Amulet of guardian spirit
Version 0.25: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.
| Type | Jewellery |
|---|---|
| Name | Amulet of guardian spirit |
| Icon | 
|
| An amulet containing a protective spirit which will cause any damage taken to be divided between the wearer's reserves of health and magic. |
Wearing an amulet of guardian spirit grants the spirit shield intrinsic. This links your HP and MP, causing all damage you take to be split proportionally between your HP and MP pools.
Equipping this amulet will immediately set your MP to zero.
Strategy
- Vine Stalkers and Demonspawn with the Mana Shield mutation innately have spirit shield and gain no further benefit from wearing this amulet (fortunately, equipping an amulet of guardian spirit will not drain their MP). Since this amulet links MP with HP, deep dwarves will stop regenerating MP (and lose all MP upon equipping the amulet) until they remove it.
- This amulet is best suited for spellcasters and races with a very low HP-to-MP ratio, for whom it provides the greatest increase in survivability. While these characters will sometimes be reduced to low MP and be unable to cast spells or use certain abilities, this is better than being reduced to 0 HP and being dead. Conversely, it offers little benefit to berserkers and other characters with little to no MP.
- If you plan to wear this amulet long-term, consider training your Spellcasting, Invocations, or Evocations ability to increase your mana pool and give you some additional durability. Training Spellcasting will grant you the most MP, but training Invocations or Evocations may or may not be more practical options depending on your character specs and/or skill aptitudes.
- When combined with some sort of channeling ability, it can serve as a limited form of on-demand healing. This is great for mummies or lichform casters, who can channel constantly without feeling hunger, and is worth considering for spellcasters in chunk-rich areas.
- Deep elves and felids have low enough HP that they can be one-shotted by Lehudib's Crystal Spear and similar dangers. Losing a large chunk of your MP from a hard hit is still preferable to losing all your HP.
- Remember to re-assess the priority for killing MP-draining monsters (such as eyes of draining or ghost moths) while wearing this amulet, as their ability to drain your MP is often rapid and irresistible.
- Guardian Spirit has no effect on poison damage over time. As such, if you are lethally poisoned, you will still need to cure or out-heal the poison to avoid death.
History
Prior to 0.10, the amulet used only MP to shield the wearer, making it less useful for casters.
