Activating & Recharging mana items (wands, staffs, blades)

[luke41]

Hi,

During my walk thru the dungeons I collected a lot of stuff I dont really know how to use properly. These are magical items like wand, teowand, yew staff, vorpal blade etc.

I realize, that the magical functions can only be used by guy with some mana experience - that is logical.
-But sometimes I dont see any effect: like when using "calm" from wand - no monster so far seemed to be calmer...
-On the other hand, yew staff is great to fight ghosts - but is it possible to recharge it somehow? Or can I throw it away after approx. 10 uses? Will it happen to all staffs, or are there staffs possible to recharge?
- I have a vorpal blade: but how to activate it? Or just to wait, until one of my characters has so much mana so the additional function will activate itself?
- What to do so the lightning functions of some ILLUMULET are more powerful? Mine seems to have only 10-Watt-Power...

[Ameena]

Nothing with charges can be recharged. Some things are single-use, like the Magic Boxes (green ones last longer than blues). I never use any of them, personally, but stick to melée weapons and Fireballs .
A Vorpal Blade is just a sword, but it can damage non-material beings as well. Unlike other melée weapons, it grants Wizard levels for using it rather than Fighter. If you get hold of a couple, keep 'em! It gives you a way to fight, say, Ghosts, besides ensuring you have the mana to cast Harm Non-Material Being at them.
The Illumulet is as bright as it'll ever get.
No item can ever be improved or upgraded beyond how it is when you find it - weapons that get extra attacks do so because your level in the applicable skill has become high enough that you can now access the better attacks.
Personally I favour melée weapons with the Thrust attack for their damage versus delay - some weapons do more damage but recover slowly so if you miss that's a longer time of dealing no damage than if you're attacking every couple of seconds and missing less. So I get the rapier first (I think it's on Level Three), then the Delta Blade (Level Eight), and finally the Inquisitor (Level Seven, once you've been all the way down and got all the keys and come back up to access the main part of the level), even if there's really only one mob that I get to use it on .

[Chaos-Shaman]

luke, an item can be recharged. there is an example in the update on Banville.