Lomya
| = Lomya | |
|---|---|
| Base item | black signet ring |
| Affiliation | |
| When carried | none |
| When worn |
|
| When invoked | none |
| Base price | 0 zm |
| Weight | 6 |
Lomya is an artifact that appears in dNetHack and notdNetHack. 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 while wearing Lomya has a 1⁄2 chance of putting target monster(s) to sleep for up to 8 turns, subject to monster MR. 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. The bonus is strong enough that it's enough to offset practically any normal collection of penalties, like multiple pieces of metallic armor at once. However, this does not supersede the inability to cast spells for other reasons - the influence of the Spire, lacking free hands, or any other effects that block all spellcasting will block your enchantment spells regardless.
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, but also 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. If you're lucky enough to have a game where black signet rings are free action, then Lomya is obviously much better than when it's a ring of hunger. If you're a ranged or melee build with a free ring slot, Lomya is also quite possibly worth wearing, due to the chance to sleep enemies being very powerful.
Of the elf ring, Lomya is probably one of the most build-dependent. For ranged or melee builds, it's outstanding, for a very solid chance to sleep struck targets. The chance is roughly equivalent to MR + level - 5⁄100, where MR is the defender's monster MR and level is their experience level. On many endgame non-boss monsters, this is around a 30% to 50% chance to sleep them per hit. On uniques, high level monsters, or anybody with high monster MR or sleep resistance, this is substantially less effective. Note that iterative attacks or multishotting projectiles will most likely wake up newly slept monsters on subsequent hits. Despite these hurdles, Lomya can be very powerful on some builds, especially Rogues. It's most likely not worth wishing for non-Rogues due to the chance-based nature, but otherwise is most likely worth a slot if found naturally.
For pet-based builds, this is potentially very useful, but not guaranteed to be very helpful. The maximum level increase can be helpful, but 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 expert beast mastery (and no Clarent), that lowers the level threshold by 8 - 3 from attributes and 5 from skill. This can make raising pets substantially quicker, and is especially useful if you have pets that grow up into new forms (like pseudodragons) or gain new attacks or abilities at higher levels (like most Eladrin).
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 sleep does not 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.
