Etch? Dissolve?

Unfortunately, burn and melt don't work quite right.

That's what revealed to me that this is new(ish) nightly edition. Also angle brackets around PVAL were a giveaway.

Magnate, I PM'd you a download link for the save and randart.log. This is all on Mac OS X. I would have reported it in a lot more detail, but I wasn't thinking of this in terms of a bug.

Quick glance through the log, this item went through a BUNCH of iterations. At the point when three blows were added it went from Power 151 to Power -2818, which is definitely a problem. Every now and then an iteration would make the power positive again, at which point it was rejected as too powerful. The final power is listed as -145, after 200 tries, with a mean of 227 and a variance of 15507. I think we have a rollover bug in the power calculations somewhere.
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CALIFORNIA MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARY

Yep - took me about five seconds to work it out once I saw the log: it got an inhibited power, and then had a load of subsequent calculations performed in its inhibited rating, which caused the overflow - and ended up leaving it with a legal rating!

The fix is reasonably simple - we just exit the function as soon as we apply INHIBIT_POWER.

Thanks for sending me the log. The fix should be in tomorrow's nightly.

So my prayers have been heard:

The Great Hammer of Epheleme (8d1) (+11,+5) (+9)
Dropped by a Novice priest at 2650 feet (level 53).

+9 wisdom, speed.
Slays animals.
Cannot be harmed by acid, electricity, fire, cold.
Grants the ability to see invisible things.

Combat info:
1.1 blows/round.
With an additional 2 strength and 0 dex you would get 1.3 blows
With an additional 0 strength and 2 dex you would get 1.3 blows
Average damage/round: 36.2 vs. animals, and 26 vs. others.

Radius 1 light.

Yep. My _priest_ found this, unbelievably isnt it.

Nice - that's a really cool piece of jewelry in your weapon slot. I just hope you are planning on killing *everything* with spells ...

Given his current stats are insufficient to get more than 1.1 blows with that thing, he's probably neglecting melee anyway...

Yes, with priest (and mage) I dont use melee for most of the game, instead relying purely on spells. To kill the big uniques, either of the 3 options (melee, archery, spells) works, but melee I find to be the least aggravating by far so I usually end up using it.

Back in the days when archery damage modifiers were multiplicative and x3 might and shots werent unheard of, I would sometimes opt for archery. After the changes though I never find myself tempted; imho archery needs to do more damage per round than melee to be competitive. I know that opinion differs, pointing to the fact that where the meleeing guy has incoming damage when the monsters attacks, the guy at range has none (the monster moves closer instead of damaging). However, I find it more inconvenient to phase and maintain ammo than to phase and heal up.

"Only a little acid to counter the soporific on the Emperor's blade"?

A.

With +9 wisdom you can afford to.