Vilya
| = Vilya | |
|---|---|
| Base item | sapphire or brass ring |
| Affiliation | |
| When carried | none |
| When worn |
|
| When invoked | none |
| Base price | 0 zm |
| Weight | 6 |
Vilya is an artifact that appears in dNetHack and notdNetHack. It is unaligned and elf-favoring, and its base item is a ring with the randomized appearance of a "sapphire ring". If the sapphire ring is a ring of polymorph in the current game, then Vilya will appear as a brass ring instead.
Description
While worn, Vilya has the usual effects conferred by the ring whose appearance it matches, and additionally confers shock resistance, warning, stealth and magical breathing. Each attack made in melee or with a thrown/fired weapon while wearing Vilya applies 1d20 turns of study to the target, stacking with any existing study.
Wearing Vilya also massively lowers the failure rate of healing spells, guaranteeing the ability to cast any healing spell at 0% fail rate for almost any character: this does not supersede the inability to cast spells for other reasons, e.g. the influence of the Spire, lacking free hands, or any other effects that block all spellcasting.
In addition, wearing Vilya applies an intelligence-based modifier of (Int-11)⁄2 to normal hit point regeneration, sanity regeneration, pet HP regeneration, and pet AC. This modifier can be negative, which will worsen each of these stats: this can potentially kill your pets if low enough, but will not cause negative hit point regeneration for the player character, and instead worsens existing regeneration to a minimum of 0 unless it was already negative.
Strategy
The effectiveness of all of the elf rings depends on their base item type in that game. If you're lucky enough to have a game where sapphire rings are free action, then Vilya is obviously much better than when it's a ring of hunger. Despite this, if you have a free ring slot and decent intelligence it's almost always worth wearing.
Of the elf rings, Vilya is possibly the second most useful for most characters. The study is effectively an untyped damage bonus for melee or ranged builds, and the healing spell success rate can be very helpful for anybody who would struggle to cast those spells otherwise. With decent intelligence, the regeneration is also a nice side effect, but isn't really enough to save you if you're surrounded or against monsters with high burst damage. Unfortunately, the other resistances and intrinsics are mostly a nice benefit rather than anything essential. As such, for most characters this is not worth wishing, but is a nice artifact to find on the floor.
For Troubadours, this is possibly the best ring to have (tied with Narya) because with high intelligence it can seriously boost your pets' defenses, healing them for up to 5-7 HP per turn even without trying to fully maximize your intelligence. However, it's most likely not worth wishing over Narya, if at all, since Narya scales off charisma (which you will already want high for your pet capacity) and boosts your pets (offensively more than defensively) as well.
