Narya

=   Narya
Base item	ruby or gold ring
Affiliation	elves intelligent artifacts
When carried	none
When worn	standard effects for rings of that appearance +1d10 fire damage on each attack (minus spells and spell-like abilities) fire resistance lowers fireball and firestorm failure rate
When invoked	none
Base price	0 zm
Weight	6

Narya is an artifact that appears in dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack. It is unaligned and elf-favoring, and its base item is a ring with the randomized appearance of a "ruby ring". If the ruby ring is a ring of polymorph in the current game, then Narya will appear as a gold ring instead.

Generation

Both Narya and the Ring of Thror have the same fallback appearance, but since they will both only become gold rings if their primary ring appearance is used for the ring of polymorph, at most one of the two artifacts will be a gold ring in a given game.

Description

While worn, Narya has the usual effects conferred by the ring whose appearance it matches, and additionally confers fire resistance. Each attack made in melee or with a thrown/fired weapon while wearing Narya adds +1d10 fire damage. Pets are "emboldened" while wearing Narya, which causes them to exit scared states in ¹⁄₄ of the time it would take otherwise - this does not stack for monsters that are already naturally bold.

Wearing Narya also massively lowers the failure rate of the fireball and firestorm spells, guaranteeing the ability to cast either 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 Narya also applies a charisma-based modifier of ^(Cha-11)⁄₂ to the wearer's successful saves versus sanity loss, usually significantly reducing the sanity damage taken, and always prevent the secondary effects of temporary madnesses. The modifier is also applied to pet to-hit and damage, and rolls a die of that modifier's size and adds the result to each pet AC.

Strategy

The effectiveness of all of the elf rings depends on their base item type in that game, e.g. Narya is obviously much better in a game where ruby rings are free action than in games where they are hunger. Despite this, Narya is possibly worth wearing for characters with a free ring slot and decent charisma.

For melee or ranged builds, Narya is likely the least useful out of the elf rings: Though they benefit from the minor additional fire damage, they will not be able to make good use of the other properties if they are not using pets or spells. Guaranteed casting of fireball and firestorm are nice, but the spells themselves are unlikely to be cast without double spell damage (e.g. from The Magic Mirror of Merlin). The benefit to saves versus sanity loss is nice, but has little to no effect without high charisma, and characters that do not already have high wisdom (used for the base save modifier against sanity loss) will not notice a huge difference.

For spellcaster builds, Narya can be helpful but is rather one-note as with weapon-based builds: the bonus fire damage is less important for them than the reliable casting of fireball and firestorm, as well as the sanity saves. Narya only benefits fire spells rather than all spells, however, and casting builds ideally already have low fail rates on the spells they want to cast, including fireball and firestorm.

For pet-based builds, Narya is possibly the best out of the elf rings: these builds will most likely have high charisma to maximize pet capacity, and can make excellent use out of the emboldening along with the bonus damage, accuracy and AC for pets. The extra fire damage or fire spells is less useful, but potentially decent for characters supporting their pets with offensive spells. The sanity save modifier is no more or less useful, though pet-focused builds are much more likely to have a meaningful modifier size than builds without high charisma.