ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Some yaech just killed me by inflicting full damage with Aether Beam even though I was standing on the center of the spiral and so I should have only taken 10% damage. Is there some known way for that to happen? I plan to work around it in the future by fleeing aether beams more hurriedly; in this case I deliberately stood still for an extra turn because it seemed safe to be at the center. I guess that's good enough, but it'd be better to actually understand how this happened...

I think what happens is that you get hit by every beam while standing at the center, and because new beams appear so fast, you take a lot of damage even though individual beams deal less. (I'm definitely not certain of this though, it's been a while since I've played with it)

Yeah... I definitely took those many small hits. Hm actually I think the log showed me taking the small hits over and over for the first turn and maybe part of the second, and after that I maybe took both the small hits and the big hits. I didn't save the text though, so I may be misinterpreting or misremembering.

But there were definitely a bunch of big hits that started at some point. It was like, 10 arcane 10 arcane 10 arcane 10 arcane 78 arcane 10 arcane 78 arcane 10 arcane 78 arcane (not all on one line like that though). Or maybe the 10s weren't really mixed in at the end like that. I feel like they were though...

Obviously I'm fuzzy enough on this that nobody can say what actually happened to my character, but maybe somebody knows of some general reason why the beams could hit for full damage within the hub tile.

My experience is that Aether Beam is rather strange. Sometimes I'll lay it down and an enemy walks right through with little trouble. Other times it will hit them 5+ times in a turn.

Yep! An Archmage in a patrol I fought one time DESTROYED me with this skill in one turn. Got annihilated. You generally don't have much arcane resistance because it's something you rarely encounter, and most items don't have much if any resistance to it. This is where the underrated prodigy Swift Hands comes in... handy. Swap on resistance gear and a Torque as soon as it happens and survive