Version 1.0

This strategy no longer applies to the latest version of Diablo II. It remains here for archival use only.

Outline
I. Intro
II. Mana issues, damage, and hit rates for the Avenger
III. Crowd control for the avenger
IV. Avenger types
V. Avenger tactics
VI. Conclusions
VII. Acknowledgements

I. Intro:

The avenger is a paladin which uses the paladin skill vengeance to its greatest benefit. This guide is an attempt to explore the issues facing an avenger and propose two avenger templates to consider.

Vengeance is the main skill paladins have with which to deal out significant elemental damage. Vengeance is by far the most effective way to drop physically resistant creatures such as ghoul lords or wraithes. You have a fixed 20% attack rating bonus with this skill. By level 20, you will pay 13 mana with vengeance to do +130% fire, +130% cold, +130% electrical damage and you will have a cold length of 12.6 seconds in normal.

The central drawbacks to vengeance are (a) its high mana cost, and (b) vengeance affects a single target, and by itself is not great in swarm situations. These two concerns are addressed in sections II and III.

The vengeance bug: My understanding is that you get double elemental damage from vengeance as long as you have no other elemental damage modifiers on your equipment (eg frostburns, or say fire damage on your weapon). Apparently elemental damage is calculated upon the basis of your displayed physical damage, and your physical damage displays as a factor of 2 too high if you stay away from the elemental adders. Your physical damage is not really increased, but your elemental damage is.

II. Mana issues, damage, and hit rates for the Avenger

First consider mana cost. At 13 mana, you need 10% mana steal on a 130 average damage attack to on average recover the cost of vengeance. In practice, you will need even more mana steal than that to compensate for misses, blocked blows, or swings that miss from desynchronization. This high level of mana steal can put a severe restriction on your equipment, tying up most of your jewelry with mana leech items and making you favor bat/vampire weapons over others. Because vengeance does not increase physical damage, you may find it difficult to achieve the average damage levels necessary to make mana leech possible.

For example, consider an avenger with 103 strength using either a rune sword or a divine scepter. Both of these weapons average about 25hp damage, and with strength you can say boost it to the 50hp average level. Unless you get a highly damaging weapon (say around double damage for around 100hp average), it is going to be difficult to come close to breaking even. Furthermore such damage levels usually kick in later in the game when you are well into nightmare difficulty, making the lower levels a constant mana struggle for a young avenger. For this reason many avengers elect to go with a damage enhancing aura such as might (+230% @ lvl 20) or concentration (+345% @ lvl 20).

The other factor in mana leech is missing. Most avengers will not elect to use an ignores target defense (ITD) scepter, since these weapons in general are hard to find, and high damage ITD weapons are even more difficult to find. Most avengers need to consider rare swords or divine scepters with higher damage for mana steal purposes. After all, your elemental damage tracks your physical damage, so a 2 fold increase in physical damage results in a 6 fold increase in elemental damage. The problem here is that on the games highest difficulties, monster defense increases to the point where you must over pump dexterity to hit.

Consider the case of a Hell Urdar. A hell difficulty urdar has 481 def (see http://darkness.diabloii.net/beastiary/normal/blunderbore/) and is level 81. Your chance to hit a monster is

Chance = (a/(a+d))*(2l/(l+L))

Where a is your attack, d is the monsters defense, l is your level, and L is the monsters level. Most people are going to experience a hit rate loss from the level difference term, but if you assume for the sake of argument that you have somehow managed to reach level 82, you can discard it. Solving for a we find

Your required attack rating, a = cd/(1-c), where c = your chance to hit.

So lets pick a reasonable hit rate of 75%. To hit this hell Urdar at 75% at level 82, you need an attack rating of 1443. Since you have a 20% bonus to hit with vengeance, you need a base attack rating of 1203.

You attack rating with no gear is, a= dex*4 -28, or a ~ dex*4

So to get this attack rating on dexterity alone, you would need a dexterity of 308 with no attack rating adders. Even if you get really lucky and have +400 attack rating from objects, you would need a 207 dexterity. Almost no paladins will ever want to pump their dexterity that high.

