The Longbow of Diana
) The Longbow of Diana | |
---|---|
Base item | bow |
Damage vs. small | 1d2 |
Damage vs. large | 1d2 |
To-hit bonus | +1d5 |
Bonus versus | (any) |
Weapon skill | bow |
Size | one-handed |
Affiliation | |
When carried | |
When wielded | |
When invoked |
|
Base price | 4000 zm |
Weight | 30 |
Material | wood |
The Longbow of Diana is the Ranger quest artifact. It is the prize for completing the Ranger quest, and is chaotic for wishing purposes. Its base item type is a bow.
When carried, the Longbow of Diana confers telepathy; when wielded, it confers reflection and grants a +d5 to-hit when firing arrows. Invoking the Bow creates arrows with the same beatitude as the bow, with a small chance of producing poisoned arrows. Beatitude also influences the amount of arrows created each time: a blessed Bow creates more arrows, up to 21 per invoke, while a cursed Bow will create fewer, at most 11 per invoke.
Contents
Strategy
- See also: Invoke § Optimum invocation schedule
The Longbow of Diana is considered one of the more unimpressive chaotic artifacts, and is generally regarded as one of the weakest artifacts in the game. Since the base type of the Longbow is an ordinary bow, it will not provide racial multishot bonuses, making it a poorer weapon than the starting bow for non-human Rangers; gnomish Rangers in particular have an entirely different launcher with its own skill to boot.
Furthermore, arrows are often plentiful in the dungeon, either from arrow traps or enemy archers, and blessed arrows are very unlikely to break with high Luck; this makes it unlikely that invoking the artifact will occur very often, if at all. Additionally, of the two useful intrinsics it provides, it must be wielded for reflection, and there are other sources of telepathy - slotless or otherwise - that can serve better additional uses.
Arrow creation
The enchantment range of the arrows is inclusive and depends on rne(3) and the current beatitude of the Longbow.[1][2] A blessed Longbow will only produce arrows with enchantment from 0 to 10; a cursed Longbow will only produce arrows with enchantment from -10 to 0; and an uncursed Longbow will produce arrows in the range of -10 to 10. The probability distribution of the enchantments is not uniform.
Arrows generated from the blessed or cursed Longbow of Diana are more likely to be +0 than randomly generated blessed or cursed arrows. This is because mksobj, which arti_invoke calls to generate the arrows, can produce arrows of any BUC, regardless of the BUC of the longbow; arti_invoke changes the BUC status of the arrows after mksobj returns, bringing negative enchantments on blessed arrows and positive enchantments on cursed arrows to 0.
History
The Longbow of Diana first appears in NetHack 3.3.0 alongside the Ranger role, under the name of The Longbow of Artemis. It was renamed in NetHack 3.3.1.
Variants
Many variants attempt to improve on the Longbow in some manner.
UnNetHack
As of UnNetHack version 5.1.0, the Longbow of Diana gives +1 multishot and +1 damage bonus when firing any type of arrow.[3]
Encyclopedia entry
This legendary bow grants ESP when carried and can reflect magical
attacks when wielded. When invoked it provides a supply of arrows.
References
- ↑ artifact.c in NetHack 3.4.3, line 1333: arti_invoke calls mksobj to create arrows
- ↑ mkobj.c in NetHack 3.4.3, line 391: relevant section of mksobj
- ↑ https://github.com/UnNetHack/UnNetHack/blob/master/ChangeLog