This ability doesn't seem to do anything other than sap my abilities for 100 turns. Am I misunderstanding what this is supposed to do? I read it and assumed it would remove negatives from my equipment.
Where did your negatives come from? I wonder if it has anything to do with the source of the negatives (whether or not they came with the item, were put there by an anvil, or were corrupted by monsters).
It's only Corruption. Flames of the Heckforge (and any other corruption removing things; it all uses the same code) will not reduce Krongian negatives, which are tracked separately. More specifically: internally, for each artifact we track: - a collection of buff stuff (primary stats, secondary stats, damages, resistances, hit effects, all the usual stuff) - positive quality traits granted by Kronging - negative quality traits granted by Kronging - negative quality traits granted by corruption Flames of the Heckforge simply removes the negative traits from corruption. Translation! rerolls the positive and negative quality traits on an artifact *before* corruption, and has some % chance (I believe 50%?) of removing one positive trait. Corruption then gets applied on top of that. This is all from memory and may have no resemblance to reality. Translation! isn't really all that useful - I mean, you get to reroll, and you may get better perks that better suit your build or your current environment - but it has a 50% chance of making your artifact actually worse. So I dunno why people obsessaroll over it.
I see. Hmm, probably should have looked into this prior to taking it. Thanks. I was hoping to use Kronian Ritual to repeatedly forge my gear and Heckforge to get rid of negatives. Guess it was too good to be true.
Signed up for the sole purpose of bumping this and stating that Flames of the Heckforge still appears to do nothing at all on my corrupted items. These are items corrupted by traps and monsters, not Kron fails.
Archeology just seems pretty weak overall after It Belongs in a Museum! Remember Your Charlemagne already feels like a filler point, Translation was (justifiably) nerfed to the ground and ritual doesn't seem as good anymore now that Krong seems to like cursing items even on the first attempt.
It can also randomly stop working on your artifact and instead show 'you are now lost in your own museum' when you try to use it. Even on the first re-translation. A very thorough nerf.
Remember your Charlemagne is actually pretty good. It can knock back any kind of creature or trap, creates a cloud of confusion (which can buy you some time), and you can use it in the absence of a teleport to knock artifacts or Dredmor statues off of islands.
One could argue an over nerf. They would have nerfed it less if it had a 10% chance to summon Cyberdemons in real life to shoot you with rockets. Seriously, it now needs a buff, paradoxically, before anyone would use it. They drove it through the ground, and through the core of the Earth, and out the other side, and into deep space, all the way to the observable end of the universe, some 93 billion light years away.
Eh, it's not that bad. The only problem is that it reduces the value of items for This Belongs in a Museum!