So what are your options? I can see 3-

(1) an ITD weapon, but that does no solid base damage.
(2) the blessed aim aura- at level 20, you get +360% attack rating. In our hell urdar example of above, you would need 1443/(4.8) = 300 attack, which you can achieve on a dexterity of 82 with no adders, entirely reasonable for most paladins. The problem with blessed aim is if you use this, you can not use might or concentration.
(3) conviction - at level 10, you get 12 yds, 50% reduction in resistance, and 80% reduction in defense. So our hell Urdar has a defense of 0.2*481 =96, and to hit it 75% of the time with no attack adders you would need a 67 dex. The problem with conviction is you can not use it in conjunction with holy freeze.

III. Crowd control for the Avenger

A crowd control problem arises when monsters arrive faster than you can dispatch them. As avengers are not defiants, they have no super high defense to stand in a crowd and take no damage. Also avengers in the true sense do not use blessed hammer (since BH/Conc is such an overwhelming skill combo, any character with a significant investment in BH is a hammerdin). Avengers are not zealots where they can use either iceblink and zeal to freeze crowds, or knockback and blind to thin crowds. Nor do avengers have minions to even the playing field odds. For the pure avenger, it comes down to dispatching foes with vengeance faster than they arrive.

There are two main ways to do this- (1) speeding up your attack rate via items or fanaticism, or (2) slowing down your foes by holy freeze. Lets first consider fanaticism and attack speeds.

A. Crowd control by increasing your attack speed:

Going through all the fast, damaging weapons that can be employed single handed by a paladin, you quickly arrive at a short list of three solid 'ultimate' weapons to consider for an avenger- rune swords ( 103str, 79dex, 26avg, +10% speed), divine scepters (103str, no dex req, 25 avg, +10% speed), and ancient swords (128str, 88dex, 30.5 avg, +0% speed). Battle hammers are -20% speed, and too slow for this consideration, making them mainly a charging weapon. There are other faster weapons, but they suffer from either low durability and low damage or both. What you immediately notice is that the dexterity requirement you need for the swords puts you at about the level you need to be to hit stuff with conviction/blessed aim in hell.

First consider the divine scepter/rune scepter. Both of these do similar damage, have identical speed. The maximum zeal speed of these weapons is 4 frames, and you can achieve that with a quickness version + 3 slightly increased attack speed (SAIS) adders (namely sais gloves, goldwrap, twitchthroe). For vengeance, you can get a 9 frame attack with a quickness version, or an 8 frame with quickness and 2 SAIS. ARK says 9 frames is about as slow as you can go in hell difficulty. Fanaticism at any level will not up your maximum zeal rate. Adding 1 fanaticism skill level to quickness and 3 speed increasers drops you to 7 frames, and adding 20 fanaticism will bring you down to a 6 frame vengeance with optimal gear.

Next consider an ancient sword. It is normal speed (+0%). Without fanaticism, the best you can achieve with zeal is 5 frames (quickness + 2 SAIS). With fanaticism, you can get up to a 5 frame zeal (4 fanat, quickness, and 3 SAIS). More to the point, for vengeance you can achieve 8 frames (quickness + 3SAIS), 9 frames with less (quickness + 1SAIS), or 10 frames with just quickness. At most you can drop it to 7 frames with fantaticism (quickness, 3 SAIS, 2 Fanaticism).

Since there are 25 frames per second, you can divide 25 by your weapons attack speed in frames to get the number of attacks per second. For the speed obscessed avenger, you can achieve up to 4 attacks per second with fanaticism, or about 3 without fanaticism. Assuming a 75% hit rate, this means you can dispatch roughly 2-3 foes per second as they arrive. This will be sufficient for most zones, but in situations such as the flayer jungle, you will be sucking down pots. For this reason people who go this route will take advantage of terrain and look for choke points. They do things like back against walls to limit frontage, or stand in doorways. They also swing a couple of times, retreat, swing, to keep their frontage minimal.

There are several tradeoffs to consider here. The fanaticism aura means you can not easily use blessed aim or a damage aura (other ally auras). There is an addition attack boost to fanaticism (130% at lvl 20). This can help some, but will not by itself solve your hell urdar problem. You would need a 151 dexterity with no adders to hit the urdar when you are level 81, or say 120 dex if you have 100 attack from some object. If you wish to replace blessed aim with fanaticism, you must pump dexterity significantly higher.

