Drain life
Drain life or level drain refers to one of the following:
Attacks
- the spellbook of drain life and the spell it confers
- the drain life attack of the artifacts Stormbringer and the Staff of Aesculapius and in SLASH'EM the additional artifact Thiefbane
- the drain life monster attack
- one possible effect of the seduction attack of an incubus or succubus
- a possible negative effect of prayer
- the SLASH'EM item, a wand of draining
Resistance
- drain resistance, which protects against drain life attacks.
Losing a level
- the player losing levels
Life draining / level draining in NetHack is relatively complex. The spellbook/wand, the artifact weapons, and monsters all provide apparently-similar life draining, and every source has the same effect if used on the player, but each does a different amount of damage to monsters. In addition both NetHack itself and the NetHack community use inconsistent naming, making any combination of the words "level"/"life" and "drain" interchangeable.
In addition, the level drain monster attack is affected by magic cancellation.
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This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.
It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.
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