Fortress talisman

File:Fortress talisman.png A fortress talisman is a talisman that changes you into a heavily-armoured crab.

Useful Info

When eVoked, a fortress talisman turns you into Fortress Crab Form, which lasts until you end the form. Entering or exiting a form takes 5 turns.

Fortress Crab Form has the following effects:

Offensive traits

• Unarmed Combat: 8-13 base damage, depending on your Shapeshifting skill.
• You can breath clouds of rust, which corrode and weaken enemies. The cost is 12 HP + 12% max HP. The size of the cloud is 9-25 tiles, depending on your Shapeshifing skill. Note that there is no breath timer for this ability.

Defensive traits

• Body armour base AC increased by 70%-135%, depending on your Shapeshifting skill.
• Corrosion resistance (rCorr)
• Poison vulnerability
• Innate AC: 3 AC

Restrictions

• Melded Gear: Offhand, helmet, gloves, boots, barding, cloak
• Suppressed mutations: Anatomy, bones
• You are slow (-30% move speed).
• You can't use a shield, but you can equip any 2 handed weapon your base form can use.

Fortress Crab Form has a minimum Shapeshifting skill of 12, and the maximum skill is 20.

Strategy

Fortress Crab Form has many downsides, making it niche at best:

• The loss of aux slots reduces your effective AC and prevents you from gaining egos/artefact properties from those slots. The loss of a shield lowers defenses further.
• It has slow movement speed.
• It requires significant investment into Shapeshifting, as well as Armour and other melee skills. In addition, most other talisman forms meld the body armour slot, making this investment spread awkward to go for.

It is seemingly best on a heavy armour character in the mid-game, who hasn't filled many of the aux armour slots yet, and preferably has prior investment in Shapeshifting.

Note that there is no synergy with Awaken Armour; that spell uses the base AC from the armour type without accounting for the form bonus.

Fortress Crab Form	Gargoyle
File:Fortress crab form.png	File:Fortress crab form gargoyle.png

History

• Fortress talismans were added in 0.33.