The Acquirement lottery

[Gockel]

just started another game today after experiencing a funny defeat on lvl100...

high-elf warrior because i wasn't in the mood for scumming the early lvls for see invis. as i was still a bit annoyed and not in the mood for playing the first lvls, i decided to do a complete diving game, taking every single stair down that i can find.

actually i expected it to end somewhere between lvl10 and 25 as i didn't consider it very probable to find FA early enough...

went strangely well, though, i had one close call around lvl 20 with an illusionist (?) who paralyzed me. fortunately he considered it safer to blink away shortly afterwards. i showed my gratitude in a very subtle way

anyway, thing is that after ~2 hours of playing i arrived now on lvl32 (with only a ring of FA and some weapons that provided the rest of the basic 4) and here i found two scrolls of acquirement laying neatly next to each other... and they kindly provided me with the shield of celegorm and the cap of thengel.

maybe not the most impressive find, but it was by far the most useful things they have ever given me.. gave me almost everything i need (basic4, blindness, confusion + some other stuff)...

i still believe i'll die from a poison breather sooner or later, but at the moment i enjoy my by far fastest game yet...

[gudjkrist]

Just to average out that amazing "The Mace of Tarialen", I got a throughly unimpressive "Leather Scale Mail of Resist Cold [20, +6]. Still, it's better than my current armor.

[Taha]

Two levels later, a lesser balrog dropped an artifact boots with +13 speed. The weapon and these boots are the only speed items seen this game other than rings of escaping and teleportation; if I wasn't a mage I would have been dead long ago.

The damage output is amazing; after killing things with acid bolt all game this does 10 time the damage.

Now to not get overconfident. My scrawny bookworm hobbit skin is still instakillable by a whole range of deeper monsters.
________
LIVE SEX

[Derakon]

Holy crap dude.

The RNG only gave you that to tempt your scrawny bookworm hobbit skin into melee range, y'know. My latest warrior would have loved to have had that kind of damage output.

[Taha]

To add to the acquirement fun; I found a scroll of *Acquirement on level 60, read it immediately (I never save these anymore, dying when one is sitting at home is too sad). They normally are worthless, but this time I hit the jackpot:
Katana of Venom (+10,+9)
Blade of Chaos (Holy Avenger) (+10+18) - 206dmg vs evil
The Mace of Tarialen (8d4) (+5,+39) [+10] <+3>
Conjured forth by magic at 3000 feet (level 60).

+3 strength, charisma, infravision, speed, attack speed.
Slays animals, evil creatures, orcs, trolls, giants, dragons.
Branded with weak acid, frost.
Provides resistance to lightning, fire, dark, disenchantment.
Provides protection from blindness, confusion.
Cannot be harmed by acid, electricity, fire, cold.
Sustains intelligence, dexterity.
Grants the ability to see invisible things.

When activated, it heals cut damage, and cures stunning, poison
and blindness.
Takes 91 to 100 turns to recharge at your current speed.
Your chance of success is 93.3%

Combat info:
7.0 blows/round.
Average damage/round: 610.4 vs. animals, 610.4 vs. evil creatures,
610.4 vs. creatures not resistant to acid, 756 vs. orcs, 756 vs.
trolls, 756 vs. giants, 756 vs. dragons, 756 vs. creatures not
resistant to cold, and 464.8 vs. others.

That damage is with NO off weapon bonuses - rings, headgear or anything else. I haven't used a weapon for combat since my first ring of escaping, may need to switch that up soon.

More on the ladder:

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11324

________
SexyCara cam

[Rivendell]

Used a scroll on dlvl 50 and got "Dal-i-thalion". I got the scroll much earlier, but after reading this thread I decided to keep it in my house for awhile, then use it when I was deeper.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11318

[Magnate]

Slay orc and troll are victims of the combat system; at the early time where orcs and trolls present a challenge, youre likely using a dagger with damage rings and (+x,+y) gloves where a "slay" isnt going to add much. The slay/brand ride to power happens later with the heavier weapons, and by that time orcs and trolls are usually trivial foes.

This is a very good point. Definitely time to revisit fizzix's AC branch (where slays don't change damage dice but bypass absorption).

[Derakon]

Isnt everyone diving these days ? You dont want people to town-scum for scrolls of deep descent to get to the place where the good gear actually drops.
Yes, the most interesting part is when you dont have gear and still need to find it, but as a diver you dont spend any amount of time in an area where you cant get gear.
Im not saying pushing back the gear level is going to be bad, Im just saying it might have other consequences than people spending more time with bad gear in the 1000' - 2000' region.

Diving doesn't mean you can ignore everything around you and just cherry-pick the gear you want. You still spend non-negligible amounts of time in the dungeon dealing with enemies. Also, typically diving doesn't really get started until you've done a decent job of maxing your important stats and have a fairly reliable offense of some description -- both things that won't have happened by the time I'm talking about.

And I don't think people will townscum for Deep Descent just because gear isn't available.

[Estie]

I've sort of been gently agitating for pushing back the good gear anyway. The 1000'-2000' region gets a lot more interesting when good gear is scarce; in standart games that's usually when you start finding a whole bunch of bread-and-butter artifacts that drastically increase your power level. Delaying that means taking on the monsters in that part of the game with egos instead.

