TomeNET

(5.18) Recharging                                                               
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Wands, staves and rods are generally called 'magical devices' in the stricter
sense, this paragraph is about those and those are the only items that can be
manually recharged by the player at will.
There are in the broader sense of the word 'magic device' other items too that
can be activated to unleash a specific kind of magic, such as certain jewelry,
artifacts and special ego-powered items. These cannot be recharged at will
however, the user will just have to wait till they are ready again.

While wands and staves use a charges counter to measure if they are depleted or
not, rods have an internal charge that is completely depleted on using it and
will slowly build up again on its own - depending on the user's magic device
skill the depletion may be less severe, the rod will therefore take less time
to recharge if it had been zapped by a proficient magic device user.

While electricity or disenchantment based attacks may deplete magic devices,
they can usually also be manually recharged when necessary!
So wands and staves will need to be actively recharged by the player when
depleted, while rods (and other, not manually rechargeable items) will
automatically recharge themselves over time, displaying 'charging' label or
just '#' if the item name is very long and there's not enough space.

Recharging can be done via shop service (see (4.5a)), a scroll, another magic
device or a magic spell.
For wands and staves recharging will replenish their charges, while for rods
recharging will reduce their 'charging' delay, aka refill their energy.

When an item is recharged the result depends on the method of recharging and
the item's base type level. For wands and staves it also depends on the current
amount of charges in the device: To minimize the risk of a failure you should
only recharge wands and staves that are already fully depleted ie have zero
charges left.
In general, higher recharge power and lower base item level result in...
 -lower chance for the recharge process to fail,
 -chance for gaining a higher amount of charges replenished.

If the device is successfully recharged and is a device using charges (ie
a wand or a staff) it will become unidentified as you will not know how many
charges it gained. To find out, you have to identify it again.

If unlucky, recharging may result in a failure. Even when recharging at the
highest magic spell level there is still a very slim chance for a failure to
occur.
While a failed recharge may drain rods even further, wands and staves may
either just get their charges depletes or they may even blow up completely,
depending on your (bad) luck. The messages are:
 - "There is a static discharge." - the device survives but is depleted.
 - "There is a bright flash of light." - the device is destroyed.
   (Wands or staves only, rods can only get discharged but not destroyed.)
If the device was destroyed and it was fused with a mage staff, the mage staff
survives and is reverted to its basic state, allowing you to fuse it again with
a new device.

If a wand or staff still has charges when you try to recharge it, the risk of
failure increases for every charge it still has.
So if you want to minimize failure chance, only recharge thosse when they are
already fully depleted.
You can inscribe wands and staves "!D", a quality of life feature which will
automatically deplete the device for you first when you try to recharge it,
so you don't have to activate it manually to get rid of any remaining charges.
The (small) drawback is that you cannot use this inscription if you actually
aim at overcharging a device, ie recharge it further while it is not yet
depleted, to gain even more total amount of charges on it - a very risky
process, obviously.

Means of recharging:
-Scrolls            (60 power)
-Thingol artifact   (80..110 power, depending on magic device skill)
-Shop service       (125 power, see (4.5a))
-Magic spell        (10..140 power)
 (Tier details: Recharge I 10..84, Recharge II 68..104, Recharge III 111..140)

The power determines both, the chance of succeeding in recharging the item and
the degree of recharging done to the item.
Some lesser means of recharging might not be powerful enough to recharge rods,
these require over 60 power, so for example scrolls won't work.

Staves and wands 'of plenty' will receive about twice as many charges from
recharging (with the risk of breaking remaining unchanged) so look out for
those!

If you try to recharge a whole stack of devices in one go, the risk for it to
fail is actually the same as if you recharged just a single item.
You will get the amount of charges replenished to every single magic device in
the stack, at a slight rate of diminishing returns.
In other words: Recharging stacks is okay, it can save you a lot of scrolls of
recharging, just don't go too crazy with the stacks size to keep diminishing
returns low and if it ever fails you might lose a lot of wands/staves at once.

Note that inside the Ironman Deep Dive Challenge (IDDC) it is not possible to
recharge Staves of Summoning or Wands of Polymorph.

Items used to recharge magic devices can be inscribed "@I<partial item name>"
to target a specific item. Also see (0.3) for details about "@I" inscription.