Wide-angle disintegration beam

A wide-angle disintegration beam is the most powerful attack that an angry god can make against you.

When you anger a god, they will sometimes strike you with a lightning bolt from the heavens (see Anger#Smiting). This attack would normally kill an adventurer outright. However, if you have shock resistance, reflection, life saving, or are engulfed by a monster, you will survive the bolt. If this occurs, the god will follow up with a wide-angle disintegration beam.

If you are still engulfed, the disintegration beam will hit the engulfing monster instead. This occurs when the monster is shock resistant. In vanilla NetHack, the only engulfing monsters with shock resistance are energy vortices, which are also disintegration-resistant, so the disintegration beam will have no effect.

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that the information below is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate it.

Monsters can gain intrinsics from corpses, so it would in theory be possible for an engulfer to be shock- but not disintegration-resistant

Otherwise, the beam will strike you. First, your shield, cloak, and body armor will be disintegrated, unless they provide reflection or disintegration resistance. Then, if you are wearing a shirt and no body armor or cloak, it will be disintegrated (a shirt worn under silver dragon scale mail, for example, would not be disintegrated).

If you do not possess disintegration resistance the beam will then kill you outright, though you will survive if you have life saving. Note that reflection will not save you, though it might save some of your armor as described above.

References

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 Information on this page may be out of date.

Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-343}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.