Amulet of Elemental Vulnerability

Version 0.30: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

A blue-steel amulet. Its creator, an exceedingly practical woman, designed it to provide powerful protection against mundane jabs, stabs and bites. It's worse than useless against fire and frost, but how often does anyone really need to worry about that?

the amulet of Elemental Vulnerability

+8 AC
rPois
rC--
rF--

Desirability

The amulet of Elemental Vulnerability is an odd piece of jewellery. Matching the ring of the Tortoise's amazing AC buff is great, and poison is the killer of many, many early characters. But even in the early Dungeon, there are many elemental threats.

• In early Dungeon, you'll find orc wizards (who cast Throw Flame) and ice beasts.
• The Lair isn't safe either; it has rime drakes and the occasional lindwurm.
• Any weapon-wielding monster can have a weapon of flaming or freezing, increasing their threat level significantly. You can also find uniques, like Azrael, Fannar, and Nessos with fire/cold attacks.

Overall, this amulet will make 'average' encounters easier, but creates entirely new threats in the process. It introduces a player-side risk -- if *you* forget you are vulnerable, you can take surprising spikes of damage. Therefore, it is great for weak characters, those who struggle with the average encounters. Strong characters benefit much less: you can handle average encounters, but this amulet can make you take surprising damage spikes from enemies that were otherwise unthreatening.

This artefact is more likely to spawn in the early game, where it is more likely to be useful. By the time you reach Vaults and Depths, there are a large amount of fire/cold monsters, so it becomes a very questionable choice.

Notes

• Vulnerabilities do not stack. Having rF-- and rF- give the same 150% damage from fire attacks, and 200% damage from fire melee attacks.
• AC protects against magic and most types of elemental damage, e.g. Throw Flame is reduced by AC. "Attack flavours" (such as ice beast cold melee) are not blocked by AC, however, the ice beast needs to deal at least 1 physical damage in order to proc the cold attack flavour.

In the very early game, the AC bonus can mean you take less average damage from fire/ice attacks (though maximum damage increases):

• An orc wizard's Throw Flame deals 3d5 on its own. That's 9 avg. damage, 15 max. damage.
• With fire vulnerability, Throw Flame deals 3d5 * 1.5 damage. But the 8 AC reduces damage by an average of 4. That's 9.5 avg. damage, 23 max damage.

History

• The amulet of Elemental Vulnerabilty was introduced in 0.29.