YAWP - First win, with a big assist from Harowen

**Nick** · October 31, 2015, 03:47

Congrats! Any win is a good win, and your first win is special. Nice to get PDSM, too - I never have.

**Estie** · October 31, 2015, 05:46

Randarts no less

Congrats!

**Bowman** · October 31, 2015, 12:45

Originally posted by Nick

Congrats! Any win is a good win, and your first win is special. Nice to get PDSM, too - I never have.

Thanks.

It was definitely a great experience. And yes, the PDSM was certainly "nice"

. Between that, the randart gloves, and a lantern of true seeing, the only resists I didn't have were nexus (eventually covered by a shield of elvenkind until I got an amulet of trickery) and stun (which the cloak from Glaurung was nice enough to patch up).

I'm not good at figuring out probabilities, but I have to imagine that having a level 51 unique on dl59 (so, drop level = 55) drop a native level 100/rarity 64 item had to be an unimaginably unlikely event. On the other hand, I'm not too clear on how item native level and drop level relate, because unless the juti.nl spoiler files are wrong, even the weakest DSM are native level 50, but I seem to always find some around to dl20-30 depths

. And on the third hand, I also distinctly remember a baby blue dragon around dl25-30 that only hit me with one lightning breath which just happened to blow up all of my wands of teleport other, so maybe the PDSM was just the RNG's way of evening the scales

Originally posted by Estie

Randarts no less

Congrats!

Thanks.

Out of curiosity, though, are randarts generally considered weaker than the fixed artifacts? Admittedly, getting the PDSM skews my perspective with this character (perhaps along with Friar Tuck from TooMuchAbstraction's Let's Play who also used randarts and ended up with resists to everything plus immunity to all of acid/fire/cold/lightning [I was missing that last immunity

] ), but the ones who died before usually didn't have too much difficulty in getting what seem like the most important resists (acid/fire/cold/lightning/poison/blind/confuse) before running into major threats who use them (not counting major threats who would be impossible to survive even with the resists, like a vault-generated ancient multi-hued around dl30).

**Estie** · October 31, 2015, 15:18

Originally posted by Bowman

Out of curiosity, though, are randarts generally considered weaker than the fixed artifacts? Admittedly, getting the PDSM skews my perspective with this character (perhaps along with Friar Tuck from TooMuchAbstraction's Let's Play who also used randarts and ended up with resists to everything plus immunity to all of acid/fire/cold/lightning [I was missing that last immunity

] ), but the ones who died before usually didn't have too much difficulty in getting what seem like the most important resists (acid/fire/cold/lightning/poison/blind/confuse) before running into major threats who use them (not counting major threats who would be impossible to survive even with the resists, like a vault-generated ancient multi-hued around dl30).

There is more spread with randarts; more often than not, I have confusion covered 3 times but lack blindness, or the other way round. The standart set is more balanced.
Wether one or the other is "better" is hard to say; the randarts are deliberatly balanced to be on average as close to standart power as possible.
But people value differently; for example, when you point out that all resists were covered, that probably means we use a different evaluation.

What normally happens is that a few randarts turn out well and in slots where they dont (or you dont happen to find any good ones), you use ego items. A game with a bad randarts set feels like a no-artifacts game.

**Bowman** · October 31, 2015, 16:21

Ah, that makes sense. Maybe it's in part because I used to play a lot of Diablo 1 and 2, but having to cobble together some random set of gear feels more natural to me (and yes, I realize the Diablo games had their standarts with set/unique items, but as someone who played offline with minimal gear twinking, I tended to end up using mostly magical/rare items).

Come to think of it, that's probably also at least part of why I tend to value resists more than most other modifiers. While I haven't yet experienced it for myself, the thought of "It breathes. / You died." tickles the same paranoia for me as offscreen advocate fireballs/gloam lightning

**Estie** · November 1, 2015, 00:11

I am also an old Diablo player.

As for Angband resists, the basic 4 + poison behave much like Diablo fire/cold/lightning in that it reduces the damage by a fixed and substantial amount and thus warrant the attention you are accustomed to give them.

All the many other resists like sound or nether however work differently. The amount of reduction is random and worst case can be something low like 10% (dont quote me on the exact number). Basically, treat it as if resist doesnt reduce damage, but only prevents side effect of the element. While some side effects are nasty enough to make resisting them valuable, an endgame character missing an exotic resistance isnt in danger of getting 1-shot killed at full health. Basic 4 and poison can do up to 1600 unresisted damage, the exotic elements top out at about 600.

**Derakon** · November 1, 2015, 02:27

Generally the most dangerous exotic elements, damage-wise, are nether, shards, and darkness. This has more to do with the relative prevalence of monsters that use those attacks: there's a lot of deep monsters who have powerful nether/darkness-based spells or breaths, and a few nasty shards breathers like Gelugons and Huan. The other resists, yeah, are more useful for preventing side-effects.

YAWP - First win, with a big assist from Harowen

YAWP - First win, with a big assist from Harowen

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