Condenser vane
| Type | Miscellaneous item |
|---|---|
| Name | Condenser vane |
| Icon | 
|
| A magical device that allows its wielder to create clouds that will engulf and surround all enemies in sight with various destructive clouds, their lethality increasing with Evocations skill. |
A condenser vane is evoked to engulf every monster in sight as well as the 8 squares surrounding it with semi-random clouds, with the cloud types increasing in lethality with higher Evocations skill.
Strategy
Evoking the vane engulfs each monster you see along with the 8 squares around it with dangerous clouds; your skill in Evocations is no longer linked to the area covered. While one may not choose exactly which clouds will spawn, types include (in order of increasing power) noxious fumes, flame/freezing vapour/poison gas, negative energy, thunder clouds, and acidic fog. Providing your target(s) are not fully resistant, much havoc can be wrought.
At low levels of Evocations, you'll mostly get noxious fumes with the occasional burst of fire, ice, or poison. At moderate levels (about 8 in Evocations), you'll only rarely get noxious fumes, and mostly get fire, ice, and poison with the occasional burst of negative energy or storm clouds. At high levels (starting at around 14 Evocations), you can start getting clouds of acid; after that point, increasing Evocations makes dangerous clouds like negative energy, storms, and acid more common while decreasing the chances of getting fire, ice, and poison.
(Disclaimer: the exact distribution may look slightly differently; taken over from Wand of Clouds and recollection of a prior discussion and code dive.)
When you should use a wand of clouds largely depends on how much Evocations skill you have. Unskilled characters should avoid using the wand when fighting monsters immune to poison, as they will completely ignore noxious fumes and clouds of poison. Once you have a few levels of Evocations under your belt, a wand of clouds can make difficult encounters much easier by constantly dealing damage to dangerous creatures. It's especially effective if you can manage to keep a group of monsters in a cloud, and the high-end clouds can be particularly lethal. Of course, there's always the risk that you'll create a type of cloud that the majority of creatures you're fighting are immune to (clouds of fire when fighting fiery creatures, or negative energy when fighting the undead).
Maximizing effectiveness
Contrary to intuition, Condenser vanes work best either on very high levels of evocations when they generate acidic clouds pretty reliably... or on no to very low levels of evocations if you have picked up the spell Ignite Poison: that will turn both noxious fumes and poison clouds into fire clouds, against which only very few monsters that appear in packs are immune to.
Also, since the condenser vane works very much like the spell Ignition does, it is best used when you are facing a (large) group of enemies with restricted room to manoeuvre: the density of monsters will create a carpet of clouds, ideally covering your entire line of sight. The entrance to Vaults:5 is an obvious one, as are Ziggurat floors.
Since intelligent enemies will not willingly walk into the damaging clouds, consider combining a condenser vane carpet with a Potion of attraction to pull them in nevertheless. Adding a Scroll of silence on top makes the end vault of Elf:3 quite a bit easier.
History
- Condenser Vanes replaced the Wand of clouds in 0.26.
