Drain resistance

Drain resistance – or level drain resistance – is a property that resists attacks that reduce experience level or monster level. It can be possessed by both players and monsters.

Effect

Drain resistance prevents the following attacks:

• The drain life monster attack. All V vampires and W wraiths have this attack, as does & Demogorgon. If the compile-time option SEDUCE is not enabled, & foocubi become level-draining monsters as well.
• The drain life ability of The Staff of Aesculapius and Stormbringer.
• Directing the spell of drain life at oneself or a monster.
• Being seduced by a & foocubus and getting a negative effect, with the compile time option SEDUCE enabled (the default). This is one of five possible negative effects.
• Suffering a god's anger through incorrect prayer or sacrifice. This is one of many possible effects.
• In SLASH'EM, being zapped by a wand of draining.

Acquiring drain resistance

Drain resistance may be acquired by:

• Wielding Stormbringer, Excalibur or the Staff of Aesculapius grants extrinsic drain resistance.
• Polymorphing into a monster with drain resistance.

In SLASH'EM, drain resistance can also be acquired by:

• Wearing deep dragon scales or deep dragon scale mail.
• Wearing an amulet of drain resistance.
• Wielding the Hand of Vecna
• Starting the game as a lycanthrope or vampire.
• Being an undead slayer or necromancer.

Monsters with drain resistance

Drain resistance is intrinsic in:

• demons.
• L M W V Z   undead.
• lycanthropes – in both human and animal form.
• & Death.

In SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, the following monsters are drain resistant in addition the above:

• adult deep dragons (but not babies, strangely enough)
• undead slayer player monsters
• All the new undead, lycanthropes and demons

Messages

Drain resistance usually acts silently. Only the lack of level drain messages indicates it is operating.

When consorting with a foocubus, the message "You have a curious feeling" indicates that you would have lost a level, but the loss was prevented by drain resistance.

Strategy

In vanilla NetHack, drain resistance is not especially important; this is because monsters' level drain attacks are subject to magic cancellation. By the time such monsters are encountered, most players will have a magic cancellation of 3 and a successful drain life attack will be extremely rare. Even then, a single point of experience is enough to regain the occasionally drained level.

In SLASH'EM, monsters may use a wand of draining to attack the player, particularly in The Guild of Disgruntled Adventurers. This makes drain resistance much more important.

References

This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.

It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.

Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-343}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.