An actual Ultimate Bug Report for Sil

[Karkaroth]

TL;DR: Almost all powers can be added to almost any item with artifice, allowing you to put most abilities on most items, stack ridiculous stealth/song, stack damage sides, stack regeneration, or a lot of other things. I stacked damage sides to see how it would go. The game told me to make an "Ultimate Bug Report," so here I am.



About two weeks ago, I found that pressing the button for an illegal ability in the Artifice menu, while the cursor was on a legal ability in the artifice menu, would add it to the item with no problem. E.g. if you make an artifact helm, put the cursor over the Light ability, and press 'a', it will add Damage Sides to the item, whether that's possible or not.

This is a bug, and a funny one, so I decided to see what builds were viable. Alas, Hal on the discord wisely pointed out that mithril longsword is just plain better than a handaxe for Riposte, so no poisoned 5d8 axe of fun for me.

So, after about fifty embarrassing deaths where I tried to make 2 rings of evasion +2 and a ring of secrets at the 100' forge and gloves of enchantment, expertise and weaponsmith at the 300' forge (and sometimes succeeded, despite my 5/4 melee/evasion!), I settled on a relatively sane build where I only go to 18 smithing instead of 21 by the second forge, and take enchantment there instead of Artifice and Armorsmith, crafting jewelry of grace and constitution and making the gloves at the third forge.

This was where Strength in Adversity shone - I take it every run for +3 smithing, costing at most 2000 xp for a 5000 xp value. If, and only if, you start smithing while on 25% health or less, you have +3 grace (until you're inevitably interrupted, and then you have to get wounded again). This is, of course, safest with pits and acid traps, though you have to take off all your meltable gear for an acid trap. Caltrops are no fun, because the slow wears off halfway through smithing and you have to damage and slow yourself again and again and again. After that, spiders are very safe - with poison damage, you know when you have to chug an !Antidote, and you can simply flee around corners to the forge and they won't follow. Expendable orcs that you kill before smithing aren't bad; serpents are risky, but you can outrun then and close a door behind you. Dragons don't follow around corners, but they're terrible.

As it turned out, on my winning run I made the grace gear and a constitution amulet on 250', chasmed down to 350', and made the gloves there, but it would have worked just fine with a 300' forge and a 400' forge instead. I took delving after that, and the plan was to get 10-15 song and hunt down a few forges before 500' while pumping evasion.

My eternal problem was still how much smithing investment would kill me; I have a habit of trying to invest all my spare xp in smithing every time I get to a forge, going from 11 points at 300' to 15 points at 500' and then realizing I can't beat a simple orc captain, much less Orcobal. But.... it'll be so powerful once I finish smithing five forges of grace gear and then five forges of other gear!

So, after those five forges of grace gear, and minimal other Enchanted gear, I started smithing difficulty 30 items, almost all with damage sides. Ironically, my shield didn't have damage sides, being a Shield of Deflection +3. A normal artifact shield can't have a +3 evasion bonus, and very little was more important than evasion. Besides, I didn't even finish an artifact in each armor slot before running out of time!

I found two _Revelations that game. The first one was immediately burned up by a ruby serpent; the second one was very, very late, in Cat Fortress on 900'. On the plus side, the next two levels I found were Gothmog's Hall and a level with a forge and Chambers of Thu - a smith's dream.

So, by that time I had a 2d13 sharpness accurate Rapid Attack Riposte build, with Cruel Blow, Whirlwind Attack and Flanking on the side; it killed Morgoth pretty trivially, and then of course nearly died to Ungoliant and a Gwathrauko despite use of a Silmaril.

Having destroyed my wonderful sword Sil-cutting, I concluded that the only thing to do was to use Grond to kill Ungoliant and Carcharoth. Grond is not... a good weapon, and I only figured out at the end why Riposte wasn't working with it. But it was possible to hit Carcharoth, despite him having more than 10 more evasion than my attack bonus, and me having the three-Sils curse. That took over a hundred turns., since it took three hits to kill him with his regeneration.

Credit where credit's due: Hal, on the discord, is awesome. I would not have made it without that tireless* willingness to argue about the correct things to smith, point out obvious errors of how I was playing the game, and discuss ridiculous builds.

This was for Sil-Q, but I've confirmed the build exists in some versions of Sil as well.

I've got no idea what the etiquette for posting a bug-run character file on the ladder is. Should I put it there, or no?


Questions spawned by this run:
Does Accurate reroll the evasion and the melee roll?
How did I get artifact jewelry from weapon and armor chests (twice!)?


* Okay, so Hal got tired once, but that was arguing about accurate and the Sil curse, and it was after Morgoth was dead.

[Quirk]

Well, firstly, congratulations. I wouldn't be much of a coder if I didn't appreciate a good exploit run, though yes, please don't put them on the ladder, particularly if you find a way to destroy the high score.

Shame the sword got smashed - would have been nice to see it.

Accuracy just rerolls your melee roll on failure, but by itself this adds rather a hefty bonus. It mostly works as about +3, +4 Melee with regard to actually connecting with the enemy as long as the difference between attacker Melee and defender Evasion isn't more than 15 or so - there's little to be gained from a reroll if you are guaranteed to hit, or almost guaranteed to hit. However you don't gain extra criticals like +3 Melee would give you. It works best on weapons where connecting is sufficient and criticals are a bonus.

Not sure about the artifact jewellery, would need to check, but the object generation code is a little odd in places.

[Karkaroth]

Shame the sword got smashed - would have been nice to see it.

Pretty sure this is the final version of the sword - just a basic accurate sharpness sword, even though I knew Fire Brand was probably better than Accurate.

...there's little to be gained from a reroll if you are guaranteed to hit, or almost guaranteed to hit. However you don't gain extra criticals like +3 Melee would give you. It works best on weapons where connecting is sufficient and criticals are a bonus.

Yeah, that was the idea at the end, when I realized that I wouldn't go above two crits in practice against V, and sharpness+d13 damage sides meant I didn't desperately need crits. I figured I'd need Accurate to beat V's end-stage evasion, especially with Rapid Attack. Tossing Finesse, and maybe even taking Power, was arguably worth it; I couldn't afford anything other than a longsword, though, with the precious +2 evasion bonus and Parry.