How useful is rChaos?

[luneya]

I just found a Cloak of Aman with rChaos. Right now I'm using a different Cloak of Aman for rPois, which is obviously more important, but is it worth saving the new one for when I find a different source of poison resistance?

[krazyhades]

I like having rChaos mostly because the side-effect of chaos damage is the Hallucination status effect, which can be crippling and takes a long time to wear off.

[Elrond]

Not to mention there are some end game baddies that breath chaos for 500 HP. e.g., Jabberwock

[Thraalbee]

And mushroom of emergency becomes very useful since the hallucinations won't happen IIRC. 200 hp heal, rFire, rCold

[Derakon]

It's not that important, honestly. Yes, there are nasty creatures with chaos breath, but there's a grand total of 11 such monsters in the game, of which the most notables are Great Wyrm of Chaos/Balance, Pit Fiend, Jabberwock, and Chaos Hound. And chaos breath is the only source of chaos damage in the game -- there's no "hit to cause chaos" or chaos attack spells that monsters can use.

[brbrbr]

rPoison is much more important, so keep the current cloak.
Chaos attacks are rare, as guys mentioned, so it's not worth carrying as a swap either.
I would drop it at home in case you find rPoison from something else.

[Timo Pietilä]

It's not that important, honestly. Yes, there are nasty creatures with chaos breath, but there's a grand total of 11 such monsters in the game, of which the most notables are Great Wyrm of Chaos/Balance, Pit Fiend, Jabberwock, and Chaos Hound. And chaos breath is the only source of chaos damage in the game -- there's no "hit to cause chaos" or chaos attack spells that monsters can use.

There is melee that causes hallucination though. Not common, but annoying when it happens.

Most high elements are not important for damage reduction, you should consider them by their side-effects. For that reason nexus goes above nether, chaos above shard, and so on.

If you can get them without sacrificing other things, then fine (usually the best combo otherwise is also best by resists), but you should not concentrate on getting every resist into game. Far more important are speed, HP and capability to choose your fights and where you fight.

[Derakon]

There is melee that causes hallucination though. Not common, but annoying when it happens.

Is that covered under chaos resistance? I don't think so. It used to be, back when chaos resistance also protected against confusion and shards resistance against being cut by any source and sound resistance against being stunned...but I don't think it works that way now.

[Thraalbee]

I would expect it to help against that too. It certainly prevents the hallucinations from mushroom of emergency.

[wobbly]

Most high elements are not important for damage reduction, you should consider them by their side-effects. For that reason nexus goes above nether, chaos above shard, and so on.

This depends, nether is the 1st dangerous high element to appear & a winged horror can 1 shot a lot of mages with nether breath.

[Timo Pietilä]

Is that covered under chaos resistance? I don't think so. It used to be, back when chaos resistance also protected against confusion and shards resistance against being cut by any source and sound resistance against being stunned...but I don't think it works that way now.

It does in 3.5. Must test if this is still true for 4.0.3.

[EDIT] checked, rChaos includes pHallucination. No more hallucination with it.

[Timo Pietilä]

This depends, nether is the 1st dangerous high element to appear & a winged horror can 1 shot a lot of mages with nether breath.

471 with resist is still 1 shot against most.

[Derakon]

471 with resist is still 1 shot against most.

Statistically nether will do much less damage than 471. I wouldn't want to rely on it, but the situations where you've accidentally let yourself be breathed on by a max-nether-damage monster are not exactly ideal to begin with, so any mitigation you can scrape together is probably worthwhile.

[Timo Pietilä]

Statistically nether will do much less damage than 471. I wouldn't want to rely on it, but the situations where you've accidentally let yourself be breathed on by a max-nether-damage monster are not exactly ideal to begin with, so any mitigation you can scrape together is probably worthwhile.

Yes, but if you need to choose between 550 damage from nether with practically no ill effect and 400 damage from nexus with tele-level/teleport/tele-to/scramble stats, I choose 550 from nether.

I tried to refresh my memories about resists and elements, but those are difficult to find from current 4.0.3 code. Which file contains those?

[Nick]

I tried to refresh my memories about resists and elements, but those are difficult to find from current 4.0.3 code. Which file contains those?

The calculations are in adjust_dam() in project-player.c, and the data used for eac element is in list-elements.h.