Talk:Wand of wishing

Wand of wishing in shops

In a few places on the wiki, advice is given on how to dispatch the shopkeeper if a wand of wishing is found in a shop before one can pay for it. The advice is to either wish for a wand of death to kill the shopkeeper (which has a luck penalty if not chaotic, plus telepathy loss if someone was lucky enough to eat a floating eye corpse) or to wish for a blessed figurine of an archon. If I was in that situation, my course of action would be to instead wish for a blessed figurine of a purple worm. Purple worms have a digestion attack that is certainly enough to take out a shopkeeper. More importantly, they are much safer to wish for than an Archon because a hostile purple worm can be easily defeated by a wand of digging, while an archon is certain death to a character that doesn't even have enough gold to buy a wand of wishing. Additionally, likely not an issue so early in the game, but an Archon is given a guaranteed artifact, which could be bad for someone planning to wish for artifacts with the wand. A purple worm (or any strong pet) is also, in my opinion, significantly more useful than a limited-use wand of death. I don't want to change the relevant pages without hearing what other people think; a pet archon is obviously more useful than a purple worm, and this is simply my opinion on the matter and far from expert advice.

Actually, why isn't the most obvious solution of leaving the wand alone and trying to find enough gold to simply buy it ever mentioned? Gold really isn't that rare, and a wand of wishing shouldn't ever cost more than 1000 zm for an extremely ugly character.

Qazmlpok 22:41, September 13, 2009 (UTC)