Isnt everyone diving these days ? You dont want people to town-scum for scrolls of deep descent to get to the place where the good gear actually drops.
Yes, the most interesting part is when you dont have gear and still need to find it, but as a diver you dont spend any amount of time in an area where you cant get gear.
Im not saying pushing back the gear level is going to be bad, Im just saying it might have other consequences than people spending more time with bad gear in the 1000' - 2000' region.

[Estie]

Slay orc and troll are victims of the combat system; at the early time where orcs and trolls present a challenge, youre likely using a dagger with damage rings and (+x,+y) gloves where a "slay" isnt going to add much. The slay/brand ride to power happens later with the heavier weapons, and by that time orcs and trolls are usually trivial foes.

[Magnate]

The nature of these problems, where you sample from a distribution and count the number of times you improve the best seen so far, is that you really can't change the total number of useful items much at all unless you crush the variance. The only practical way to make slay troll more useful, useful defined as you might carry it and use it, is to make other things comparatively less useful, probably by making them deeper so you are less likely to use them when you find them.

Yes, I agree with you here. I should have said that other things (like brands and *slays* and artifacts) need to be made rarer/deeper, as well as (or instead of) making the weaker slays more common earlier.

Also, I apologise for misrepresenting your position. I had forgotten that you are indeed focused on squelching, not on junk per se. This is partly why I said (in another thread) that I usually stay out of squelching debates - I took from Leon Marrick a desire to make squelch unnecessary, though I know it is not achievable.

Monster-specific ESP is definitely good too.

[Derakon]

I've sort of been gently agitating for pushing back the good gear anyway. The 1000'-2000' region gets a lot more interesting when good gear is scarce; in standart games that's usually when you start finding a whole bunch of bread-and-butter artifacts that drastically increase your power level. Delaying that means taking on the monsters in that part of the game with egos instead.

[PowerDiver]

You don't cite slay orc, so presumably you find slay orc early enough for it to make a difference in a proportion of games which you consider reasonable. Is there any reason why adjusting the generation of slay troll and slay giant couldn't achieve the same for them? The latter is harder, I'll admit, because giants tend to come later on, but trolls have a definite "phase" in the dungeon, like orcs.

First off, let me say that I have no problem with junk. I want more junk, not less. I do not like the reduction in weapon drops in the early game. One person's junk may not be another's. My problem is the need to identify before squelching junk. That has always has been the problem IMO.

As to slay orc, the point is that orcs come earlier. Once you have a branded weapon, there is less value in a slay that affects monsters with no resists. You are more likely to have a branded weapon by the time you encounter trolls in numbers because they are deeper. Another point is that it has to be on a max-swing weapon. You need to get the slay when most weapons are at most 5 lbs. Slay orc or troll on a long sword doesn't make up for losing a blow. I don't use slay orc much, but I have vague recollections of using it on a spear. I wouldn't argue with someone who called it junk, but I wasn't sufficiently sure that I wanted to say so myself.

I don't see how to make the slays very useful, except for giving them monster-specific ESP. Even then, I doubt I would carry one once I was using a branded weapon.

If you want to make these slays more valuable, I don't think it will help much to make them shallower. Slay troll even at DL1 is still not particularly useful if you find a branded weapon before you encounter your first score of trolls. Instead, you need to make artifacts and other egos sufficiently deep that you don't find any before you start killing trolls in numbers. Every time you change an artifact weapon to make it appear earlier, you further marginalize weapons of slay troll.

The nature of these problems, where you sample from a distribution and count the number of times you improve the best seen so far, is that you really can't change the total number of useful items much at all unless you crush the variance. The only practical way to make slay troll more useful, useful defined as you might carry it and use it, is to make other things comparatively less useful, probably by making them deeper so you are less likely to use them when you find them.

[Magnate]

How about replacing Rings of Resist Fire/Cold with the elemental rings and having them show up around about 800-1000'? You might want to tone down the damaging portion of the activation a bit, and maybe the amount of extra AC given, but then they'd be showing up early enough that they might actually get used.

Using Eddie's definition of "make a difference" in his other reply, I have never ever known the attack activation of an elemental ring to make a difference. It's nice flavour, but I only ever use the activation for the temp resist. But yes, I agree that making them turn up earlier would be what made the difference.

Once variable-strength slays are available it'll be easy enough to re-create ring-slot elemental brands and see how weak they have to be to be balanced.

Adding a new slay or brand is now only two lines: one extra line in src/object/list-slays.h, and one in src/object/list-object-flags.h. I would not feel comfortable adding any back to the elemental rings in direct contravention of takk's changes though (the wikipedia term "revert war" comes to mind!). He made a decision to address a vexing issue, and I respect his leadership even if I don't like the decision. (If I can persuade him to try x2 brands, that's another matter ...)

EDIT: I just added five x2 brands - no point saying how easy it is and then never getting around to it. I changed Paurnimmen to use the new x2 cold brand, as it's the only remaining off-weapon brand in the game (excluding randarts). When I rewrite randart.c, off-weapon brands will normally be x2, not x3.

[Derakon]

How about replacing Rings of Resist Fire/Cold with the elemental rings and having them show up around about 800-1000'? You might want to tone down the damaging portion of the activation a bit, and maybe the amount of extra AC given, but then they'd be showing up early enough that they might actually get used.

Once variable-strength slays are available it'll be easy enough to re-create ring-slot elemental brands and see how weak they have to be to be balanced.