Ring of lightning

[Edi]

It's one of the more useful early items, because it gives full immunity. The copper plate can do that too, but requires research. It can literally mean the difference between having your nation annihilated and being the one doing the annihilating.

In the one Dom3 MP game I have so far taken part of, playing EA Ulm, this was the case for me, since I started next to Vanheim. Awake PoD as a pretender and I found an air site early on to produce gems. I managed to produce a ring of lightning and ferry it to the pretender just one turn before he got hit with a Van army of roughly 170 mixed huskarls and hirdmen backed up by five vanadrotts. Less than fifty troops and only three vanadrotts made it out of that bloodbath alive, but without the ring, it would have been game over before three rounds. I'd gotten lucky in that I had a snake bladder stick and black steel plate on the pretender (event-given) to help him survive and deal out damage more than one unit at a time.