AAR: no OP items

[Estie]

Borrowing this thread here, I played a standart @ just to stay in touch with changes.

Here is the dump:

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=21332

This is actually the second attempt, the first one had an unfortunate incident involving a great wyrm of thunder waking up while I was snatching the !con next to it. The first incarnation was a rogue, just in case anyone is wondering if that wasn´t a foolish thing to do.

The first @ had a spectacular easy run (up to the wyrm incident), the weapon upgrade went from magic dagger to Careth Asdriag (wasn´t that a saber previously ?), a 2d6 rapier well enchanted with +1 attacks. Thancs pale in comparision.

The warrior @ was less lucky, but still more speedy than my average randart @. The first weapons of note were Theoden and Forasgil, both from a couple of early orc uniques, which kept me playing the game of switcheroo for unique battles. When I found an ESP hat, I said good bye to Theoden and kept using solely Forasgil for a long time - it got eventually replaced with Til-i-arc and shortly after I scored a MoD +2 attacks from a deep vault.

Then Doomcaller made an appearance and it was a matter of filling up the corners till @ was ready. With Colluin, uniques are easy prey, ~1000 damage from either the MoD (if undead) or Doomcaller (dragons), and ~700 otherwise. Celeborn being the armor of choice for farming and Narya helped preserving consumables, I could have killed Ancalagon and the Tarrasque easily but they made themselves scarce in the end, so I just went for the last fight when I had enough potions.

Now randarts _can_ get better damage than this, but there is usually more headache involved in getting a well rounded @ - no banishment and resistance and enlightenment activations all at the same time.

I hereby declare my worries about randart balance alleviated. They are fine, not challenging but neither are standarts. Maybe the incoming changes to monsters can rectify that, I am looking forward to it.

[Grotug]

Nice Estie. Whenever I think about standarts in comparison to randarts they always seem to pale in comparison, but there are a few superb standarts.

So I decided I like the disarming and detection abilities of Rogue, but not the carefulness required of a hobbit, so I'm trying HT/Rogue. I haven't read on here forums many people playing this combo. Sort of a lousy starting INT, but the idea is I'll come into the spells later in the game.

Draebor just dropped a couple useful items: a sling of buckland, basically, with hLife (yay! I didn't get level teleported!).

the Sling of Galoth: +1 speed, +2 shooting power, +2 shooting speed (+7, +15) and a lousy weapon with rPois and acid immunity:

The Awl-pike of pathetic damage (1d8) (+12, +8) , but it's my first encounter with rPois and it provides immunity to acid. It's branded with acid, too, bringing the damage up from 35 to 46! My current weapon is quite good, though (+5, +25) (4d4) dagger that does 165 to others and 335 to undead and demons. I will need *a lot* of iron shots to make the rPois/acid immunity combo work, but I might try it for a bit. Maybe use the weapon as a swap after detecting for drolems etc.

The sling will be great for trying out the doors LOS exploit trick. I haven't had a chance to try it yet. I'm currently CL28 on DL40.

sometime later

I'm seeing here Hezrou has half the hitpoints of Ibun, does less damage in melee, has fewer resistances, and overall is up to less mischief, yet garners 14 times more exp points than Ibun. Shouldn't Ibun, who disenchants, and who is otherwise more troublesome to kill, garner more exp points? I understand their different levels have much to do with it, but seems to me the game should try to align the amount of actual experience you, the player, as a real person, gains from killing a troublesome monster with how many actual exp points @ gains.

sometime later

When I'm in town I have 100% physical/magical disarm, but when I'm in the dungeon my disarms are 97%/96%. Very odd.

My H/T Rogue is so dumb I have to wear a ring of INT <+6> instead of a ring of slaying (+7, +6) or STR <+4> He can't cast many spells, but he can disarm a trap! (I'm now CL31 on DL45).

[Sky]

I failed so miserably, im having a hard time believing it.

I made for fun a kobol mage. I almost immediately found Kelek (im talking like CL23 and DL20), fire immunity, ESP, +9 speed, max INT 220 sp, pConf pBlind,

I find Eol and i make a nice corridor, i think im just gonna Soul Rend this sucker, he heals/resists/idontknow and i use almost all my mana, i get ready to teleport out and my brain says to me START CASTING WORD OF RECALL YOU WILL SAVE TIME and im literally about to TS

"Eol yells DIE! You comply ..."

[Grotug]

Wait, you had all those abilities at what CL and DL? When did you face Eol?

I found an amulet with a bunch of {??} and an activation for beam of light, but when I activate it it aims randomly. Only when I finally ID'd all the ?? does the activation now ask me where I'd like to aim my beam of light. Is this intended behavior?

