Water walking boots
[        water walking boots | |
|---|---|
| Appearance | random |
| Slot | boots |
| AC | 1 |
| Special | |
| Base price | 50 zm |
| Weight | 20 |
| Material | leather |
Water walking boots are boots that allow the wearer to walk on water. They can also be used to cross lava if they are fireproof (trying with non-fireproof boots will destroy the boots and probably plunge you into the lava).
Water walking boots will not protect you against drowning attacks, nor will they protect you or your inventory against the fire damage from crossing lava. If you are mounted on a non-flying steed, water walking boots will also not prevent the steed from drowning when you lead it into water.
Unlike levitation, water-walking allows you to #dip items into water squares, so it is useful for blanking scrolls and spellbooks, and diluting potions.
Vlad's Tower always contains a pair of water walking boots.
Identification
Water walking boots are non-trivial to identify, as they don't display a message when worn and have no obvious effects. If you can price-ID the boots, you can identify water walking by elimination, as speed boots and jumping boots are easy to identify.
If you can't price-ID, the simplest way to test for water walking is simply to step onto water. If you guess wrong, you can climb out again unless you're too heavily encumbered. Make sure to remove and drop any scrolls, spellbooks, potions, and iron equipment first.
A safer, although more difficult, option is to use teleport control to attempt to teleport onto a water square. If you have water walking, you'll end up standing safely on top of the water; if not, you'll be sent elsewhere in the level.
Strategy
Water walking boots tend to be unpopular for ascension kits. However, this is less due to their lack of merit than the existence of speed boots and jumping boots, which many players consider more useful. For players who have not found speed or jumping boots and do not want to use a wish on them, water walking boots are an excellent choice. Players who have not found any of these boots by the Castle could choose to wear a pair of unenchanted high boots or elven boots until they reach Vlad's Tower and can pick up the water walking boots (or find another pair of better boots).
Water walking boots will allow you to cross Juiblex's Swamp and Medusa's Island and pass the trapdoors at the Castle by going around on the moat. Except for certain quests (some of which can also be managed with water walking boots, fireproof ones in the case of quests with lava), these are the only levels with obstacles that are normally impassible without levitation (or water walking or jumping or some other special method). Therefore, water walking boots make it possible to put off obtaining levitation until the Planes and use a potion of levitation for those if necessary. This can often save a wish.
If you have the choice of water walking boots or levitation boots to cross a water level, water walking boots are superior. This is because they don't cause you to lose contact with the ground, so you do not have to remove your boots (using several turns, potentially dangerous if there are sea monsters nearby) in order to pick up items from the ground or go down stairs. However, a ring of levitation is probably easier than water walking boots: it is much easier and faster to put on and remove and doesn't require taking off any other boots you may be wearing.
It should be noted that water walking boots, if worn routinely, can prevent drowning and getting your inventory wet due to typos next to water or forgetting to wear a ring of levitation. These mistakes can be very annoying, particularly if your Luck is poor, so this is an advantage of water walking boots, except in variants that warn you if you're about to step into water.
For players who don't use water walking boots as their normal boots, they can still be useful for making holy water and scrolls of blank paper or otherwise wetting items, as they allow unlimited #dipping over any water square. (If you don't have a convenient water square near you, you can usually make some by digging down over a fountain.)
