Spellbooks as artifacts

[Derakon]

Just in case you didn't know this: Banish evil is basically mass TO all evil monsters in LoS. It doesn't remove monsters from level.

Yep, I do know that, but the important thing is that this makes it more viable when someone summons powerful monsters, powerful undead, ancient dragons, etc. You don't really care where they end up, so long as that place is "not here". Even if you have to encounter those guys later on in the level, that's better than dealing with them right now.

Specifically, when Morgoth summons uniques, you can generally banish-evil everything away, including Morgoth, and then not worry about any followup (assuming you didn't get any angels, the Tarrasque, or other nasty non-evil uniques). Whereas the mage-types have to teleport Morgoth away and then Destruct, since their spell doesn't affect uniques.

[Timo Pietilä]

Yep, I do know that, but the important thing is that this makes it more viable when someone summons powerful monsters, powerful undead, ancient dragons, etc. You don't really care where they end up, so long as that place is "not here". Even if you have to encounter those guys later on in the level, that's better than dealing with them right now.

It's good spell, I don't deny it. Very useful especially in situation where you need to get rid of multiple monsters in different directions now.

Other good ones are dispel undead, evil: both cost less and do more damage than Exorcism similar spells: 1d(4*clvl) instead of 1d(3*clvl) and then there is *destruction*.

Annihilation is not worth enough to be in deep book. It does 200 points of damage to non-demon, undead, golem, vortex or elemental (IE. basically all most major threats are not harmed barring dragons). OoD does (1.5*clvl + 3d6) = 85.5 * 2 = 171 to all evil with fraction of the manacost and it is ball-spell which means splash-damage, area-effect and non-obstructed aiming. Make that 400 points to single target or make it beam always, then it might be worth actually using sometimes.

[fizzix]

Annihilation is not worth enough to be in deep book. It does 200 points of damage to non-demon, undead, golem, vortex or elemental (IE. basically all most major threats are not harmed barring dragons). OoD does (1.5*clvl + 3d6) = 85.5 * 2 = 171 to all evil with fraction of the manacost and it is ball-spell which means splash-damage, area-effect and non-obstructed aiming. Make that 400 points to single target or make it beam always, then it might be worth actually using sometimes.

I've suggested annihilation should be 300 unresistable damage. I agree that the spell is useless.

[Derakon]

300 unresistable damage could be useful, but it still needs to be a much earlier spell. At the very least it should be the first spell in WoG, not the last...