How should I deal with a water nymph in Nethack?

Recently, while I was playing Nethack, I drank from a fountain and it created a water nymph, which then paralyzed my and stole almost all of my items. I followed it further into the dungeon, but, when attempting to attack it, it simply stole another item and teleported away.

So, how should I deal with a water nymph? Are there any optimal ways of killing her or escaping from her?

Solution 1:

Each time you attack, as long as you actually hit you are doing damage and so it will eventually die if you just followed it around.

However, there's a few other things you can try - sometimes the Nymph might attack a floating eye and be frozen, allowing you to attack it freely.

• If you have a pet, and they attack first, this can sometimes allow you to do enough damage before they then manage to freeze you too.

• Wands with projectile attacks allow you to attack from a distance, meaning it can't freeze you, or you could polymorph/teleport the nymph away too.

• If you're carrying a mirror (?) then the nymph will always take this first and depending how quickly you unfreeze then you maybe able to kill it immediately after it takes this.

• Also you could go extreme and just genocide all the nymphs, tho I believe they do drop some useful items.

The most obvious tip tho, is to not drink from fountains, until you're ready to take on everything that can spawn from them...