First clean victory

[nullfame]

My +3 hits ring (without having the one ring) isn't all that much better than vilya or nenya, I'm not going to try to pure melee Morgoth as things stand anyway.

I would. 7x113.5 is almost 800 per round. Without The One you are looking at closer to 700 but that still compares to a warrior with Doomcaller. You were getting 4 shots and had holy might ammo so shooting was the better choice in your particular circumstance but your melee was sweet too.

I love the 'thancs, if I find them early enough, but usually prefer ego gloves to the paurs. Finding a 'thanc early in, say, 1 game in 10 keeps them useful IMO.

One advantage I see of the standard artifacts is that I know not to seek out a base item once I find everything. E.g., if I have Thranduil I don't go out of my way for hard leather caps. Obviously this isn't true for slots with useful egos but I gather in a randart game you never think "well, I have X so that's nothing." You have to go after everything.

[Ycombinator]

For me one of the things that make standard artifacts easier to play is certainty of end-game ESP. You're always going to wear RoP and sometimes the Palantir. With randarts ESP often ends up in an unusual slot and you have to trade ESP for something else. Not that I'm complaining about it, that's part of fun.

I also have a feeling that current randart generation algorithm overestimates value of speed on boots a bit. Something comparable to boots of Wormtongue (shallow and moderately hard to find artifact) is going to have gen. chance 1 and rather deep native levels. And of course RNG would never roll anything comparable to Feanor.

[Taha]

Even with half the shots from my +1 launcher and no holy might, I would have used ranged. The best seeker bolts of slay evil I had would have done 680 dmg/turn, and the worst around 450. Compared to 800, it's worth it to avoid earthquakes and staff draining. Doubling that was pretty sweet, but not going to change the decision.

And knowing that anything could be an artifact is one of my favorite parts; anything could surprise you. Also, I can leave a level with unided boots, knowing that they can't be feanor.
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MeganFoxxy

[Magnate]

Before Thorin was plain necessity to simply survive, barring very lucky finds or class/race choices that allow very high CON.

This is just totally wrong - I mean you are correct that that's how it was, but it's totally not how it should be. This game of infinite randomness shouldn't boil down to a single endgame choice for any slot - that's stupid.

You (plural, not you personally) can't have it both ways. I made a number of changes to artifacts which were considered "useless", precisely to mitigate the problem of most items being junk. That seems to have been reasonably successful, in that items previously not used are now used. (Perhaps too successful, in that some people now complain that some ego items are obviated.)

The other half of that fix was to weaken, very slightly, some of the uber items, so that they weren't uber in conjunction with the newly improved items. I wasn't allowed to do that, because it broke the stupid tedious boring identikit endgame gear. So we have the result that Thorin *is* absurdly powerful, for the reasons you yourself observe.

Personally I would argue that it's too powerful regardless of any conjunction with other items, but that's beside the point.

It's clearly a day for ranting.

[Magnate]

I also have a feeling that current randart generation algorithm overestimates value of speed on boots a bit. Something comparable to boots of Wormtongue (shallow and moderately hard to find artifact) is going to have gen. chance 1 and rather deep native levels. And of course RNG would never roll anything comparable to Feanor.

You'd be surprised. The difference is that it doesn't generate something comparable to Feanor every time - but they do happen.

Your point on boots of speed is backwards, I think. Certainly in terms of price (which uses the same power algorithm), speed is still undervalued, and needs upping for the next release. Most of the feedback I get is that speed is too common and too easily applied to randarts, i.e. it's underestimated, not overestimated.

[nullfame]

The best seeker bolts of slay evil I had would have done 680 dmg/turn, and the worst around 450. Compared to 800, it's worth it to avoid earthquakes and staff draining.

It's interesting to hear other players' perspective. I like to melee him *because* he earthquakes. It means I can usually stand in combat longer without worrying about the summons as much. Compared to the high demons/liches, Sauron, and especially Maeglin melee is much more practical with Morgoth. The others I really need to loosen up with arrows if not rely exclusively on archery for the drainers. With M, again because of the earthquakes, I find ?phase, ?recharge, and empty the staff to be a reasonable substitute.

