Tangaria has potions, spell books, wands, staffs, rods, activate-able items, melee weapons, ranged weapons, and whatnot. They’re meant to be used, for crying out loud! It can take a while to get used to using all the different types of items, but they work best when used in concert. For those able to use magic devices, rods wands and staves can be very useful when your mana is running low, and allow you access to spells that may not normally be available to your class.
Players may not be inclined to carry multiples of an item, or do so in a limited quantity, perhaps due to weight encumbrance concerns. Don’t be afraid to carry a LOT of an item, particularly the basics — food, light, projectiles, cure potions, “run away” scrolls, etc. Don’t be afraid to MAX OUT important items! Some monsters will steal or destroy your items, so it’s worth carrying additional quantities of key items – such as Scrolls of Recall or important spell/prayer books. This becomes very important when you reach dungeon levels in which monsters develop fire and acid-based attacks. Mages and priests tend to start out with low strength, and so are very limited in how much stuff they can carry, so consider carrying additional copies of the spellbooks that you know you can’t afford to lose during a fight.
Common fallacy: you find an incredibly powerful Staff of Mighty BOOM! (3 charges), or a single Potion of Become Chuck Norris, and then you keep carrying it around and never actually use it. It could be a life insurance, but you might still reconsider your strategy: maybe you’ve become too careful lately (Tangaria rewards deliberate risk-taking, after all). Or maybe you should just sell the thing and invest the money into something you do use.
Don’t be afraid to buy from the “blackmarket”. Sure the prices are more expensive than the other stores, but it tends to offer a good selection of items and it can be worth the gold versus not having it in the dungeon. You can always get more gold, but the RNG is random. It’s just another store — don’t worry about the name. The blackmarket may become a good source of valuable consumables, so it’s worth checking each time you visit the town – and try to have enough gold to purchase potions with the most important properties for your character.
Your Weapon
Carrying a weapon in your backpack does you no good. You must wield a weapon before it can be used in combat. A secondary weapon can be kept by keeping it in the backpack, and switching it with the primary weapon when needed. This is most often used when carrying two weapons, each of which provides a rare power that the character needs at two separate times.
Weapons have two main magical characteristics, their enchanted ability to hit and their enchanted ability to do damage, expressed as ‘(+#,+#)’. A normal weapon would be ‘(+0,+0)’. Many weapons in Tangaria have bonuses to hit and/or to damage.
Tangaria assumes that your youth in the rough environment near the dungeons has taught you the relative merits of different weapons, and displays as part of their description the damage dice which define their capabilities. Any damage enchantment is added to the dice roll for that weapon. The dice used for a given weapon is displayed as ‘XdY’. The number ‘X’ indicates how many dice to roll, and number ‘Y’ indicates how many sides they have.
A ‘2d6’ weapon will thus give damage from 2 to 12, plus any damage bonus. The weight of a weapon is also a consideration. Heavy weapons may hit harder, but they are also harder to use. Depending on your strength, dexterity, character class, and weapon weight, you may get attacks more quickly: high dexterity and strength and low weapon weight are the main factors. Warriors may get up to a maximum of 6 attacks per round; mages and
priests are limited to only 4; other classes may get up to 5. Your attacks per round with a weapon are displayed as a decimal, e.g. 2.3 or 3.4 etc. The fractions take the form of unused energy which is carried over to your next turn.
Missile weapons, such as bows, have their characteristics added to those of the missile used, if the proper weapon/missile combination is used, and then the launcher multiplier is applied to the total damage, making missile weapons very powerful given the proper missiles, especially if they are enchanted. Like weapons, Inspecting ammunition will tell you how much damage you will do with your current missile launcher.
Finally, some rare weapons have special abilities. These are called ego weapons, and are feared by the great and the meek. An ego weapon must be wielded to receive the benefit of its abilities. It should be noted that some of these items are considerably more powerful than others, and generally the most powerful items are the rarest. Some items will have an obvious effect, like increase in infravision, or extra strength. These effects will be
noticed as soon as you wield the item. Other effects, like most resistances, will need to be learned. You can learn them by either suffering an appropriate attack, or by using magical means of identification.
Some of the more common ego weapons are described at the end of this article.
Your Armor Class
Your armour class (or AC) is a number that describes the amount and the quality of armour being worn. Armour class will generally run from about 0 to 200, though exceptionally good armour can improve even on the latter figure.
The higher your armour class, the more protective it is. A negative armour class would actually help get you hit. Armour protects you in three manners. First, it makes you harder to be hit for damage. A hit for no damage counts as a miss, and is described as a miss. Second, good armour will absorb some of the damage that your character would have taken from normal attacks. Third, acid damage is reduced by wearing body armour (but the armour may be damaged instead). It is obvious that a high armour class is vital for surviving the deeper levels of the dungeons.
Armour class values are always displayed between a set of square brackets, as ‘[#]’ or ‘[#,+#]’. The first value is the base armour class of the armour. The second number is the magical bonus of the item, which is only displayed if known, and will always have a sign preceding the value. These plusses can be determined by wielding the armour in combat and being hit. Note that a few rings, amulets, and weapons also have the ‘[+#]’ notation, indicating that they provide an armour bonus. Many pieces of heavy body armour will also have a ‘(-#)’ (in normal brackets) before the ‘[#,+#]’, which indicates that the weight of the armour decreases your chances of hitting monsters. This can range from nonexistent for very light armour to ‘(-8)’ for the heaviest armour!