B. Crowd control by slowing them down:

Here your philosophy is that if they are moving slowly, you can pick them off one at a time. A level 13 holy freeze will slow enemies by 51% out to a 12 yd radius. Futhermore, the chilling effect of vengeance stacks with holy freeze, accomplishing a super slowdown. I have seen Izual swing about once every 4 seconds while under vengeance and holy freeze. Radius is important for holy freeze, since it only checks every 3 seconds to see if something is within your radius. A fast moving creature can cross your radius within 3 seconds and reach you before being frozen. Increasing your radius improves your defense against fast moving opponents, as it sticks them further away. There will still be many instances in which you will need to retreat until they freeze. Also auras like holy freeze and conviction work on a line of sight basis, and things like rivers are considered to be opaque for line of sight (ie stuff won't freeze across a river unless you have a direct view of them across a bridge).

The slowing effect of holy freeze is substancial. This works on bosses, champions, everything, and can not be resisted. If you have never tried this aura, you should as it is one of the most powerful at your disposal as a paladin. Holy freeze chill and vengeance chill stack for super slow targets. Your main method of working a holy frozen bunch is to hit one, retreat, hit another, etc. You have superior foot speed, and can stick and move easily with this aura. Vengeance because it is a single swing attack is ideal for stick and move.

You can use two auras at the same time by 'flashing'. This is fairly tricky to master, and some dislike the technique. It works like this- the game checks to apply an aura every 3s for whatever is in range, but the game only checks every 8 seconds to remove an aura. So you apply one which will last for 8 seconds (ie you 'flash' it), then switch to another. Three seconds after your 1st aura, the game adds your second aura to the first, and you have 5 seconds of overlap before the game turns off the first aura. There are two classes of auras- 'ally' auras which effect you, your party members, and your minions (eg. concentration or fanaticism), and 'enemy' auras which effect monsters, people who hostile you, and minions of those hostile to you. It is clear you can stack an 'ally' and an 'enemy' aura. Charis reports you can stack two enemy auras at once (holy freeze and conviction), and I have seen some reports that you can even stack 2 ally auras (the report I saw was for fanaticism and concentration), but I have yet to double check the later, and think the report mentioned the stacking occured for allies. In practice it is simplest to see a stacking of enemy over ally auras, since the animation appears on different targets and is not overwritten. In principal you could triple stack auras, getting overlap from 3 auras for 2 seconds, but in practice this is such a bear to manage that most will not try. Being able to see this aura animation is important for timing when to switch back and repeat the process. For this practical reason I will only consider stacking ally and enemy auras in this article.

IV. Avenger types

(A) Concentration/Conviction Avenger - this avenger sticks monsters with conviction, then switches to concentration to up his damage. An alternative to concentration is might, which requires one less prerequiste (no Blessed Aim), and gives you an immediate benefit at the expense of less long term damage. Might is worth considering if you are playing hardcore (HC) or if you are playing with someone else who uses concentration.

For this build I would opt to gain the following skills in addition to the perquisites- from combat skills, charge + smite; from defensive auras possibly salvation and lightning resistance if you are playing HC. Charge gives you an easy way to close into vengeance range and handle widely dispersed foes. Smite is a prerequisite skill for charge, and is necessary to dispatch buggy creatures generated by charge. I would put no more than 1 point into each of these skills. Salvation is useful for those times you face heavy magic. Since salvation is a ally aura, you can use it with conviction (an enemy aura) and easily tell when to repeat flash. Lightning resistance is an excellent single point investment for HC, helping tremendously against lightning enchanted bosses (LEB's).

For equipment, you should go for the best divine war scepter/rune sword/ancient sword you can find as you main weapon. Gather the speed gear (twitchthroe, goldwrap, SAIS gloves). Some like the Hands of Broc (3% life and mana steal), but if frame rate is your top concern, you may want to stick with the SAIS gloves. Your shield should be a tower with 3 perfect diamonds. You are free to use whatever you can on helmet, boots and jewelry, but you will probably want to get resistances and or mana/life steal. Fast boots and maximum shield block help out for all avengers (see the tactics situations). Because you have twitchthroe as your ultimate goal, you will go with zero into holy shield, as your block rate is maximum (assumes tower shield) and your total defense insignificant. Fast hit recovery items help since you will be in melee with a need to swing while being stunned or disengage from swarm situations. Many Avengers swear by vulpine items, since they convert a fraction of the damage you receive into mana (eg. Nightsmoke belt). Since you are being hit a lot, this return can be substancial. Also consider fastest hit recovery items- you will be hit, and these items can stack to the point where you will not be stunned as much (occurs when you take 1/12th your max hp in a single shot).