Haha! I polymorphed a Colbran into a green dragon! That is.. just .. frickin' .. awesome! I held onto the wand for ochre jellies or the black jellies that are uber acid, but I didn't think the wand would work on the Colbran since it doesn't work on vortices (the two having nonlivingness as a shared attribute). I wonder if the wand works on Storm Giants? Probably not. (Not that I have a metallic means of TO anyway), but regardless, both electrified nasties are nasty pieces of work (and I like my rod of mapping).

The @ posted about above died almost immediately after I made the post, just after picking up a rod TO and an elvenkind armor of rPois, two things I really needed! But I let an Ethereal dragon on a small maze level get the better of me. As soon as I detected it I should have left the level, but instead decided to try to take down an ancient black dragon wielding puny acid immunity awl-pike and the ethereal dragon decided that was a good time to wake up and take advantage of my injured @. Lesson learned: bad weapons with immunity, even as a swap weapon, are useless.

EDIT: Was there a change made to !Salt Water? I quaffed one and instead of being at the early stages of Faint I was at the end stages of Faint.

edit: I detected for objects with the spell and it said I detect objects! but there were no objects in the area. Pretty minor thing, but it probably should say "there are no objects nearby."

Well, it's happened again. Was considering testing out a rod (will this one finally be TO?) on a master thief, then thought better of it: he might drop something useful. Yeah, I'd say <+9> <+4> boots are pretty useful. I think this marks the second such item I found on DL36. I wonder... is it by some small chance possible that somehow the powerlevel of these fine boots somehow got inadvertantly reduced in the code? Because I remember finding them on the floor at this depth on a 6 feeling level, which seemed like a low feeling for one of the best ego items in the game.

[Sky]

There's objects allright, but you sqelched them.

And yes. I had the most powerful CL25 ish Kobold ever and i lost it like a moron.


For rogue, i prefer Half Orcs, i dont care about the low sp because the rogue cannot cast anything above 2 sp reliably at low levels, and at high levels you max out anyway.

[PowerWyrm]

I found an amulet with a bunch of {??} and an activation for beam of light, but when I activate it it aims randomly. Only when I finally ID'd all the ?? does the activation now ask me where I'd like to aim my beam of light. Is this intended behavior?

Bug. It should only ask for a direction once and stop when the effect is IDed.

[Nick]

I found an amulet with a bunch of {??} and an activation for beam of light, but when I activate it it aims randomly. Only when I finally ID'd all the ?? does the activation now ask me where I'd like to aim my beam of light. Is this intended behavior?

Which version/nightly are you playing? I think that should not happen in the most recent build.

[Estie]

Dwarf rogue on the way down. Two good weapons:

a) the Scimitar of Ilmar (4d2) (+8,+32) <+1>
Found lying on the floor in a vault at 2700 feet (level 54)

+1 attack speed.
+1 light.
Slays dragons (powerfully), trolls, animals.
Provides protection from confusion.
Cannot be harmed by acid.
Slows your metabolism. Feather Falling. Grants telepathy.
Grants the ability to see invisible things. Prevents paralysis.

Combat info:
5.5 blows/round.
Average damage/round: 380.5 vs. dragons, 308 vs. trolls, 272 vs.
animals, and 236 vs. others.

a) the Lochaber Axe of Vannimog (3d8) (+11,+13) <+5, +2>
Found lying on the floor in a vault at 3250 feet (level 65)

+5 stealth.
+2 attack speed.
Cannot be harmed by acid, fire.

Combat info:
6.0 blows/round.
Average damage/round: 189.

ESP hat is available. Which would you pick ?

[Derakon]

Go with the scimitar for now; +50 base damage is worth losing a lot of stealth IMO. But keep the axe around for when you have better combat stats / more off-weapon damage, since it has an extra attack over the scimitar.

[Estie]

Well well, I went with the scim; waking up wyrms versus ability to fight more quickly, but I didnt intend to keep the polearm. Stealth is great early on but loses its appeal later, I expected long before the axe would surpass the scim in damage. But when I unloaded at home, it was still in my inventory and since I had plenty of room, I stored it there. Which was a good decision in hindsight:

The next minor vault yielded a body armour which is inapproapriate for this thread; among other things, it brands melee weapons with acid, so I quickly went back and swapped weapons, I now have ~500 acid damge. Yay!

[Grotug]

@Nick: I believe it was with the Dec 10th version.

Well, that was fun. I used the create door/LOS trick on Morgoth with seeker holy might arrows. I was only doing 371 a round before buffs, but I'd get in 6 to 8 shots before TOing him away and waiting for him to return to redo the shenanigans and pickup the arrows. I think arrows accounted for about 55% overall damage.

I did a fair bit of meleeing in the beginning and finished him off in melee, too, but as I am wont to do, I forgot the ?RoPs, the ?Banishments and the ?Mass banishments. All in all, found some decent rings but no crazy good gear. In order to make the 30 speed minimum, I had to go into the fight with a few holes in the IBA set, such as pConf and rPois in order to keep CON up (I never maxed out on that stat) and to ensure bodykeeping. Didn't seem to matter, much, though. I don't think M confused me more than once or twice max.

