Mr. Wickham the Elf Mage (long)

[Malak Darkhunter]

You value stealth way too high, I have no trouble with a comp char whatsoever, I find things, can fight things and that's about as bad char as it can be for stealth and stats.

In fact I'm about as fast as you are in respect of clvl and turncount and I'm not as deep as you are and I still have far better equipment. You probably fight wrong things, or avoid things too much or dive too fast.

Maybe you just don't know how to play non-stealthy non-melee chars. This current comp is good practice for that. After that try Dwarf Priest. Those have bad stealth as well, but are still the easiest class in the entire game.

If you want stealth use Rings of Mouse. Those give huge stealth benefit if you just want to sneak around without waking things up. You can't melee things (much without very good weapon), but you can get +6 - +8 stealth very early.

BTW. I don't see how you can say that shops don't have good equipment. I have seen by 400k turns ego-items in all shops selling items that could be ego (except cloaks in general) and rings of resist poison, BoS +10, HXbow of Extra might and many other great things in BM (I could afford only that ring, HXbow was gone before I had money to buy it). Dungeon also gave Tensers at 650' (dropped by orc), but obviously that was not very useful for warrior. This is pretty consistent with my other games in 3.4. Maybe you have just been unlucky with shops.

IMO flavor has not gone anywhere, it's still all there.

beat game several times with dwarf priest, as well as in moria, they have detection, infravision, group spell attacks, very different.
Found very uninteresting things in shops during my run, i felt made game less exciting, and more boring.
There seemed little improvement in weapons from levels 10-30, levels 30 to 40 where a desert and very uninteresting, i found barely any stat potions or good gear, i wont waste my time with that kind of struggle or grind,
options have been taken away from the player, making game less intetesting im on to play something else.

[Derakon]

options have been taken away from the player, making game less intetesting im on to play something else.

Will you please try a character that isn't so outright terrible before dismissing the game out of hand? Get a higher starting STR and DEX and see if your complaints still have merit. It's certainly possible that the game is now too stingy, but right now I feel your statements are being very heavily colored by the fact that you're playing the competition character, so it's difficult to know what degree of correction would be warranted.