Playing with nerfed archery, missile rebalance

[fizzix]

I think what I did in DJA for nerfing archery works pretty well:
x2 = x1.75
if x1.75 = 2 then x1 = .875 (half of 1.75), so:
x3 = x2.625
x4 = x3.5
etc

EDIT: Also, a missile-nerf idea no one has suggested: Make some monsters resistant to missiles (halves damage for those monsters).

I found that archery was still pretty powerful for DJA, even with the reduced multipliers. Then again, I was playing an archer, so I guess it was supposed to be powerful.

I like the missile-resistance idea. When I first started Angband I thought skeletons might be resistant to edged weapons, which is a similar thought process.

[miyazaki]

I found that archery was still pretty powerful for DJA, even with the reduced multipliers. Then again, I was playing an archer, so I guess it was supposed to be powerful.

I like the missile-resistance idea. When I first started Angband I thought skeletons might be resistant to edged weapons, which is a similar thought process.

I think that missile breakage should be linked to the monsters. Seems like arrows hitting a bronze golum would break on contact. And maybe non-ego missiles should fly through ghosts, et al.

[Atarlost]

It's only a problem if you want archery to remain dominant in the early game. Right now it trumps all other damage sources. Magic missile may as well not even exist because mana pools are so small and melee requires exposing yourself to enemies. There aren't a lot of ranged damage dealers in the early game. Even 13 damage is over half what you do with a +10 dagger in two blows and at no risk to yourself.

[Timo Pietilä]

Limiting missiles in the stores won't drive people to use melee more, it will cause them to rest on dlvl 1, store scum and call for a buy-out button.

A better solution is to remove enchanted/ego arrows from stores and provide an unlimited supply of (+0, +0) missiles.

I don't think people would do store scumming. It's just boring and unlimited supply of missiles from stores are not that important to anyone. Especially if we change drops (again) to contain more consumables. Missiles could be counted as such thing because they break and eventually you run out of them if you do not find replacement. Arrows and missiles should be common. Many orcs for example "shoot missile" which, according to Tolkien, is almost always arrows. I think a bit more thematic drops could be useful in this. Kill a black orc and it might drop its quiver of arrows. Need more arrows? Find a proper target.

Add "orcish arrows", "elvish arrows", plain "arrows" etc. Replace seeker, mithril etc. with these.

Whole situation where shops are needed is just absurd. Game should be winnable in no-shop artifactless chars with just a bit patience. Not much patience. Shops should be just safety net that provides something you have hard time finding in dungeon by quirk of RNG, with no guarantees whatsoever that that item actually is in shops (but with guarantee that it usually is).

Ammo is not the only one. I think also spellbooks should be abundant enough in dungeon that you wont need shops unless very unlucky. Restore <stat> potions and scrolls of phase door, teleport etc. should be dungeon items, not shop items.

Absolute essentials are food, lite, scrolls of recall (for convenience sake) and beginning spellbooks for spellcasters. Everything else should be subject of random occurrences. And even those essentials should be plenty enough in dungeon for player not needing to play game of shopping.

I think removing the to-hit and to-damage values completely from missiles would be a good idea as well. Leave the brands/slays intact.

I like the idea of making brands and slays additive to missile multiplier instead of multiplying entire damage. That makes a big impact without making slays and brands unusable. If you are serious about getting rid of to_hit and to_dam bonuses from missiles then I suggest that missiles get bigger dice. 1d8 or 2d4 instead of 1d4. 3d6 instead of 3d4. 4d6 instead of 4d4. Something like that. Maybe even bigger chance to get extra dices than with melee-weapons. More randomness.

[Timo Pietilä]

Oops! I retract. Unless curses are reworked. Or remove curse applies to heavy curses. Or something

I think the whole "sticky curse" is being reworked. Much better "curse" would be item with a drawback or drawbacks that can be removed by remove curse. Excellent melee-weapon that activates randomly to cause terror, for example. Helmet with ESP that randomly causes blindness (make that a visor that drops in front of your eyes .

