memorable randarts

[will_asher]

memorably pathetic: (DaJAngband of course)

The sling 'Gilun' (ML2) (+1, +1)
It makes you fall like a feather. It grants you immunity to paralysis. It activates for frost bolt (6d8) about every 2 minutes.
...It was dropped by a goblin on level 32.

[fizzix]

My first artifact in an iron man game:

The Morning Star of Elithar (2d6) (+5, +9)

Dropped by Ugluk, the Uruk at 1650 feet (level 33)

Cannot be harmed by acid, fire, electricity or cold

I wonder if it was based off of Melkor or something.

[Magnate]

My first artifact in an iron man game:

The Morning Star of Elithar (2d6) (+5, +9)

Dropped by Ugluk, the Uruk at 1650 feet (level 33)

Cannot be harmed by acid, fire, electricity or cold

I wonder if it was based off of Melkor or something.

Probably. The current randart generator isn't very good at making interesting-but-not-powerful artifacts. So you get dull and not powerful instead.

[Nomad]

So I've been playing the v4 dev versions, where damage for the early game is so low I was pretty happy to be running around dlevel 12 with a +3 shovel that did 21 damage per round. Then Wormtongue dropped the first randart I've yet encountered in v4:

a) the Dagger of Talith (3d4) (+14,+19)
     Dropped by Wormtongue, Agent of Saruman at 600 feet (level 12).
     
     Slays animals, undead, orcs, giants.
     Branded with weak lightning, acid.
     Provides resistance to light, nexus, chaos.
     Cannot be harmed by acid, electricty, fire, cold.
     Grants the ability to see invisible things.
     
     When activated, it deals 60 damage to all evil creatures that you 
     can see.
     Takes 73 to 81 turns to recharge.
     Your chance of success is 90.6%
     
     Combat info:
     3.8 blows/round.
     With +1 STR and +0 DEX you would get 4.3 blows
     With +0 STR and +1 DEX you would get 4.1 blows
     Average damage/round: 144.7 vs. animals, 144.7 vs. creatures not
     resistant to electricity, 144.7 vs. undead, 173.9 vs. orcs, 173.9
     vs. giants, 173.9 vs. creatures not resistant to acid, and 115.2
     vs. others.

...Thanks, Wormie.

[Derakon]

Ehh, it's only a factor of 8 increase in your damage against most opponents. That's balanced, right?

[Magnate]

Ehh, it's only a factor of 8 increase in your damage against most opponents. That's balanced, right?

Well, it rather depends what it's based on, and what alloc_prob the randart generator gave it. It's way more powerful than a 'thanc, which account for about 80% of the artifacts v4 drops in the first ~20 dlevs. So I'd like to say it's a very nice, very rare drop - but it could be that the randart generator needs some tweaking to play nice with v4. Let's see how many other people have similar experiences with randarts.

[Nomad]

Well, it rather depends what it's based on, and what alloc_prob the randart generator gave it. It's way more powerful than a 'thanc, which account for about 80% of the artifacts v4 drops in the first ~20 dlevs. So I'd like to say it's a very nice, very rare drop - but it could be that the randart generator needs some tweaking to play nice with v4. Let's see how many other people have similar experiences with randarts.

I checked the artefact spoilers after I died (they have the same bug with missing information as the chardumps, incidentally) and this was the one:

Min Level 38, Max Level 127, Generation chance 70, Power 216, 0.9 lbs
Based on Haradekket.

So, yep, pretty lucky drop I'd say.

That's the only randart I've found so far in about twenty games - mostly dying around dlevel 20, twice making it down to around 40 - so I don't think there's too obvious a problem. (I do seem to be finding a surprising number of OOD consumables in the early levels, though, but that may just be the RNG messing with me of course.)

[Magnate]

I checked the artefact spoilers after I died (they have the same bug with missing information as the chardumps, incidentally) and this was the one:

Min Level 38, Max Level 127, Generation chance 70, Power 216, 0.9 lbs
Based on Haradekket.

