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	chaotic Ranger intelligent
When carried	telepathy
When wielded	reflection
When invoked	creates arrows
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.

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 to convey reflection, and the Ranger quest's home floor alone is likely to warrant having a source of reflection before pursuing said quest; while it only needs to be carried for telepathy, there are other sources slotless or otherwise that can serve better uses.

Arrow creation

The enchantment range of the arrows is inclusive and depends on rne(3) and the current beatitude of the Longbow. 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.

EvilHack

EvilHack adds The Crossbow of Carl as an 'alternate' quest artifact for gnomish Rangers - its base item is a crossbow, ensuring that they retain their racial multishot bonus, and it otherwise possess all the same properties as the Longbow of Diana in that game.

Encyclopedia entry

This legendary bow grants ESP when carried and can reflect magical
attacks when wielded. When invoked it provides a supply of arrows.