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• Thaumaturgist

Shape

Thaumaturgy spells have various shapes attributed to them. These combine with an effect to determine the outcome of the spell when cast.

• Bolt - Fires from you to the thing you target, can hit intrevening creatures.
• Beam - A solid line of damage, striking every square in range
• View - Everything that can see your character, or that your character can see
• Ball - As bolt, except that upon striking a monster or wall, it explodes in a circular ball of damage
• Blast - As ball, except centered upon the player
• Area - The most powerful Thaumaturgist spell template, as ball except strikes 1-100 times in random viewable squares near your character. Can be extremely powerful in corridors or in conjunction with wall creation.

Added Effects

Thaumaturgy spells have the added affects added to them. These are not unique to their spells, but rather the element type -- any source of Light damage, for example, blinds the target. Most of these are explained in more detail in the [Damage Type] Spoiler.

• Fire - can create lava (rarely)
• Flames - creates lava (which removes water and ice - can be quite useful if you have IM_FIRE, quite annoying otherwise)
• Plasma - can create lava
• Cold - Can create Ice Squares (Which can cause random movement, cuts, and stunning, Levitate or Fly prevents the random movement)
• Ice - Can create Ice
• Lightning
• Force - Knocks back the target. Does triple damage if target cannot move backwards. (Against a wall, for example).
• Meteors - Equal parts physical and fire damage, can create lava
• Pure Light - Blinds target. (Does damage to, but seems not to anger non-light-vulnerable pets?)
• Pure Darkness - Creates dark squares.
• Pure Time - Slows the target
• Sound - Sometimes confuses.
• Chaos - Confuses target. Sometimes polymorphs the target.
• Nether
• Mana - Unresistable damage
• Destruction - Destroys a large area of the dungeon, doing unresistable damage to everything the area of effect.
• Arrows - Physical based damage?
• Poison - Often poisons, causing damage over time.
• Gravity - Causes monsters to Teleport, also slows
• Inertia - Slows monsters, stacks until monster is at -50 speed

Particularly desirable spells

• Sound view - may stun *all* enemies, useful if you are in danger
• Chaos area - destroys items and pets, but is quite ridiculous against enemies
• Gravity/Force ball - gets things out of the way
• Force Beam - Knocks monsters back, and hits them every step of the way, doing outstanding damage
• Mana Area - Does incredible unresistable damage
• Inertia Area - Can potentially slow all enemies within the blast radius to molasses.
• Force Area - Use an a tight area where monsters can be pushed into walls for extreme damage.

Nirnaeth Arnoediad

For thaumaturgists who prefers breezing through this level:

Just cast gravity spells to move monsters out of the way. You would need lots of speed though.

For thaumaturgists who prefers clearing out this level:

This Gondolin quest can be accomplished easily even at relatively low levels (20+). If you manage to get nifty View or Area spells and terrain-altering non-view spells (fire or water). The challenge here is to get those nasty Hrus away from you, since all the others can be killed easily enough.

Cast the terrain-altering spells repeatedly until you are completely surrounded by lava or water (preferably at your starting corner). Since most of the trolls including hrus can't cross these types of terrain, they won't be able to reach you. You're now free to fire away at the trolls with your view and area spells. Beware of the dragons though (and Ulik too IIRC), because they can fly over lava and water.

KitaKita - IMPORTANT EDIT: Hrus are no longer stopped by water (as of 2.3.x). Do NOT attempt this quest unless you have some way to get away from them (Phase Door works on this level). Hrus can burrow through rock, so wall creation is not an option.

Chatter

KitaKita - A bit of a tip for young Thaumaturgists using the default Windows install -- if you are using spells that create lava, make sure you go into the visual preferences menu (%) and select "Change feature attr/chars". The specific features you are looking for are Terrain 85 and 86 -- Deep and Shallow Lava. For some reason, on my default install of Tome 233 both are set to blank spaces rather than the "default" red dots. Make sure you dump the Features file (i.e. Save it) before you exit the menu.