Firestarter

Version 0.26: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

A huge mace imbued with potent fire magic. It fills those it strikes with inner flame, and offers protection against the resulting devastation as well as immunity to clouds of flame.

the +7 great mace "Firestarter"

+7 great mace

Flaming
Adds Inner Flame enchantment on strike
rF++
Grants immunity to clouds of flame

Desirability

Unless you're facing foes resistant to fire, Firestarter is an exceptionally powerful weapon, combining a solid and well-enchanted base weapon, a decent brand, an extremely useful defense (any source of rF++ is worth consideration), and one of the most brutal melee crowd-control methods in the game.

The massive amount of noise it generates along the way has the benefit of waking up lots of monsters around you.

While this is often seen as a threat, your previous actions and the fiery clouds they left behind have created deadly terrain for your enemies they first have to cross before they can reach you. This means that any monster not immune to fire will be damaged already as you engage it in melee combat.

Strategy

Combine it with a potion of attraction to ensure pesky casters or ranged enemies hovering around the edges of your cloud carpet get pulled into the flames as well.

And if a fire immune enemy appears, switch to a weapon of freezing. Only takes half a turn - but mind that you lose the fire cloud immunity when you unwield Firestarter.

History

Prior to 0.19, Firestarter did not grant immunity to clouds of flame.

Firestarter was added in 0.14.