Your stat goals should be 127str, 88 dex (usage lvl for ancient sword), starting energy, and the rest in vitality. High vitality is important since you will need big life to avoid stun. I like to get the minimum stats I need for gear naturally, as avenger is tough enough in terms of making the gear work without imposing additional restrictions of str, dex adders on your rings etc. What I like to do is go str=vit, dex = 2/3 str. You can trade some vitality for energy to get a slightly larger mana pool, but in general a mana adder will accomplish this more effectively.

Your tactics are to stick something with conviction, then switch off to your concentration and dispatch it quickly. Crowds should be dealt with in choke points and by methods of limiting frontage (fighting retreats etc). See section V. for tactics.

In terms of build priorities, I would acquire your prerequisites and optional skills at the 1 point level when they become available. I would go for about 10 pts into concentration, and around a 10-13 vengeance by level 30. In the early game you will find concentration will greatly help with your mana problems, and hence you may want to put more into it than vengeance if you to pick. Once you hit level 30, you should pump conviction to a skill level of 10 as soon as possible. Then return to maxing out concentration or vengeance. Put more into vengeance if you have no mana problems, and more into concentration otherwise. By around level 54 or so you will be maxed out on your core skills, and you can consider other things such as upping charge, or perhaps beefing salvation, or upping the range of your conviction.

(B) The Blessed Aim/ Holy Freeze Avenger - as an alternative to blessed aim consider fanaticism (and use aim at its prerequisite level until you reach fanaticism). Your statistics build is the same as that for the concentration/vengeance avenger except that you will need around 120 ish dex if you go fanatic. I would not consider fanaticism for HC since the ~50-75 extra stat points in dexterity at the expense of vitality will probably get you killed. You can get fanaticism to work at lower dexterities with a few solid meteoric rings.

In this build you will always be suffering from mana issues on your vengeance, as your raw physical damage will not be high enough unless you get some really fantastic weapon or you do something like over pump str (not a wise move for HC, since you need the vit).

The alternative here is to put some points into energy to establish a decent vengeance mana pool, and rely upon other methods to recharge. A few good methods are to (a) zeal back your mana, particularly if you are a fanatic, and (b) consider using redemption. Personally I would avoid redemption as that is a hard climb up the defensive tree, and zeal is immediate and fast. A reasonable mana pool target is 10 vengeances worth of mana- some can get this via energy adders. Your normal zeal pattern is vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, zeal...

Again you want to acquire the speed gear, again fast boots and max shield block help, and go for the best weapon you can find of the rune sword, ancient sword, or divine scepter variety. If you do more zealing (go the fanatic route), I would save an imbue for divine scepters as that can get you an ITD weapon, and in general they have a nicer durability than swords (70 dur for the divine, 44 for the sword). If you do more avenging than zealing, I would go with imbuing an ancient or runesword, since your odds of getting a damage related pre/suffix are better and they in general are much cheaper to repair. Like the other avenger, go for twitchtrhoe, goldwrap, and SAIS gloves. Wear them if you get a speed break. Wear something better if you don't. Keep them around in case you find a better weapon. The same comments about vulpine gear, Hand of Broc, and fastest hit recovery items made for the concentration/conviction avenger apply to this build.

A really fun combination to try is the

And holy freeze and vengeance. The slow down from the pinchers and the flail stack with the chill from vengeance and the slow from holy freeze. Once hit a target is knocked back and moves so slowly as to become a non threat. The trick here is that the flail with 19 average damage is on the low side for mana leech and your elemental damage scales down accordingly, but the high durability makes it a fine choice for zeal, and you get a nice bonus of mana steal on the weapon. Living with knockback is difficult- and you can opt off with the pinchers if it is not your cup of tea. Iceblink can disable knockback from Cleglaws.

Your typical pattern here is to run with holy freeze (HF) on, and be ready to retreat until it sticks. Then switch to blessed aim or fanaticism and cut them to ribbons. Use hit and run tactics if things get sticky.

For build priorites, I would again suggest charge (and smite when you get a bugged monster) for closing. I would not go with salvation etc as you are reliant upon fanaticism/blessed aim to hit as your ally aura. I would try to get holy freeze up to its target level (13 or so) first, then put the rest into blessed aim or fanaticism whichever is your build. I would eventually go on to max out holy freeze, and perhaps eventually get something like redemption for post combat refill.

