Lomya

=   Lomya
Base item	black signet ring
Affiliation	drow intelligent artifacts
When carried	none
When worn	standard effects for rings of that appearance 1-8 turns of sleep on each attack teleportitis teleport control automatic searching
When invoked	none
Base price	0 zm
Weight	6

Lomya is an artifact that appears in dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack. It is unaligned and drow-favoring, and its base item is always a ring with the randomized appearance of a "black signet ring" - this ring cannot be levitation, aggravate monster, hunger, polymorph, or polymorph control.

Description

While worn, Lomya has the usual effects conferred by the ring whose appearance it matches, and additionally confers teleportitis, teleport control and automatic searching. Each attack made in melee or with a thrown/fired weapon while wearing Lomya has a ¹⁄₂ chance of immobilizing a target monster(s) for up to 8 turns, subject to sleep resistance and MR score - Lomya counts as a spell-like effect for the MR-based resistance check when worn by the player, and has a flat attacker level of 45 when worn by monsters. This also counts as a paralysis effect, meaning that afflicted monsters cannot be woken up. Unarmed attacks without gloves while wearing Lomya also apply silver damage due to the presence of Lolth's holy symbol.

Wearing Lomya also massively lowers the failure rate of enchantment spells, guaranteeing the ability to cast any enchantment 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 Lomya also applies a wisdom-based modifier to pets' DR, a wisdom and charisma-based modifier to pets' maximum monster levels and experience gain thresholds, and halves the timeout of special attacks for pets - the DR modifier is a flat ^(Wis-11)⁄₂, and the maximum level modifier of ^(Wis+Cha-18)⁄₄ + ^{beast mastery bonus}⁄₂. This wisdom and charisma modifier applies to both the maximum possible level that a pet can grow to and the minimum level necessary for slain monsters to grant them experience.

Strategy

The effectiveness of all of the elf rings depends on their base item type in that game, e.g. Lomya is obviously much better in a game where black signet rings are free action than in games where they are hunger.

Lomya is probably one of the most build-dependent elf-rings: For characters with a ranged or melee build that has a free ring slot, Lomya is very often worth wearing, due to the power granted from the chance to put hostile monsters to sleep: the chance for a monster to resist is roughly equivalent to ^{dlev - alev + MR}⁄₁₀₀, where alev is your level and dlev is the defender's level. For many endgame non-boss monsters, this is around a 30-to-50% chance of putting them sleep them per hit, depending on the exact foe - for unique monsters and high-level monsters with high MR score or sleep resistance, this is substantially less effective. Additionally, iterative attacks or multishotting projectiles that put monsters to sleep cannot wake up those monsters on subsequent hits, and therefore have significantly increased chances to sleep targets.

For these reasons, Lomya can be very powerful on the aforementioned builds, especially Rogues - who appreciate the free sneak attacks immensely. For non-Rogues, it's most likely not worth wishing for due to the chance-based nature, but otherwise is almost always worth a slot if found naturally.

For pet-based builds, this is potentially very useful, but not guaranteed to be very helpful: while the maximum level increase can be nice, many pets won't necessarily make it to those levels regardless, due to either dying or outliving their usefulness. The DR modifier can help boost significantly your pets' defenses, but the strongest aspect is most probably the threshold raise for gaining experience. With 15 wisdom, 15 charisma, and base Expert skill in beast mastery (i.e. without the boost from Clarent), that lowers the level threshold by 8: 3 from attributes and 5 from skill. This can make raising pets substantially quicker, particularly those that have multiple growth stages (e.g. pseudodragons) or gain new attacks and abilities at higher levels (e.g. most Eladrin). However, most good endgame pets are rather high-level, and the minor extra level growth is not guaranteed to make a difference.

For spellcasters, this ring is most likely not very useful: None of the granted intrinsics are very essential or hard to acquire from other sources, enchantment spells are broadly speaking not very difficult to cast, and the chance to sleep enemies doesn't apply to spells. Unless you have pets and a free ring slot, or black signet rings are a base type you'd already like to use, Lomya is most likely not worth using.