Waiting for that I think "remove curse" could have same chance to break heavy curse as enchant scrolls have. Read enough of those and heavy curse breaks. That allows removing enchant scrolls from shops. Priests would obviously benefit more from that than any other class, but OTOH I don't see anything wrong with that. In old days priests were capable of recognizing curses (heavy and normal) without even needing to pick things up (by casting OoD to items), and I don't think anybody was against that.

[Pete Mack]

@Timo--
FAAnangband works that way, more or less. You might want to give it a try for playtesting.

[Ycombinator]

Applying the multiplier to the damage is realy brutal for starting players, since arrows are only 1d4. Really, really brutal.

It can be brutal for starters, but it makes mid- and end-game archery altogether obsolete. I tried d_m's patch in my current game. Let me show some numbers:

  Heavy Crossbow of Extra Might (x5) (+15,+25) (+1)

                            current V       with patch                        

1d5 (+0, +0)                141.4           40.1
1d5 (+5, +5)                168.3           45.3
1d5 of acid (+3, +10)       581.4/193.8     59.4/50.3
1d5 of slay evil (+8, +12)  408/204         58.4/52.3

Brands and slays become useless, difference between launchers almost nonexistent. Whether it's Bard, or Umbar, or high-end ego launcher, they're as useful against end-game enemies as flasks of oil. Archery should be nerfed, but not by an order of magnitude!
One thing I agree with is that high dice ammo (mithril and seeker) should contribute more to the total damage. Currently there is not much difference between them given sufficiently high to-dam bonus.

[fizzix]

It can be brutal for starters, but it makes mid- and end-game archery altogether obsolete. I tried d_m's patch in my current game. Let me show some numbers:

  Heavy Crossbow of Extra Might (x5) (+15,+25) (+1)

                            current V       with patch                        

1d5 (+0, +0)                141.4           40.1
1d5 (+5, +5)                168.3           45.3
1d5 of acid (+3, +10)       581.4/193.8     59.4/50.3
1d5 of slay evil (+8, +12)  408/204         58.4/52.3

Brands and slays become useless, difference between launchers almost nonexistent. Whether it's Bard, or Umbar, or high-end ego launcher, they're as useful against end-game enemies as flasks of oil. Archery should be nerfed, but not by an order of magnitude!
One thing I agree with is that high dice ammo (mithril and seeker) should contribute more to the total damage. Currently there is not much difference between them given sufficiently high to-dam bonus.

That looks to me like the patch isn't working properly...

[Ycombinator]

That looks to me like the patch isn't working properly...

Why, that's exactly what you can expect with additive modifiers applied only to base dice.
avg(1d5) = 3
3 * 5 + 25 = 40 — for average bolts
3 * (5+3) + 25 + 10 = 59 — for acid bolts with +10 to-dam.

With Umbar (x7) (+18, +18) this would be:
3 * 7+18 = 39
3 * (7+3) + 18 + 10 = 58

With Bard (x5) (+17, +19):
avg(1d4) = 2.5
2.5 * 5 + 19 = 31.5
2.5 * (5 + 3) + 19 + 10 = 49

All equally useless.

[fizzix]

Ah, I missed the second part about adding multipliers only to damage rolls.

Yes, that's too much of a change. Really, changing the slay multiplier to additive and making extra shots = 1.5 shots instead of 2 shots is probably enough for a first go.

[Timo Pietilä]

Why, that's exactly what you can expect with additive modifiers applied only to base dice.

How about keeping multipliers multipliers, but instead of multiplying multipliers add them together. x3 bow with x3 slay ammo would be x6 instead of x9. I think that is what "additive multipliers" were meant to be:

Acid bolts with +10 to-dam with Umbar (x7) (+18, +18) that would be:
(3 + 7) * (18 + 10 + 1d4) ~= 305, when it is currently 3 * 7 * (18 + 10 + 1d4) ~= 640.5 Without ammo bonus it would be (3 + 7) * (18 + 1d4) ~= 205.

