Maw talisman

Trunk-only: This article pertains to a feature of Crawl which is being tested. It will likely change before the next release, and may even be removed entirely.

Transforms the user's midsection into a giant mouth, gnashing and ready to devour foes. The mouth may devour slain creatures, healing the user to an extent increased by the user's Shapeshifting skill and the power of the creature eaten. Skill also increases the damage done by the maw.

A maw talisman is a talisman that changes you into Maw Form, which adds a giant, gnashing mouth in place of the stomach.

Useful Info

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

Maw Form has the following effects:

Combat Bonuses

• Unarmed Combat: 5 base damage.
• Maw aux attack: Adds a biting auxiliary attack. Damage = 12-20, scaling linearly with Shapeshifting skill past the minimum (+0.8 damage per level). Whenever you make a melee attack, weapon or not, you have a 75% chance to make a maw attack. This ignores the usual XL-based check for aux attacks.
• Devour on kill: Whenever you kill a enemy that can drop a corpse in melee, you have an independent 66% chance to devour it, healing you. You'll heal the lesser of HD + 1d(HD) or Shapeshifting + 1d20. You don't need to make a maw attack to devour.
  • Beogh followers will not devour orcs. Gozag turns corpses into gold, stopping this effect. Death drops still generate, so you won't miss out on dragon scales and the like. (Necromancy??)

Restrictions

• Melded Gear: Body armour.

Maw Form does not block any mutations, does not change your size, and gives no innate bonus to HP / AC.

Maw Form has a minimum Shapeshifting skill of 10, below which you get an HP penalty. It has a maximum skill of 19, where skill has no further impact.

Strategy

The maw auxiliary attack doesn't care about how hard you hit, but the faster you swing, the more maw attacks you'll proc. Therefore, it works best on fast weapons. Skilled Unarmed Combat is obvious, but it also works well with Short Blades and demon whips.

History

• Will be introduced in trunk, in the transformation overhaul. Maw Form had no previous counterpart.