Fizzlebert the gnome mage

[fizzix]

Starting another youtube playthrough. This is on the about-to-be-released v3.4.1.

It's a gnome mage with randarts, tiles, and the halved range distance option selected.

I'm playing around a bit with resolution settings, but hopefully everything is at least passable for now.

[getter77]

Yep, visuals are passable as far as I reckon....perhaps a bit more tinkering can help with any image tearing when moving and the like but overall a good enough baseline on top of reckoning not everything is fully optimized on the new tiles and animations even if all is implemented.

Good Stuff!

[fizzix]

Yep, visuals are passable as far as I reckon....perhaps a bit more tinkering can help with any image tearing when moving and the like but overall a good enough baseline on top of reckoning not everything is fully optimized on the new tiles and animations even if all is implemented.

Good Stuff!

The visual tearing bothered me enough that I spent some time working on it. I managed to reduce it significantly on the second video. It'll come at the cost of me having to do some extra post-production work and limiting lengths to under 30 minutes, but it's probably worth it.

I set base delay to 80 ms and i'm capturing a frame every 40 ms so the animations should show up reasonably well.

[PowerWyrm]

I'm curious to see how you will play a mage. I'm currently playing a gnome mage myself using my playstyle from the MAngband variant (mostly using spells to kill stuff) and I'm struggling to make my way through the midgame with such abysmal hps. I just hope the RNG will favor you as it did with my char (RoS+12 already found at 1900ft)

[PowerWyrm]

It's a gnome mage with randarts...

This will make the game interesting. Up to this point, my game has been giving me useless randarts: weapons for fighters, armor with +str, wis, dex or chr (I'm playing a mage). I'll have probably to wait until something based on a powerful artifact shows up to use it...

[fizzix]

This will make the game interesting. Up to this point, my game has been giving me useless randarts: weapons for fighters, armor with +str, wis, dex or chr (I'm playing a mage). I'll have probably to wait until something based on a powerful artifact shows up to use it...

I've found that mages are usually the least hobbled by a bad artifact set since the spellbooks and devices don't change.

Low HP is really the biggest problem with a mage. It's a double whammy because the classes you most want to play with as a mage tend to have low hit dice too (elf, hobbit, gnome). I've been down at dlevel 98 with less than 200 HP and no ESP. Personally I think giving the mages a small HP bonus would be ok (2 points per level, say). But I think the general feeling is that mages should be a challenge class, so it would take a lot of lobbying to get this across.

I probably will have better luck convincing people to raise the spell-point regen rate early in the game, or give a starting SP pool of 6 or so.

[debo]

The tiles look really great!!

[Derakon]

I probably will have better luck convincing people to raise the spell-point regen rate early in the game, or give a starting SP pool of 6 or so.

Nah, mages would be much less interesting early on if they had enough mana to kill single targets in one go.

(Get wands! Use them! They extend your offense incredibly!)

[fizzix]

Part 2 is up (or was, as of a couple hours ago).

Derakon: there isn't enough money to afford MB1, MB2, ?WoR and a wand of magic missile with starting gold. I'm more concerned about the very first few dungeon levels of the game before you find a wand of magic missile. Once you start getting devices, everything is certainly more reasonable. It's really the 2 SP and the 20% fail rate, and the painfully slow regen rate at the very beginning that I dislike. Probably relaxing any of those would make things better.

[Derakon]

It's really the 2 SP and the 20% fail rate, and the painfully slow regen rate at the very beginning that I dislike. Probably relaxing any of those would make things easier.

Fixed that for you.

More seriously, the hard part of playing a mage is the first 40 levels, during which you never have anywhere near as much mana as you'd like to have. Teaching the player that this applies right from the start seems preferable to me than letting them handle the early levels trivially and then being unable to proceed past 300' or so. The first level is entirely representative of what it's like to play as a mage -- unloading your magical arsenal, hoping like hell it's enough, and running away when it inevitably proves insufficient.

In other words, are you sure you're actually solving a problem here, as opposed to pushing back the point at which it becomes noticeable?

If the early mage game feels slow to you, just type faster.

[fizzix]

Part 3 is up. I think I actually got my fiancee's microphone to work properly this time around. But hopefully the sound is good.

Probably no more updates until Monday evening.

[clouded]

Playing with such a small viewport looks kind of unbearable.

[fizzix]

Playing with such a small viewport looks kind of unbearable.

It takes some getting used to. If I had big monitor it wouldn't be a problem.

The halved ranges helps a lot thought with keeping everything manageable.

[fizzix]

The original Part 4 has been removed

[fizzix]

Part 4 is up. This is the new part 4 since I had to redo some stuff due to video issues.