitates other brands, changing with each attack to one of the following:

• Vorpal
• Flaming
• Freezing
• Electrocution
• Venom
• Draining
• Vampiricism
• Holy wrath
• Antimagic
• Confusion (normally only found on needles)
• Distortion
• Or "true" chaos, which can cause one of the following effects:
  • The defender is cloned
  • The defender is polymorphed
  • The defender is turned into a shapeshifter
  • The attacker experiences a random miscast
  • The defender goes berserk
  • The defender is healed
  • The defender is hasted
  • The defender is made invisible
  • The defender is slowed
  • The defender is paralyzed
  • The defender is petrified

The brand is gifted by Xom (not necessarily to the player), and is wielded by Xom's vault guards and the uniques Crazy Yiuf and (sometimes) Psyche. Some Pandemonium lords and others have this for a base attack, and the killer klowns have a similar (even more unique) attack. Taking this brand (usually through Yiuf's quarterstaff) will give you access to extremely powerful effects very early on that will overwhelm most low level monsters. Just understand that chaos is a fickle mistress, and its only a matter of time before you berserk an eight headed hydra. Dropping this in favor of a more reliable brand is recommended as soon as possible.

The chaos brand may appear on missiles as well. Such missiles turn into a bolt of random type when they affect each cell and always get destroyed upon impact, but not if they were missiles without brand fired with a ranged weapon of chaos.

Observe that while a beam of paralysis created by a melee weapon with this brand ignores the magic resistance of its target and may affect even monsters immune to magic, a beam of paralysis created by a ranged weapon of chaos checks magic resistance and it has ench_power 0 (for example, it's impossible to affect monsters with MR greater than 100).