Lightning rod
| Type | Rod |
|---|---|
| Name | Lightning rod |
| Icon | 
|
| A rod that allows its wielder to fire blasts of lightning. By evoking the rod in consecutive turns, the discharge will be sustained and can be redirected to new targets. It takes a moment to warm up, making short bursts rather ineffective. |
The lightning rod is a powerful source of area-of-effect electricity damage, though it requires multiple turns to use properly. The first time you evoke it, it fires a weak, medium-range Lightning Bolt, almost as though you'd just evoked a less-powerful wand of lightning. However, if your next action is to evoke it a second time, the effect is different: targeting the same tile you initially attacked will create a more powerful bolt, while targeting a different tile will create a wide spray of unavoidable lightning, damaging everything in between the two lines of fire. Doing anything except for evoking the rod again will reset the rod, causing the next bolt you fire to be another low-power bolt.
The MP cost of firing this rod is 2 for the initial zap, and 5 for any consecutive zap (although you may evoke it with less than 5 charges remaining, creating a proportionally weaker effect). The damage of this rod depends on three parameters: your Evocations skill, how many charges are being consumed by the current use, and the length of the current arc. The damage of this rod is inversely proportional to the area covered; the larger the area you spray, the less damage dealt to each target.
Damage: NdM, where N is the mana cost of this zap, and M is (30 + Rod_power/6)/(2+arc_length)
To-hit: 10 + Rod_power/20, for the initial use; 1000, after that.
Note: Rod_power = 5 + 3 × Evocations; Arc_length is the aperture of the beam in tiles at the given radius. Its value is always at least 1.
Strategy
- Lightning rods can deal heavy damage to single targets, but are also excellent for wiping out large packs of enemies, such as ugly things and slime creatures. To maximize damage, try to minimize the area you affect. Ignoring one monster that's several tiles away from the body of the pack may leave it unharmed, but you'll do much more damage to all the other monsters.
History
Lightning rods were added to Crawl in 0.11.