[Taha]

With the one ring and all resists, I was immune or significantly reduced damage to any breath damage. Never even bothered to teleport the summons away. I think greater demons was the first one, and their fire /cold / poison attacks were doing next to nothing. I intentionally left a number of low level uniques with escorts (tom, bill, boldor, most of the orcs) alive, and his second summons was Boldor and a bunch of yeeks. So no issues there.

I like fighting him in greater vaults of certain types, for casters with runes of prot. its far easier than in space. One summons of low level uniques fills up the space, and phase is a guaranteed escape that doesn't take you far away if need be.

The only time I have meleed him was with a mage. That particular character had deathwreaker and some really nice gear, but no decent bow, and I hadn't learned the phase / recharge staff of magi trick to get enough mana to manastorm him to death. Just made a field of runes in one corner of the map, and slowly backed away as they broke. It was harder though, because the earthquakes when he broke one messed it all up.

Next attempt I'm thinking of a kobold rogue, your strategy will probably be more effective there. That will be a hard transition from having 0% heals and clairvoyance.
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Herbalaire vaporizer

[Timo Pietilä]

With the one ring and all resists, I was immune or significantly reduced damage to any breath damage. Never even bothered to teleport the summons away.

Did you get dragons or other than basic element breathing demons? Or high undead with Reavers? Then combined with Morgoth manastorm any single turn could have killed you. Something like shards from Gelugon + Morgoth manastorm can cause 1028 points of damage with shard resist. Same applies to sound, disenchantment and chaos, and nether is a bit worse than those four. Reavers can also do 425 points of damage using manastorm so that's 1025 points of damage combined with Morgoth manastorm.

Don't trust high-element resists for damage protection. Use them for side-effect protection.

[Taha]

I believe the demons were Balrogs / Bile demons, and only a few of those. They might have even been following him, not sure they were summoned. No dragons, there might have been one higher level demon in the mix. Even if there were, the odds of both doing a high powered breath in one turn out of all their options is minimal. And then he summoned Boldor and a bunch of yeeks, that filled up the rest of the summoning space, and they were behind the demons so didn't die in the manastorms.

When summon uniques gets yeeks, trolls, orcs or ants out of the deal, it makes me happy. Worth the effort to leave those uniques alive.
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Deealovex cam

[fizzix]

When summon uniques gets yeeks, trolls, orcs or ants out of the deal, it makes me happy. Worth the effort to leave those uniques alive.

I think this is a bug. I don't think there should be any benefit to leaving uniques alive. 'special' opponents should only summon those that are of level equal to half of the summoner or greater. Morgoth would still be able to summon the cat lord with a bunch of useless cat escorts, but wouldn't be able to summon the trolls, yeeks, orcs or the queen ant.

[Taha]

It's an edge case, and I don't think it's a bug. In normal battles they just die in the next set of earthquakes / manastorms anyway.

And it's a tradeoff (totally worthwhile to me, but not everyone) - before I had TO I had to run away from all of those characters fairly frequently to avoid killing them. And miss whatever they might have dropped in the meantime - some have drop good early, which can be a big plus.
If you can strategize to kill all the high breathers and summoners before the big fight to make it easier, why is it a bug to leave some of them alive for the same purpose?
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Electric Cigarettes

[Derakon]

Because Morgoth derives no value from summoning Boldor or Mughash or their ilk. The point of that summoning spell is to bring in a bunch of nasties; you're subverting it by controlling which nasties it can select from, which is a very metagamey way to nerf one of Morgoth's better spells. I agree with Fizzix; uniques that are too low-level should not be allowed to be summoned by that spell; if there are no high-level uniques left, then it should default to its normal "no uniques" behavior, which IIRC is to summon a bunch of high undead.

[nullfame]

I agree with capping it at 50. I almost think you could go higher because greater undead are scarier than some of the level 50 uniques, but the Balrog of Moria and escort is still a legit threat against Morgoth so you probably want to include them. Cat Lord is probably still a problem with teleport-to.