APHEELSIK

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APHEELSIK.png
APHEELSIK
5 Mana Points  poison 10×lvl regen
Effects
  • Poison your target for 10 health per level
  • Doesn't work against undead.
Hotkey A


APHEELSIK is the poison glyph. On cast, it poisons an enemy, preventing it from regenerating 10 health per player level. Poison automatically expires after the player has explored the displayed amount of tiles. Monsters ordinarily regenerate a number of hit points equal to their level whenever a tile is explored. This means the formula for the number of tiles poison will last for is 10 * player level / monster level. Because the glyph costs 5 mana to cast, a player can keep a monster up to twice his level perpetually poisoned.

Unlocking the glyph

APHEELSIK is unlocked along with the Class: Assassin Assassin.

Strategy

APHEELSIK is commonly used to slowly whittle away stronger monsters by allowing the adventurer to regenerate their health and mana while the target is poisoned. This allows you to tackle foes that would normally be too tough to fight, by exploring to recover health while denying them any healing while you do so. Naturally, this only works if the player is able to regenerate enough Health and Mana to keep on fighting. This glyph works well for efficiency-based regeneration fighters. It combos well with items and effects that work with those class features; items like Item: whurrgarbl whurrgarbl or anything that grants resistances are very useful.

APHEELSIK is very similar to Glyph: HALPMEH HALPMEH in some ways. Both of them allow you to recover hit-points mid-battle, and both cost 5 mana to cast. APHEELSIK is more potent, allowing you to regenerate both health and mana (and usually more than HALPMEH would allow), but at the cost of using exploration space. HALPMEH requires no such expenditure, but cannot be repeated as your mana will eventually run dry. Both often appeal to the same types of characters, but their overlap means keeping both in your inventory can be challenging.

Due to needing mana to cast, it can be difficult to combine this glyph effectively with offensive spellcasting. However this can be done effectively by combining Glyph: BLUDTUPOWA BLUDTUPOWA and Glyph: BURNDAYRAZ BURNDAYRAZ. First, the player has to poison a monster, than he throws fireballs and uses BLUDTUPOWA. After Health and Mana are depeleted, the player simply explores until the poison breaks and repeats the process. Even without the BLUDTUPOWA glyph, it can still be worthwhile to cast BURNDAYRAZ on the target, since the Trait: burning burning effect will reduce its health regeneration by 1. Especially at low levels, this can help lengthen poison duration.

The APHEELSIK glyph is one of a select few that becomes useless at a certain point. Once the dungeon is explored, there is no more regeneration to be had either for the player or monsters, making this glyph completely pointless. This makes the glyph a great candidate for conversion if you need to free up inventory space towards the end of the dungeon; it's going to be completely useless before long anyways. On the other hand, it can be a good idea to leave sub-dungeons completely unexplored when using APHEELSIK, saving some extra exploration space for when it counts the most. Assasins who rely on physical attacks might want to keep it for a final cast on the boss to exploit their bonus damage.


Hints & Trivia

  • Poison is largely worthless against monsters with debuffs, such as weakening, corrosion, mana burn, and poison. However, if you have the HALPMEH glyph you can cure poison.
  • Poison is only half as effective against Monsters with Fast Regen.
  • Magic resistance reduces the effectiveness of the glyph. For example, a monster with 50% magic resistance will only be poisoned for half the tiles.
  • The God: Glowing Guardian Glowing Guardian punishes you if you use this glyph, but grants you extra piety for converting it.
  • Player-related poison used to have an unlimited duration, but broke on attack. This led to lv 1 characters fireballing down bosses.