MAngband

Nexus Q teled me to a big room with an awake ethreal dragon.  3 shots and I am dead.  Any help would be appriciated.  All my contact info is in my profile.

I am all set thanks to Nar.  Anyone have any idea why an ethreal dragon killed me in 3 breaths when I had resist Darkness?

They also breathe light powerfully (read ~500 hps damage).

I was also resistant to light.  But if they take off 500 and I only had 400 HP then 3 shots at 200 hp would do it.  How exacltly does the resistance work?  anyway it said it breathed darkness.

Well here's the technical description, in case you really want to know.

Light and dark attacks do (monster's hp / 6) or 400 damage, whichever is less. Ethereal dragons have 2100 HP, which means their light and dark attacks do 350 damage.

Light attacks, when resisted, do 4/(randint(6)+6) of their normal damage. So, that's somewhere between 4/11 or 2/5 at best to 2/3 at worst, which averages somewhere around 4/9, or close to 1/2. It's the same formula used for resist dark, too. If you got the best possible results on all three breaths, and the monster had all its HP, each one did ~127 damage. Your AC will *not* be factored in for this attack.

(from project_p in src/server/spells1.c, make_attack_spell in src/server/melee2.c)

Cool, thanks for the info, In that case it could definatly have taken me out in around 3 breaths, oh well part of the excitement of the game,  I just wish I had had time to hit a macro, how fast do they breathe?

That's why speed is so incredibly important.. and DSL
One thing I've found, is that because of the way the dungeon works, the deeper you get, the slower the turns go.  Therefore, it's actually SAFER in some ways because you'd probably have seen the eathereal D and had time to hit destruction at 6350.