Priest/SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, the Priest or Priestess, abbreviated as Pri, is one of the roles from NetHack that is available to the hero.

Priests and Priestesses can be humans, doppelgangers, drow, hobbits, or elves, and can be of any alignment.

Starting equipment

Each Priest starts with the following equipment:

• a blessed +0 mace
• a blessed +0 robe
• a blessed +2 small shield
• 1-2 blessed cloves of garlic
• 1-2 blessed sprigs of wolfsbane
• a spellbook of healing
• a random spellbook from a list of the following:
  • spellbook of force bolt
  • spellbook of sleep
  • spellbook of resist poison
  • spellbook of resist sleep
  • spellbook of detect food
  • spellbook of detect monsters
  • spellbook of light
  • spellbook of knock
  • spellbook of wizard lock
• a random blessed scroll
• 4 potions of holy water
• one of the following:
  • an uncursed magic marker (¹⁄₁₀ chance or 10%), otherwise;
  • an uncursed oil lamp or an uncursed set of 1-2 torches, with an equal chance of each light source (¹⁄₁₀ chance, or effectively 9%)

Elven priests are additionally given a random non-magical instrument.

Priests start with knowledge of the potion of water and any applicable racial equipment.

The Priest's default starting pet is a little dog or kitten with equal probability.

Intrinsics

Priests gain the following intrinsic properties upon reaching the given experience levels:

• XL 15: warning
• XL 20: fire resistance

Attributes

The Priest's starting attributes are distributed as follows:

Attributes	Strength	Dexterity	Constitution	Intelligence	Wisdom	Charisma	Remaining
Minimum attributes	7	7	7	7	10	7	30
Distribution percentages	15%	15%	20%	10%	30%	10%
Mean w/ standard deviation (human)	12.21±2.07	11.89±2.01	13.47±2.16	10.28±1.74	17.44±1.08	9.95±1.67

Skills

Priests have the following skills available to them:

Priest skills
Max	Skills
Basic	Weapons: lance, bow, sling, crossbow, dart, shuriken, boomerang Combat: bare hands Spells: attack, enchantment, body, matter
Skilled	Weapons: long sword, polearms, spear, javelin, trident, unicorn horn Spells: protection
Expert	Weapons: club, paddle, mace, morning star, flail, hammer, quarterstaff Spells: healing, divination

Priests start with Basic skill in maces, protection spells and the spell school corresponding to their non-healing spellbook. They use the wisdom stat to cast spells, and their special spell is remove curse.

Techniques

Priests can learn the disarm technique by reaching Skilled in any weapon, and also gain the following techniques at the listed experience levels:

Level	Technique
1	Turn undead
1	Blessing

Special rules

Priests have inherent knowledge of an item's beatitude, whether or not they can see or even touch it. (The implicit_uncursed option is set by default, so an item with no shown beatitude is uncursed - setting !implicit_uncursed in your options will display uncursed beatitude for items.)

Priests only take ¹⁄₅ damage from breaking wands by applying them.

Rank titles

The status line displays one of the following ranks for the corresponding experience levels:

• XL 1-2: Aspirant
• XL 3-5: Acolyte
• XL 6-9: Adept
• XL 10-13: Priest/Priestess
• XL 14-17: Curate
• XL 18-21: Canon/Canoness
• XL 22-25: Lama
• XL 26-29: Patriarch/Matriarch
• XL 30: High Priest/High Priestess

Gods

The Priest as a role does not have their own pantheon of gods, with the game instead randomly choosing a pantheon for them from the others available. Their first sacrifice gift is Disrupter, an artifact mace.

Quest

The Priest's quest sees them fighting Nalzok for The Mitre of Holiness, an artifact helm of brilliance. It grants fire resistance while carried, and in addition to the normal effects of a helm of brilliance, Priests wearing the artifact also take half physical damage from undead monsters and demons. Invoking The Mitre of Holiness restores energy up to half the difference between the hero's current power and maximum power, with a minimum of 12 and a maximum of 120.

Strategy

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SLASH'EM priests have some strengths and weaknesses compared to their vanilla counterparts, but on balance, they are generally stronger. Buffs include:

• Like several other "magical" roles in SLASH'EM, the Priest's spell skill set is expanded to allow for at least basic proficiency in all schools. Additionally, they are guaranteed to start the game with a spellbook of healing, letting them make immediate use of their magical proficiency.
• They can attain Skilled proficiency in long blades, allowing them to make use of many powerful artifact weapons.
• They begin with a random blessed scroll, and their small shield has a +2 enchantment.
• The blessing technique is a powerful resource that can save on potions of holy water. Notably, the technique makes the atheist conduct even easier for SLASH'EM Priests, as they can create holy water even if their initial stash is lost.

However, they do suffer a few nerfs:

• Their starting robe does not provide a boost to spellcasting; that boost is found on the robe of power instead.
• All non-robe body armors cause spellcasting penalties in SLASH'EM; however, the penalty from dragon scale mail and other non-metallic armors is generally manageable.
• Their starting mace is +0, rather than +1.

Priests in SLASH'EM seeking an artifact weapon as their primary form of melee offense will have many more factors to consider: their first gift Disrupter is only of situational use, but its +30 bonus damage against undead allows them to smash their way through many of the undead monsters in each stage of the game - an enchanted Disrupter is a valuable secondary weapon against particularly threatening ones such as liches and vampire mages. Their inability to twoweapon also means that sacrificing further upon receiving an artifact gift may be of questionable value. Each alignment of Priest has access to the following artifact weapons:

• Lawful Priests can easily obtain (and use) Excalibur without breaking any conducts, due to the role's ability to train long swords. A Priest that can obtain Excalibur will be very unlikely to need any further gifts beyond their first, since only the very situational Reaper exceeds Excalibur's flat +10 damage bonus against all monsters. As far as artifact wish candidates go, The Sceptre of Might is a much weaker wish in SLASH'EM, with a flat +3 to-hit and +5 damage against cross-aligned monsters, but can still be worthwhile for slotless conflict and magic resistance.
• While neutral Priests also have new options, none of them are especially noteworthy - they are also unlikely to outperform sacrifice gifts such as Mjollnir, which is a two-handed heavy hammer with better base damage and a flat +24 damage against monsters lacking shock resistance, or artifact wishes such as The Staff of Aesculapius, which loses its drain resistance but is still incredibly useful and can be supplemented with other sources of the property.
• Chaotic Priests can sacrifice for Plague or Hellfire to use in ranged combat and deal extra damage with Plague's auto-poisoned arrows or Hellfire's explosive bolts. They can also obtain new high damage weapons such as the Bat from Hell, which has a flat +20 damage against all monsters, and Doomblade, which does a flat +10 extra damage with a ¹⁄₄ chance of an additional +5d4 damage bonus.