Vanilla 3.2.0, resistances and abilities

[Timo Pietilä]

Resists and abilities.

There was a recent discussion about immunity to confusion effect and should resist chaos have it or not. I think Eddie made a suggestion that *no* resistance should act as immunity to any effect unless the source of the attack is same element as resist. IE. no stunning immunity from resist sound against impact, no confusion immunity from resist confusion against chaos, no blindness immunity against light from dark (which is how it is now).

I also think that "resistance" means there is elemental attack form that causes damage which the resistance protects, which puts also fear out of resistance category.

So I propose:

Move confusion from resistance to ability.
Move blindness from resistance to ability.
Move fear from resistance to ability.
Either add stunning resistance to ability or not, you can leave stunning from plasma, impact and gravity as unresistable side-effect or remove stunning from those elements.

Remove confusion as elemental attack. Remove monsters that attack using only that: Giant bronze dragon fly, Baby bronze dragon, Young bronze dragon, Mature bronze dragon, Ancient bronze dragon and Great Wyrm of Perplexity and change attack to chaos for rest that need changing. Remove Bronze DSM.

Items that have random resistance:

Bodyarmor: Elvenkind, permanence
Cloak: Aman
Shield: Elvenkind, Preservation

Items that have random ability:
Headgear: Magi, Lordliness
Cloak: Magi
Melee-weapons: Blessed, Gondolin, *slay evil*
Bows: Lothlorien

For random resistances you have only three slots to choose for resist that you want, and usually you want rConf to be one of them. For random abilities you have four slots and only one is overlapping with random resistances. That means more possibilities to get what you want.

Also:
For random abilities what do you seek? ESP, FA (very common), SI (very common), regen (not needed, but nice to have), HL (not needed) (, slow dig, lite, feather fall). That means that usually you look for ESP and pretty much ignore rest. For resistances you seek rPoison, rConfusion, rBlindness, rNexus, rSound, rDisen, rShards (, dark, lite, chaos, nether, fear). I'd say it is pretty hard to get 7 resistances using only three slots.

Three out of that category leaves four that you still want. Three more to abilities makes three abilities to look for, maybe four (I'd much rather have rFear than feather fall or extra lite)

I think that balances what you want and can have a bit. There are total 16 resistances and 8 abilities. This change would make that 13 resistances and 11 abilities.

Comments?

[PowerDiver]

Sounds good to me, of course. This sort of thing was waiting for bitflags, because resists could not be sensibly changed into abilities with the old codebase. IMO it could go into the nightlies any time, and could even be done a bit at a time, except that when it does perhaps the version number needs to change.

[Magnate]

Sounds good to me, of course. This sort of thing was waiting for bitflags, because resists could not be sensibly changed into abilities with the old codebase. IMO it could go into the nightlies any time, and could even be done a bit at a time, except that when it does perhaps the version number needs to change.

Sounds good to me too. If there is enough of a consensus I'm happy to see this happen. MarbleDice (who wrote the bitflags patch) is ideally placed to implement this - but if he doesn't fancy it I can add it to my list.

[takkaria]

+1 from me

[fizzix]

I'd prefer gravity to lose the stun, and for plasma and force to have unresistable stun. Gravity already has extremely powerful side effects (slow and move player).

If the resists, rchaos, rnether, rshards, rsound, rdark, rlite no longer block side effects, they are fairly useless because of the way the damage resist is calculated. (something like 1/2 to 1/6 random) I feel they need to be beefed up a little to compensate for the loss of side-effect resistance. Otherwise, there are now 13 resists, but only 6 or 7 of them matter at all. (rbase, rpois, rdis, and maybe rdark) Offhand, changing them to a flat 1/2 resistance seems reasonable, but maybe I'm not thinking about them properly.

I'm assuming rshards no longer blocks gashes but rdis still prevents weapons and armor from being disenchanted and rpois still prevents you from being poisoned. Is this right?

[Magnate]

+1 from me

http://trac.rephial.org/ticket/1163

[PowerDiver]

If the resists, rchaos, rnether, rshards, rsound, rdark, rlite no longer block side effects, they are fairly useless

One of us is confused. I thought it was clear that rDark will continue to block blindness from dark attacks. It does not block blindness from non-dark attacks. That is the basis for the model. This is an attempt to make explicit the reason for rChaos not providing protection against confusion attacks in general, except when they are chaos attacks.