Very useful, but not overpowered so.

[fizzix]

How about keeping multipliers multipliers, but instead of multiplying multipliers add them together. x3 bow with x3 slay ammo would be x6 instead of x9. I think that is what "additive multipliers" were meant to be:

Acid bolts with +10 to-dam with Umbar (x7) (+18, +18) that would be:
(3 + 7) * (18 + 10 + 1d4) ~= 305, when it is currently 3 * 7 * (18 + 10 + 1d4) ~= 640.5 Without ammo bonus it would be (3 + 7) * (18 + 1d4) ~= 205.

Very useful, but not overpowered so.

I don't think we should use Umbar as a base for endgame power. It's overpowered and should probably be rarer than it currently is. Instead use x5 launcher with branded mithril or seeker bolts.

assume x5 launcher, +20 to dam and +15 branded mithril bolts giving:

current:
(20+15+8)*5*3 = 645 (high)
additive:
(20+15+8)*(5+3) = 344 (good)
no brand:
(20+15+8)*5 = 215 (good)

So this seems to work. A x4 launcher with extra shots is still a bit of a problem:
(20+15+8)*(4+3)*2 = 602 (high)
If we are able to drop extra shots to 1.5 instead of 2 we get:
(20+15+8)*(4+3)*1.5 = 451 (good)

This looks perfectly serviceable for the endgame. Archery is still overpowered in the early game, but that's more because few monsters have ranged attacks. I think the best way to affect that is with ammo and enchanting availability. But one problem at a time. Let's change multipliers to additive, it seems to already be possible and then look at reducing extra shots.

[Pete Mack]

How about keeping multipliers multipliers, but instead of multiplying multipliers add them together. x3 bow with x3 slay ammo would be x6 instead of x9. I think that is what "additive multipliers" were meant to be:

Acid bolts with +10 to-dam with Umbar (x7) (+18, +18) that would be:
(3 + 7) * (18 + 10 + 1d4) ~= 305, when it is currently 3 * 7 * (18 + 10 + 1d4) ~= 640.5 Without ammo bonus it would be (3 + 7) * (18 + 1d4) ~= 205.

Very useful, but not overpowered so.

This was why I proposed it. The big reason that archery is a problem is that cumulative multiplication is guaranteed to be unbalanced.

Bard with Acid brand arrows (or just ordinary arrows vs Dragons) in the hands of a cl 40 ranger currently does

3*5*3 = 45 * base arrow damage / turn. There's no possible way to balance it.

(3+5)*2 = 16 base damage/turn seems in the realm of reasonable, assuming additive multipliers and one extra shot.


For unlucky souls with an ordinary longbow, branded ammo still does 6x base damage (rather than 9x base damage), so it still is very valuable in the early game--strong enough for a Ranger with 2 shots to take down Smaug with an ordinary bow.

Those were the two criteria I wanted to enforce:
* Aggressively diving Rangers can kill Smaug
* Crazy multipliers in the end game can't unbalance play completely.

[nppangband]

Another thing that has been ignored: critical hits.... Because the probability of critical hits are based on weapon weight, and I think it uses the weight of the arrows, so critical hits almost never happen. But they should for the characters who are skilled with bows.

We could eliminate the multipliers on the bows completely....and have the probability of a critical hit from archery based on player skill with archery and the weight of the bow instead. That way, the Rangers and warriors will still get big damage and the other classes won't.

I also think the multipliers for bows should increase the number of damage dice before the damage is calculated, rather than doing the multipliers after the damage is calculated. With ammunition being 1d4 or 1d5, under the current system 20-25% of the hits are for max damage. (Actually now that I think about it, melee hits should probably do the same.

[PowerDiver]

Another thing that has been ignored: critical hits....

I've been saying for years that criticals should depend on the to-hit roll. A crit should be about hitting the precise weak spot you are aiming for. Weight is already incorporated in the damage dice.

This idea received surprisingly [to me] little support in rgra.