V. Avenger tactics

In this section I will try to cover some of the more basic combat techniques which should work for all avengers. Note these tactics are pretty rudimentary and some even work with normal attacks, so you should practice these during those levels prior to obtaining vengeance. Your central problem is not the individual bosses, but rather swarms of creatures.

A. Choke points- This tactic goes back to the D1 days. The idea is you retreat through a doorway, then advance and engage the monster while it is in the doorway. By doing this you limit your exposure to one creature at a time. For D2 however, we have creatures with long reach weapons which can attack over the shoulders of their buddies, so it is possible that now when you only face one guy directly, several more may attack over the shoulders of the lead monster. There are many other forms of choke points, such as narrow hallways in dungeons, or spaces between buildings in Kurast, etc. You should learn to spot such places and take advantage of them as an avenger. In some instances you can create your own choke point- for instance if you have iceblink armor, you can actually freeze some foes around you, not finish them off, and kill the one or two that trickle through the cracks.

B. Limiting Frontage- if you stand in the middle of a room, creatures can surround you from all sides. Depending upon the size of the creatures facing you and the reach of their weapons, you can rapidly find yourself in a situation where you are locked up in stun and unable to do much. Stacked fastest recovery items and high life can help in this situation, but a better solution is to limit your frontage. Simply backing against a wall cuts the number of foes facing you in half, and moving to a corner will quarter the number attacking you at the same time. This is an excellent tactic to use with a full belt in the absence of choke points. However do not attempt this with ranged attackers present. Ranged attackers will fire over the melee pack engaging you, and you will have boxed yourself in with no avenue of escape.

C. Retreat action- run backwards about 5 yds off the melee crowd and wait for them to approach. Shift click attack to force the game to execute your attack at the limit of your weapons reach. When it gets too hot, retreat some more. If you run really far, you can actually put the creature you hit offscreen, as it is chilled and can not keep up. I call this 'chill thinning'. Remember it is not how many that are howling for your blood which matters, it is how many who are right on your toes swinging that does, and stragglers coming in later in time arrive too late to create a swarm problem. In this manner you can string them out over a long path, which limits the number you face at any given time. Ideally you should be fighting a retreat action towards some kind of choke point. If you are in the stairs room with no great fighting ground, you can use a retreating action in a great circle about the room. Foot speed matters for this kind of warfare, and shield block is critical as you will be running out of combat relying upon shield block as your sole defense. Sometimes a retreating action will separate the ranged attackers from the melee attackers- the idea is to run hard, and since the melee guys are faster than the ranged attackers, you can separate them from the ranged attackers by retreat and dispatch them, then return for the ranged attackers. This works very well in the flayer jungle against the machete guys and blow gun guys. This also works well in Kurast verses cantors and zealots (and your vengeance chill prevents them from getting beyond your reach).

D. Activate as few as possible- apparently activation in D2 is now different- monsters wake up when you are within their awareness radius (unlike D1 where they woke up when they were within your light radius). As an avenger, the stupidest thing to do is to run rapidly into an unexplored zone. What this does is wake up more than you can handle, and you have created your own crowd control problem. The proper way to advance is to take a few steps, pause and wait for monsters, then take a few more, pause...The idea here is that monsters activate in fewer numbers. When you see monsters coming, immediately retreat towards explored zone. If you charge to meet them, you will only activate more creatures. By retreating, you are certain all you face will be those you activated. If you know there is a big pack of undead off in a certain direction, you can fire off single holy bolts to draw out creatures one at a time towards your position.

E. Parking the pack- occasionally you will find yourself in a stairs trap kind of situation- here you come down the stairs and immediately get swarmed. You can try to run to a choke point or limit frontage, or you can simply advance into an unexplored area bringing the entire pack with you off of the stairs, cast a town portal, go to town, return via the waypoint, and slowly activate them a few at a time. The worst thing to do in a stairs situation is to die on the stairs- then if you must return via the stairs you are screwed.

