Earthquakes

[Derakon]

Using earthquakes to stop a monster from reaching you is the main use I'm aware of for them. I've used them to chop a vault up so that a specific nasty unique couldn't get me but I could still reach the other parts of the vault. With enough persistence you can also just outright delete monsters, like a weaker form of Destruction, but that generally takes a lot of castings to delete a specific monster (the quake needs to generate a wall on the monster's tile, and the monster needs to not be able to dodge into an adjacent tile).

Weapons of Earthquakes are particularly problematic though, in that if you use them in an antisummoning corridor you are very likely to accidentally delete the monster you're fighting. I'm inclined to think that monsters should not be deletable by Earthquakes. It takes a lot of the fun out of using Grond to mop up lategame uniques, for example. Maybe if they just took an extra 100-200 damage instead of being deleted?

[Fiquin]

@ Derakon, all

Ya, however perhaps a bigger point spread on the damage would simulate a more "luck" vs. force of nature effect, like 1-800 damage... the earthquake just dusts you up a bit or swallows you up in gaping chasms of fire...

[Pete Mack]

It *is* possible to get an earthquake with an ordinary ego mattock--a good hit with 8 damroll against non-acid resistant monsters does 8*3*2+5 = 53 damage. (A great hit with 7 damroll also works.) So you should see one about every 5 or 6 melee turns, in the unlikely event you actually find a mattock of earthquakes. (Mattocks are pretty rare to begin with.)

[Pete Mack]

Just looked again. With both pick and mattock it is possible to get a superb hit* in which case damroll 4 is enough: 4*3*3 + 15 = 51. However, a pick is only 1d3, so it is not quite possible to get a quake with it.
* there is a 1/900 chance of a crit being better than superb with a mattock. A pick, at weight 18, has no chance at all.

[brbrbr]

Half of the current game I've run with a Shovel of Earthquakes.
Awesome weapon, did more damage than majority of the artefacts up till the mid-game.
I had earthquake effect maybe 2-3 times for that period. Don't mind it. Actually like it.
"Beware of me! See how aweasome I am! I can cause Earthquakes!! Run and hide!! Boooo!!"

[Derakon]

Half of the current game I've run with a Shovel of Earthquakes.
Awesome weapon, did more damage than majority of the artefacts up till the mid-game.
I had earthquake effect maybe 2-3 times for that period. Don't mind it. Actually like it.
"Beware of me! See how aweasome I am! I can cause Earthquakes!! Run and hide!! Boooo!!"

Weapons of Earthquakes only cause earthquakes if they deal more than 50 damage in a single hit, so it's not surprising that you didn't see them very often with your shovel. It's vastly more noticeable with Grond, which is borderline unusable for racking up kills since so many enemies just end up getting deleted off the level due to the constant earthquakes.

[Pete Mack]

So I actually tried playing with a mattock of earthquakes. "Ar-Pharazon is embedded in the rock!" on essentially the very first real fight. I thought he would be a good target, since quakes deal with summons so well. I dropped it shortly after. Quakes just everywhere.

[AnonymousHero]

So I actually tried playing with a mattock of earthquakes. "Ar-Pharazon is embedded in the rock!" on essentially the very first real fight. I thought he would be a good target, since quakes deal with summons so well. I dropped it shortly after. Quakes just everywhere.

Incidentally this also applies in ToME 2.x where 'sentient' weapons can gain the "causes earthquakes" flag -- even with absurdly high bonuses this instantly makes any weapon useless. (EDIT: ... for anything other than niche uses like abusing the LoS interruption to reduce problems in The Void/Nether Realms.)