Drain resistance

Drain resistance – or level drain resistance – is a property that resists the drain life attack. It can be possessed by both players and monsters.

Effect

Drain resistance prevents the following attacks:

• The drain life monster attack. All V vampires and W wraiths have this attack, as does & Demogorgon. If the compile-time option SEDUCE is not enabled, & foocubi become level-draining monsters as well.
• The drain life ability of The Staff of Aesculapius and Stormbringer.
• Directing the spell of drain life at oneself or a monster.
• Being seduced by a foocubus and getting a negative effect, with the compile time option SEDUCE enabled (the default). This is one of five possible negative effects .
• Suffering a god's anger through incorrect prayer or sacrifice. This is one of many possible effects.
• in SLASH'EM, being zapped by a wand of draining.

Acquiring drain resistance

Drain resistance may be acquired by:

• Wielding Stormbringer, Excalibur or the Staff of Aesculapius grants extrinsic drain resistance.
• Polymorphing into a monster with drain resistance.

In SLASH'EM, one can wear deep dragon scales or deep dragon scale mail, or wear an amulet of drain resistance.

Monsters with drain resistance

Drain resistance is intrinsic in:

• demons.
• L M W V Z   undead.
• lycanthropes – in both human and animal form.
• & Death.

in SLASH'EM

A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows:

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Messages

Drain resistance always acts silently. Only the lack of level drain messages indicates it is operating.

Strategy

In vanilla nethack, drain resistance is not especially important; this is because monsters' level drain attacks are subject to magic cancellation. By the time such monsters are encountered, most players will have a magic cancellation of 3 and a successful drain life attack will be extremely rare.

In SLASH'EM, monsters may use a wand of draining to attack the player, particularly in the Guild of Disgruntled Adventurers. This makes drain resistance much more important.

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It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.

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