Helm of brilliance

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[ Plumed helmet.png[ Etched helmet.png[ Crested helmet.png[ Visored helmet.png
helm of brilliance
Appearance random
Slot helm
AC 1
Special
Base price 50 zm
Weight 50
Material iron

The helm of brilliance modifies the wearer's Intelligence and Wisdom by its amount of enchantment (even exceeding racial maximums), in addition to its normal AC bonus. Because of this, it is an excellent helm for spellcasters. The boost mostly serves to make casting difficult spells more feasible, and has smaller effects on energy regeneration and Intelligence checks.

Even though the helm of brilliance is metal, it does not hinder spellcasting.[1]

It will not auto-identify unless it has an enchantment. One simple way to determine if your +0 helm is a helm of brilliance is to examine your spell failure rates; the helm of brilliance is the only metal helm which will not make them worse.

Enchanting your helm of brilliance could possibly be more important than enchanting other armor. This is because your energy regeneration rate depends on the sum of your Int and Wis. If this sum is 45 or higher, you will regularly regenerate 1d4 power instead of 1d3, so you may want to increase the enchantment to +5 instead of +4 if this will put you over that threshold (if you are a human with the 18 maximum Int and Wis, for instance).

The only artifact helm of brilliance is The Mitre of Holiness, the Priest quest artifact.

NetHack 3.4.3 bug

In NetHack 3.4.3, using a cursed scroll of destroy armor on a cursed helm of brilliance or a cursed pair of gauntlets of dexterity reduced the enchantment of the piece of armor without altering the stats; after removing the piece of armor, stats would be permanently increased. You could even surpass your racial maximum that way, at least temporarily.

This became known as the "hobug" because the helm of brilliance is often abbreviated to HoB.

References

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

It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.0. Information on this page may be out of date.

Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-360}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.