RandArt - first impressions

[Narry]

I've recently played a few games with random artifacts and it has brought an element of surprise to the game, and certainly made my games more interesting.

In the first one, I found a few Stars quite early, in the second one it took a while before I found my first light source artifact. It was a lantern, which surprised me quite a bit.

Also, I found lots of artifacts with just the basic resistances of acid, cold, lightning and fire, or a combination of 2 or 3 of those plus maybe rDark. A little bit of disappointment not to be able to turn another line in the character sheet from white to turquoise... but that happens with standard artifacts too.

I noticed also that weapons hardly ever had any resistances on them... but maybe I was just unlucky with them?

Stun resistance was still hard to find, so no change there compared to standard artifacts.

I just started my 3rd game with RandArt, let's see if I'm more lucky this time...

[Derakon]

IIRC the randart generator either determines what attributes to give to items based on what attributes are on items in the standart set (where resists on weapons are rare), or it's explicitly biased to favor certain ability/slot combinations. It's certainly the case that you'll mostly find speed boosts on boots, for example.

Ideally randarts are worse at synergy than the standart set is. In practice lately we've been seeing a lot of overpowered randarts, like, moreso than there should be.

[Grotug]

I am on my second consecutive game of finding an early Arkenstone. Last game I think was in the late DL20s as a drop from somebody and in my current game Ugluk dropped it on DL24. Super exciting; the first one had rPois, too. This one has +4 STR. It's very rare to find Arkenstones in the randart set in my experience. I think I have found two before these two in many, many games.

I also seem to get a lot of super powerful weapons early, although not so much in my last couple games. I'm always curious how the treasure feeling and the power of an item line up. It seems big dice are not given that much power rating, even when they are on lighter weapons. Oh, and in my last game I found the one ring! Second time that's happened. Was much needed as I was only a little over 500 to evil wearing a ring of damage +15 and some slays elsewhere with a 6d6 randart weapon (+7, +8). I found the One in a vault on DL100 6-7 level feeling. I thought it had dropped from someone because I'd figure it'd generate a 9 feeling, but the description said 'found in a vault'.

Another thing I've noticed is that there are tons of artifact rings in the randart set but they are rarely as good as the standart rings of power: they often have lots of resistances and stats and an immunity, but never speed, an immunity, telepathy, a sustain and a slay. I forget how powerful those standart rings of power are. Off weapon extra attacks aren't common, but they aren't super rare, either, and seem to produce the most broken @s. I think my biggest concern with RandArts or with the current version of the game in general, though, is the number of artifacts that show up overall. It's raining artifacts, oh my!

Not to derail this thread, but I always thought that there should be a chance Gollum is carrying the One, except I have a few ideas for it, so it's not so silly to have a super overpowered item early:

Dormant powers: If you kill Gollum early and he drops the One ring, the ring's power will be dormant, so if you put it on not much will happen, except maybe it will make you invisible and see invisible, but drain your experience and aggravate; so it will have some use early on as an escape but maybe not be completely overpowered, but if you want its power to grow, you'll have to wear it periodically, and its power will reveal itself slowly. But if you show pity on the wretched creature and manage to keep him alive at the bottom of the dungeon and he drops the one ring then, well, then its power will have matured while in Gollum's possession. Prolly would be too difficult to program an item to have progressive power gain like that, though. Maybe every character level you gain while in possession of the ring would increase the ring's power.

[Narry]

3rd game so far:

3 artifacts: 1 wooden torch, 2 amulets (1 of which provides disenchantment resistance)

[Narry]

Another update:

Just found my 4th artifact... which was 3rd necklace.
Provides both poison and disenchantment resistance though, so I have no complaints.

[Narry]

Ugluk, the Uruk dropped the 5th artifact of the current game and... you guessed right, 4th necklace.

[Narry]

Update:

Currently exploring DL75. Still using a Lantern of Everburning, since the Wooden Torch artifact I found early in the game was quite pathetic. No Phials, Stars, Arkenstones or Palantirs yet. Not even Lantern artifacts in this game.

Aside the light source, I've found some pretty amazing artifacts, like a ring that provides three immunities, some utter crap and lots in between. I think I'm not going back to standard artifacts anymore, but I have to say I'm quite jealous of reading Grotug's finds...

[Sky]

More than Grotug's finds, are my non-finds http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=8481

[Narry]

Aye, Sky, those make me drool.