I'd like to add something to what Joph said. You absolutely should not mess with traps during the adventure (ie: before you've won). Approaching them with the attitude of "what's the worst that can happen" is a mistake. One of the trap types (as Joph mentioned) is the "drunk trap". What it does is cause everyone in a large radius to become *super* drunk. It's basically the maximum level of drunkeness right off the bat. There is no resistance to this. There is no cure for this. All you can do is wait for the effects to wear off (obviously, alchohol tolerance helps reduce the time to recover).
That one trap can be an adventure killer. You'd much rather die, since you can just run back and get right back to fighting. The drunk trap will basically ***** up the entire group for a good amount of time, and if someone hits it during combat, your group is probably really screwed (althoug dying will remove the drunk effect, so maybe that's a good thing).
You really should approach chests as something that can end the adventure if things go wrong, so always do them last. As others have said, when you /inspect the chest, it'll give you a hint as to whether it's a mechanical, holy, or arcane trap. You then must have the appropriate class type disarm the trap. Unfortunately, as most people have pointed out, most wis and int casters aren't going to spend points on the spells needed to disarm those traps, so for the most part that means that only one in three chests are usable.
As to the rewards? Questionable. I do think that they reduced the aug drop rate a bit and added them into the chests, so if you're looking for augs, chests are probably a good way to go. Other then that though, the loot isn't that great. This is one of the reasons almost no casters bother getting the spells. The cost in adventure points doesn't justify the rewards you're likely to ever get using the spells on the chests. Unless you make a point of doing a ton of LDoNs, and opening every chest you can, it's just unlikely to be worth it. After all, you could have just spent those points directly on augs/gear from the merchants, right? And those will presumably be things you really want/need as opposed to the random stuff you'll get in chests (which will always be +stat/+resist items IIRC).
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King Nobby wrote:
More words please