So, yep, pretty lucky drop I'd say.

That's the only randart I've found so far in about twenty games - mostly dying around dlevel 20, twice making it down to around 40 - so I don't think there's too obvious a problem. (I do seem to be finding a surprising number of OOD consumables in the early levels, though, but that may just be the RNG messing with me of course.)

Hmmm. Yes that does sound pretty lucky - that was about 15 levels OOD, right? And a gen chance of 70 (scale of 1-1000) means it was probably the best/rarest artifact the generator could have picked at that point (unless something even deeper also passed an OOD check and made it into the allocation table).

I'm afraid I still can't reproduce your bug - spoilers and chardumps work fine for me.

[Nomad]

I'm afraid I still can't reproduce your bug - spoilers and chardumps work fine for me.

Huh - maybe it's Windows specific? I'm on Win 7 64-bit. You'll be pleased to hear it's not a V4 problem, anyway: I just downloaded the latest Vanilla nightly (50c3f4b) to check, and yup, I get the same problem there. The last version of Vanilla I downloaded prior to that was bf11085, and the chardumps still work fine for me in that one.

[Magnate]

Huh - maybe it's Windows specific? I'm on Win 7 64-bit. You'll be pleased to hear it's not a V4 problem, anyway: I just downloaded the latest Vanilla nightly (50c3f4b) to check, and yup, I get the same problem there. The last version of Vanilla I downloaded prior to that was bf11085, and the chardumps still work fine for me in that one.

Oh dear. It's likely to be a UTF8-related problem then. When the UTF8 change was first done there were quite a few problems with dumped files of all kinds, but most have been ironed out. As soon as one of the devs can reproduce it, we can start to sort it out.

[Nomad]

Oh dear. It's likely to be a UTF8-related problem then. When the UTF8 change was first done there were quite a few problems with dumped files of all kinds, but most have been ironed out. As soon as one of the devs can reproduce it, we can start to sort it out.

I downloaded a bunch of the nightlies and managed to isolate the specific update that introduced the problem. It was working in this one:

24 Oct 2011 at 19:39 UTC, revision 883bab2

And then broken in this one:

24 Oct 2011 at 20:51 UTC, revision de47bfb

[Magnate]

I downloaded a bunch of the nightlies and managed to isolate the specific update that introduced the problem. It was working in this one:

24 Oct 2011 at 19:39 UTC, revision 883bab2

And then broken in this one:

24 Oct 2011 at 20:51 UTC, revision de47bfb

Nicely done - that narrows it down exactly. My apologies to the UTF-8 folks, because it's not that at all. This was a change to how V does capitalisation. I've no idea why it should glitch on Windows, but
I've opened it as #1572.

EDIT: this doesn't make sense. de47bfb is a one-line change - the main capitalisation work was earlier, before 883bab2. That one line is related to prompts in the game, so I don't understand how it can affect dumps or spoilers.

[Nomad]

EDIT: this doesn't make sense. de47bfb is a one-line change - the main capitalisation work was earlier, before 883bab2. That one line is related to prompts in the game, so I don't understand how it can affect dumps or spoilers.

That's very weird, because chardumps definitely work for me in 883bab2. However, I have also noticed something else wonky with the caps that apparently pre-dates that change: monsters referred to as 'it' or 'the' are not capitalised at the start of sentences, i.e. you get "the Village idiot wakes up." instead of "The Village idiot". So maybe something's buggy with the original capitalisation change and for some reason that one line of cleanup caused the prexisting bug to break the dumps?

[Storm-Sky]

Just found an awsome randart in 3.3.2

The guantlets of Randen [3+46] provides resistants to fire, prevents paralyzes, activates for restore life levels, found on level 20

What artifact is this based on? It's extreemly powerful

[Derakon]

Ehh, besides the AC it's nothing much; it just happened to be useful when you found it.

I don't think there's any way of knowing what it was based on.