Item Collecting
It’s easy to stockpile, but you’ll run out of space VERY quickly. Further, what was useful may not be useful now and what’s useful now may not be useful later.
Inventory full of standard items and found a magical one? Toss a standard one and pick it up. Got a lot of magical and found an ego item? Toss a magical one. As your character progresses and you continue to dive you will find better classes of items. If you can differentiate even by pseudo-ID, don’t be afraid to toss the less valuable stuff to make room, so you can continue diving.
This is particularly important while diving. If you let a full inventory be a limiting factor, you won’t be able to reach the dungeon boss unless you are willing to discard items along the way — even if they would have fetched a decent value. Remember, magic is usually worth still more than standard, and ego is usually worth more than magic…
Cursed items
Many items — typically armor and weapons — are often cursed in various ways. These terrible objects look completely ordinary, but they reduce the hero’s stats or bonuses, and sometimes cause other unpleasant effects, such as attracting monsters. Some items are so heavily cursed that a regular curse removal won’t work, and more powerful methods are required. All cursed items are automatically recognized as cursed when you equip them —once you put on cursed armor or pick up a cursed weapon, you’ll immediately feel a chilling cold, and the item will be marked as {cursed}.
How to deal with cursed items?
If you wear (not just have in inventory) cursed item – can be taken off with several attempts. Just try several times and eventually you will take it off and it will appear in your inventory.
Now, how to drop it on the ground? You can get rid of cursed items in different ways.
- if curse is weak you can simply drop it on the ground when you are outside of the dungeon or if the dungeon is open-sky (eg Old Forest). Note that daylight makes it easier to drop cursed items.
- if curse is hard you can use scroll of remove curse. Especially powerful curses may require several of such scrolls.
- some items might have permanent curses (they got “this curse cannot be removed” in description). Thess items you can drop with ease anywhere.
- some very rare powerful end-game artifacts got ‘sticky’ curses, which means that you cannot take them off. Beware to wear them, check item’s descriptions.
Sticky items
Some extremely rare cursed artifacts are sticky — once equipped, they cannot be taken off by any means. These items are bound to your character and will remain equipped permanently. However, there is a small exception: if the item is not of the highest tier (for example, not the One Ring or the Crown) and your character is exactly level 10, 20, 30, 40, or 49, and you are on the surface (not in a dungeon), you may be able to drop it on the ground (Ironman and Zeitnot can do it in the dungeon too). This allows very limited opportunities to get rid of such items, so always check the item’s level requirement and your current level before equipping suspicious artifacts.
At level 50, you can also remove a sticky item by sacrificing 100,000 gold while under the effect of a Potion of Berserk Strength — try to drop the item and the Ancient Gods may accept your tribute and unbind the curse.
Sticky items are extremely dangerous — be cautious.
Nazgûl Curses
Nazgûl curses are a special type of curse found on rings and some other rare artifacts. You can distinguish them from regular curses by checking the item description — it may include something like “bends your will”.
Features of Nazgûl curses:
- Random effects – Unlike regular curses, Nazgûl curses trigger at random moments during gameplay. You never know when they will activate.
- Multiple effects – A single Nazgûl curse can include several different negative effects, each with its own activation chance.
Typical Nazgûl curse effects:
- Summoning hostile monsters near your character
- Random teleportation at unexpected moments
- Temporary blindness that prevents you from seeing your surroundings
- Confusion, making it harder to control your character
- Poisoning
- Hallucinations and false visions
- Awakening sleeping monsters nearby
The chance of activation is quite low, so wearing such items is considered relatively safe. Some of the negative effects (such as blindness or confusion), if triggered, can be cured with a healing potion.
Weapons and Nazguls
Nazgûl are among the most dangerous foes. They can strike you with the Black Breath and also damage your weapon, permanently reducing its effectiveness. Some types of weapons are more resistant than others. The most vulnerable (in order of increasing resistance):
- Normal weapons (chance of damage >50%)
- Enchanted (ego) weapons (>70%)
- Two-handed weapons (>65%, enchanted >75%)
- Dark swords (>75%, enchanted >80%)
- Artifacts (>85%, two-handed >90%, dark swords >95%)
In addition to the chance of damage, the damage characteristic itself also matters. If an artifact gets dulled by a hit, it’s only slightly; whereas a normal weapon can take serious damage after just one swing.
There is also a special blade — Stormbringer, which can be found in the Drowned Halls. It is completely immune to damage, so it might be worth focusing your efforts on obtaining it and avoiding fights with Nazgûl until then. Be careful when hunting for it, you can get a lot of damage. But the enemy will be quite “sleepy”, so you can prepare the battlefield in advance.
Teleportation staves
In non-hardcore mode, Teleportation Staves have special mechanics that make them more reliable for emergency escapes. If you fail to use a Teleportation Staff and have less than 50% HP, you get an immediate second attempt on the same turn. This applies to all classes (even Unbelievers and Homi, though their success chance is lower).
The second attempt always consumes at least 1 charge, but it can use up to 3 additional charges depending on your luck. In rare cases, the attempt can still fail.