I was doing 525 vs evil against Sauron in melee and 513 vs evil against Morgoth in melee with an artifact rapier (6d6) picked up on DL88. So that is right about where it's supposed to be. I used several hundred turns bringing its damage up from +11 to +14. One of the rings I had had +1 extra attacks and good stats. I had good stats on a couple of pieces of gear. Finally got some alchemist gloves of power dropped by Sauron but only (+4, +1). Suppose I could have kept the other gloves I was wearing against Sauron with +2 INT (+8, +5) and elec immunity, but decided I wanted good SP for the final fight.

I dropped my two rods of TO so I could bring an xp achieving swap weapon and a swap cloak in case I wanted rPois, and also a million wounding arrows the dungeon gave me late in the game, but I never needed since the 30 holymight arrows never got destroyed by M shenanigans thanks to door/LOS exploit trick, and phasing away whenever things got out of hand.

I spent the entire game after DL36 between +8 and +11 native speed (depending on overburdening) and I believe I was +10 speed against Sauron, but had enough SP to keep myself hasted. During the endgame a good scythe of *slay Demon*, Undead, poison brand (700) allowed me to gain XP without problems despite only having okay speed. (Was doing 1000 to demons). Fire immunity in a bow swap also meant I could easily take on greater balrogs with the scythe.

Once again I collected !Speeds and never used them once my SP reached about 80 around DL40something.

Picking up early the absolute best ego boots in the game sure did make things run smoothly, though. The game took a breezy 43.5k turns. Seems my games have taken that number of turns on numerous occasions, but don't think I've ever done it in less than 43k.

It was nice being dropped two or three !Lifes from M summons after TOing M and his nasty Uniques away between missile sessions. Once again M only Summoned the very top Uniques and greater Undead/greater/greatest Dragons.

After the melee session where he brought my INT and WIS quite a ways down, I was debating using one of my !Lifes when I came up an !*Enlightenment* in the room I ended up setting up door/archery shop in. Definitely the only time I've used that potion and it was even remotely meaningful: restoring my INT and WIS (the only two stats I had down) and showing me where M was so I could setup for my first door/LOS missile trial on him.

I started crash diving at 28,800 turns on DL44 once I got rPois, a rod of TO and telepathy cloak. I went from DL44 to DL91 in around 8,700 turns and went from CL32 to CL38 in that time, and didn't have any troubles along the way, just picking my fights, picking up drops and stuff off the floor/vaults. Halfway through the fight with M I reached CL48.

***

EDIT: Was dropped another Telepathy weapon on DL16; a good one, too! Slay orc rapier (+4, +8) <+2> DEX. Very strange, seeing as telepathy weapons are very rare at all depths, let alone DL16, yet this is the third one found at this depth in last two games.

So I bought some bolts of frost and a crossbow since I already have bolts of slay animal in my possession though I was rocking a sling (+6, +5). Guardian naga, boom, 3 shots, dead. 4 headed hydra; your bolt missed, your bolt missed your bolt missed, you're almost dead. ?phase. Your bolts miss your bolts miss, you're almost dead. ?phase. White wolves are eating you, you're almost dead. !CSW, still almost dead as white wolves from all sides continue to feast on your scantily clad tender frame. ?Phase. You have four more ?blessings, the defeating sound of bolts hitting nothing fill your ears, your bolts miss, your bolt missed, the Hydra is on you again, you're almost dead. FINALLY, the bolt sends Hydra running scared (had the bolt missed again, woulda been a lousy scenario for feable little @). Angband is more fun playing on the edge, but really, do I want to throw away nice early ESP character? It's actually not why I keep shooting when the Hydra is on me. I only get so many rounds before he gets to me, and I feel like phasing all over the place every two shots would be more aggravating to me, then hopefully having the darn bolts actually hit. But, yeah, being taken down to 8 health wasn't really part of the game plan. I guess finding any/ kind of body armor by now would be good, this being DL20 and 11,000 turns in.

You see a gnarled staff. The Druid looks confused. The druid shoots a bolt of lightning at you with perfect aim. Just how confused is this druid? The druid fails to cast a spell <3X>. Is that his confusion or my 39% saving throw causing him to fail?

[Derakon]

You see a gnarled staff. The Druid looks confused. The druid shoots a bolt of lightning at you with perfect aim. Just how confused is this druid? The druid fails to cast a spell <3X>. Is that his confusion or my 39% saving throw causing him to fail?

Saving throws lead to messages like "You resist the effect!". If the monster fails to cast, that's on them, not you.

[Grotug]

Ahh! Thank you!