F. Disposable minions- in really tough situations, you can hire a minion, advance slowly, then retreat behind your minion once monsters are seen. Once they engage the minion, come in and support it by flank attacking the monsters facing it. Since you have two targets for the creatures, the number facing any given target is less. Frequent return trips to town to heal a hireling are important. For zones such as the viper lair altar room, I like to run around the altar to the north, trailing my minion. Fangskin usually engages the minion from the rear, and I am beyond his awareness range on the north side of the altar. I can then run onto the altar and use the stairs as a choke point, or deal with the lower level of crowds here.

G. Dealing with stuff which likes to run when hurt or you get too close- the situation to be aware of here is that something like a ghoul lord can retreat into unexplored territory, and you in your desire to kill the lord activate more than you can handle. What then happens is while you are swarmed, the ghould lord pops you with ranged attacks. When all you have left are these wimpy ranged attackers, try this. Retreat one screen until they can no longer fire. They will then attempt to close. When this happens, flank them and get between them and the unexplored territory (but where you still are in explored territory), and NOW advance and drive them into your explored zone.

H. Holy Freeze perimeter attacking- what you do here is dart in, kill one, retreat, kill another, repeat. As you have superior foot speed and their attack speed is slow, you can get in, get your kill, and get out before they can strike.

I. Shift click defense- when you shift click to attack, you force D2 to execute the swing right now, rather than waiting until the monster has closed within its weapon range. With superior weapon speed, you can hold down the shift and drag your click to the targets as they arrive. In this way you can kill them faster than they arrive. This does not work well when you face something like a Doom knight who has a range 3 sword and you have your range 1 weapon. The key is a very fast attack speed and having enough mana to deal with misses. I can do a left shift with my pinky, use my left index finger to punch a potion, and use my right hand to guide my mouse all at the same time.

J. Charge/Avenge- here you click and hold to charge your target, then hotkey switch to vengeance to immediately avenge. You can pull this off and get in a good freebie hit before it recovers from the knockback from charge. Beware of charge immunes and have smite hotkeyed to finish them off. Use this on widely scattered foes when you are in no danger of being swarmed by melee creatures, or on teleporting bosses.

K. Sirian's Tempting fate tactic- here you take advantage of the fact that it takes a while for a swing to complete, and you can run away before it ever lands. With chill from vengeance and perhaps holy freeze, this tactic becomes even more viable.

L. The Diablo Fanny Tag- if you stand off from Diablo, often he will charge. If you circle around behind him (chat 'ole!' for color) and hit him in the rear with vengeance while he is charging, he will slow down. You can continue to hit him from behind and there is nothing he can do about it until he completes his charge. Once he has completed his charge, get beyond his breath range and force him to close again. This is extremely effective, and becomes even better if you have him under the influence of holy freeze.

VI. Conclusions and other ramblings

I have tried both versions of avenger, and have played the holy freeze version higher. The holy freeze version tends to become more of a zealot as a primary, with vengeance as a situational attack. The conviction avenger really takes a great deal of real time tactical skill to master, and may not be the best choice as your first avenger type. The rush of a big vengeance hit is great, and slowdown from chill + holy freeze is simply fantastic on bosses where you watch them attack say once every 4 seconds or so. Aura flashing is necessary if you are going to solo, and it is tricky to master. When in doubt, go with the enemy aura and just burn blues. Do not get into the mindset that you must max vengeance to 20 ASAP. This can really exacerbate mana problems for little real gain. I have yet to try things like token points into conversion for crowd control in this package, because when I play an avenger, I enjoy the pure rush of tactical combat on the fly that you do get with avenger. The avenger fits more into party play than he does into soling, but if you seek a challenge, solo an avenger.

VII. Acknowledgements

Sirian for the lengthy discussion of tempting fate and not turning purple at my butchery of the language. Sir Die A Lot for reminding me to point out that chill stacks with vengeance and holy freeze. An unnamed poster on D2.net last fall for posting on the holy freeze, vengeance, tan's flail, cleglaw combo (sorry can not remember who). Bolty for pestering me into adding a section on tactics and in general being supportive of strategic writings. CelticHound for grammar nits. Mel for the correcting hell urdar levels. ARK for real number feedback on damage and speed levels necessary for hell survival. The numerous postings on D2.net's paladin forum which have encouraged this guide to come into being. Thanks to the Darkness site for detailed numbers on monsters. Charis for reporting enemy auras can be stacked. Air Ron for reminding me of the vengeance bug. Linus_P for the advice on meteoric rings, Hand of Broc, details on the vengeance bug, and comment on vulpine items.

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