Dyrnwyn

**Dyrnwyn** is a rare artifact weapon in *Barony*, being the sword representative of the magical weapons. It provides several unique abilities in combat, smiting undead and demonic enemies for bonus damage, and setting enemies on fire when struck.

## Description

Dyrnwyn is a very powerful weapon in the right hands, originally serving to merely grant fire damage after a hit. This helps to grant more damage to a single hit if rushing in, hitting once and dashing back out, or for finishing off an enemy which would otherwise live with a sliver of health remaining.

The Legends and Pariahs update helped to put a focus on gaining proficiency in each artifact weapon to fully utilize its effects, overall nerfing its power in the early game when the player has little to no sword proficiency. To compensate, Dyrnwyn was granted bonus damage to both undead and demonic enemies.

The chance of either burning or smite effects, along with the potency of the smite’s damage bonus, scales with sword skill. At zero proficiency, there is no chance to ignite or smite enemies, and smiting would only deal 1.5 times. At max skill, both smite and ignite chances are guaranteed at every hit, and smite damage causes double damage against susceptible targets.

While the changes put a damper on early-game flame damage, the utility of smite cannot be understated. To deal up to twice as much damage every hit makes it one of the most heavily damaging artifact weapon in the game, easily outpacing Parashu’s overall DPS increase of 12.5%, on top of burning damage.

There are obvious limitations, such as only providing a burning effect to enemies that aren’t undead or demonic, but key enemy types such as skeletons, vampires, demons, and the liches are all important enemy types which are also susceptible to smiting.

## Locations

Finding Dyrnwyn is very rare to encounter, often being found early on into the dungeon or not at all if random chance dictates. Unlike most other artifact weapons, Dyrnwyn does not have a reliable source to fall back upon if spawns are particularly unfavorable for the player, causing some runs to have no chance of encountering the sword.

To compensate for a lack of consistency, Dyrnwyn is found in two sources: King Arthur, one of many named Humans, and Shelob. King Arthur is a heavily armed human NPC, found randomly in the dungeon. While the chances of finding named humans are slim, places with naturally high human populations such as Minetown can help locate the man and his sword.

Shelob is the second source for Dyrnwyn, and the far more common one to find in the dungeon. As the special version of Spiders, Shelob is very rare to find wandering around in the Mines, and being a little more common in the Swamp. The real source of spiders is in scripted microstructures found throughout the mines, with several designs often housing two to five spiders each, which will increase the chances of finding Shelob significantly.

## Trivia

* In-game it is carried by King Arthur, but the name and flaming effect are similar to Welsh mythology of Rhydderch Hael
* It, along with Parashu, are the only artifact weapons which can only be found by random encounter and drop from special enemies.