Valkyrie/SLASH'EM

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In SLASH'EM, the Valkyrie, abbreviated as Val, is one of the roles from NetHack that is available to the hero.

Valkyries can be humans, dwarves or doppelgangers, and can be lawful or neutral. Unlike other roles, they always start the game as female.

Starting equipment

Each Valkyrie starts with the following equipment:[1]

Dwarven Valkyries start with a dwarvish spear in place of the standard spear.[3]

Valkyries start with knowledge of all non-magical weapons and armor, along with any applicable racial equipment.[4]

The Valkyrie's default starting pet is a little dog or kitten with equal probability.

Intrinsics

Valkyries gain the following intrinsic properties upon reaching the given experience levels:[5]

Attributes

The Valkyrie's starting attributes are distributed as follows:[6]

Attributes Strength Dexterity Constitution Intelligence Wisdom Charisma Remaining
Minimum attributes 10 7 10 7 7 7 27
Distribution percentages 30% 20% 30% 6% 7% 7%
Mean w/ standard deviation (human) 18/00.86±2.34 12.72±2.08 17.11±1.32 8.75±1.35 9.04±1.43 8.76±1.35

Skills

Valkyries have the following skills available to them:[7]

Valkyrie skills
Max Skills
Basic
Skilled
Expert

Valkyries start with Basic skill in spears and daggers. They use the wisdom stat to cast spells, and their special spell is lightning.[8]

Techniques

Valkyries can learn the disarm technique by reaching Skilled in any weapon, and also gain the following techniques at the listed experience levels:[9]

Level Technique
1 weapon practice

Special rules

Valkyries never stumble while walking on ice.

Valkyries have a +2 bonus to casting emergency spells.[8]

Valkyries can safely enchant gauntlets of power from as high as +5.

If the wielded Mjollnir is thrown by a Valkyrie with 25 strength, it will return to their hand 99100 of the time, and the Valkyrie will catch it 99100 of the time unless they are impaired:[10][11] if a Valkyrie fails to catch the returning Mjollnir, it has an equal chance of either landing at their feet or hitting them in the arm.[12][13]

Rank titles

The status line displays one of the following ranks for the corresponding experience levels:[14]

  • XL 1-2: Stripling
  • XL 3-5: Skirmisher
  • XL 6-9: Fighter
  • XL 10-13: (Wo)man-at-arms
  • XL 14-17: Warrior
  • XL 18-21: Swashbuckler
  • XL 22-25: Hero(ine)
  • XL 26-29: Champion
  • XL 30: Lady/Lord

Gods

Main article: Religion

The Valkyrie pantheon is based on Norse mythology.[15] Their first sacrifice gift is Mjollnir.

Quest

Main article: Valkyrie quest

The Valkyrie's quest sees them fighting Lord Surtur for the Orb of Fate, an artifact crystal ball. The Orb of Fate grants warning, half spell damage, half physical damage, and acts as a luckstone while carried. Invoking the Orb allows the hero to level teleport.

Strategy

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

"Structure and fill out similar to other SLASH'EM role strategy sections, and differentiate accordingly."

The early game of SLASH'EM is overall more difficult, to the point that roles such as Barbarians, Knights and Samurai have an overall easier time in comparison. Engraving Elbereth more often and taking advantage of NetHack 3.4.3's speed system can also help against monsters such as scrampers and baby dragons that are slow but have decent AC high-damaging attacks for this stage of the game; baby dragons are also kebabable, granting a +2 to-hit bonus when attacking them with spear weapons.

The Valkyrie's +1 spear is notably weaker as a starting weapon, but can still be sufficient for early-game combat and is partly balanced out by the starting stack of daggers that can serve as ranged weapons. This also makes Excalibur access much less easy, though they can still find long swords to train and eventually dip—even so, their combat prowess will be thoroughly put to the test on multiple fronts against against the tougher hostiles that appear, such as the much harder werecreatures. Training daggers to Expert should be done as soon as possible for the multishot bonus, and can be made faster with the weapon practice technique; spears may also be worth training to Skilled if you are having a hard time finding a stronger weapon.

Mjollnir should be a high priority, especially since its base item of a heavy hammer, flat +5 to-hit and +24 shock damage make it an even better weapon compared to NetHack, and it is a worthy candidate for either hand in two-weapon combat (though this prevents Valkyries from utilizing their small shield). Throwing Mjollnir is a much more dangerous proposition as well: exploding wands in SLASH'EM are treated as though they were broken by applying them, making any instance of Mjollnir hitting a Valkyrie as it returns potentially fatal if it occurs with several wands in the open inventory. Heroes who opt to throw Mjollnir regardless should stash all of their wands in a bag if possible, with the exception of wands of lightning (which are immune to destruction from shock damage) and an emergency wand or two such as the wand of digging. This also makes it very risky to use in melee against monsters that might be carrying wands of their own, since you will be caught in the wand's explosion.

The Orb of Fate is no longer the sole source of the half physical damage property, due to The Hand of Vecna, though it can still be worth carrying in open inventory for half spell damage, and its warning is more useful due to the presence of much stronger mindless monsters such as gemstone golems and giant shoggoths.

Ascension kits

Below is a list of suggestions for end-game Valkyrie kits:

References