[Magnate]

One of us is confused. I thought it was clear that rDark will continue to block blindness from dark attacks. It does not block blindness from non-dark attacks. That is the basis for the model. This is an attempt to make explicit the reason for rChaos not providing protection against confusion attacks in general, except when they are chaos attacks.

Er. I'm with fizzix - I thought Timo's whole point was to separate resistance to damage from resistance to side effects. So rblind protects against blindness, and rlite/rdark don't.

[fizzix]

One of us is confused. I thought it was clear that rDark will continue to block blindness from dark attacks. It does not block blindness from non-dark attacks. That is the basis for the model. This is an attempt to make explicit the reason for rChaos not providing protection against confusion attacks in general, except when they are chaos attacks.

It's probably me, I think I misparsed what Timo wrote even though I read it several times.

So is this right?

Rdark provides damage reduction for dark attacks and blindness resistance from dark attacks.

Rblind (Or Imblind?) provides blindness immunity from spells and spit-to-blind but not from light and dark attacks.

Rconf (Or Imconf?) provides confusion immunity to confusion spells, gaze-to-confuse and hit-to-confuse, but not from chaos breaths.

Rchaos provides damage reduction to chaos breaths and confusion and hallucination immunity from chaos breaths, but no confusion immunity from any other attack.

Rshards provides resistance to shards damage and immunity from cuts in shards attacks but does not give immunity from cuts from biting attacks or cause wounds spells.

Rsound provides resistance to sound damage and immunity to stunning from sound attacks, but no resistance from stunning from things like water-balls, plasma bolts, force attacks, hit-to-stun.

[PowerDiver]

It's probably me, I think I misparsed what Timo wrote even though I read it several times.

So is this right?

Rdark provides damage reduction for dark attacks and blindness resistance from dark attacks.

Rblind (Or Imblind?) provides blindness immunity from spells and spit-to-blind but not from light and dark attacks.

rBlind should provide resistance also to blindness effect from light and dark attacks, but no damage reduction. That's the status quo and I do not think anyone has recommended changing it. I don't see anything in what Timo wrote that addresses this one way or the other.

[Nick]

+1 from me

Who are you?

[Timo Pietilä]

It's probably me, I think I misparsed what Timo wrote even though I read it several times.

So is this right?

Rdark provides damage reduction for dark attacks and blindness resistance from dark attacks.

Yes.

Rblind (Or Imblind?) provides blindness immunity from spells and spit-to-blind but not from light and dark attacks.

rBlind is protection against blindness no matter which source it has including dark and light. Think of it like Free Action. No matter which paralyzation attack you are against that protects you from it.

Rconf (Or Imconf?) provides confusion immunity to confusion spells, gaze-to-confuse and hit-to-confuse, but not from chaos breaths.

Not damage from chaos, but confusion effect yes.

Rchaos provides damage reduction to chaos breaths and confusion and hallucination immunity from chaos breaths, but no confusion immunity from any other attack.

Yes.

Rshards provides resistance to shards damage and immunity from cuts in shards attacks but does not give immunity from cuts from biting attacks or cause wounds spells.

Yes.

Rsound provides resistance to sound damage and immunity to stunning from sound attacks, but no resistance from stunning from things like water-balls, plasma bolts, force attacks, hit-to-stun.

Yes.

Abilities protect against effect no matter which source that effect has, but do not reduce any damage from any of the attacks.

Resistances protect against damage and effects from that element only. Other sources are not protected in any way.

[takkaria]

Who are you?

A largely absent maintainer, apparently. ^_^

[Magnate]

Abilities protect against effect no matter which source that effect has, but do not reduce any damage from any of the attacks.

Resistances protect against damage and effects from that element only. Other sources are not protected in any way.

Ok, this is ready at http://github.com/magnate/angband/tree/resists, which I hope takk will merge soon.

rBlind, rConf, rFear are now abilities and can be found as random powers on Blessed and Slay Evil egos, and not as random high resists on Elvenkinds/Aman. They protect from the blind/confused/afraid status from any source (except objects with OF_AFRAID). They are displayed at the bottom of the 2nd column of the character details screen, separated from the elemental resists. They are now shown a pFear, pBlnd and pConf, for "protection from". Similarly, they are described in the 'I'nspect screen as providing protection from those effects.

There is no confusion breath - "bronze" monsters have 0 rarity and cannot be generated. Bronze DSM likewise.

Every resist protects from the side-effects of that element only: rChaos protects from the confusion effect of chaos attacks (but not from other sources of confusion). rSound no longer prevents stunning except from sound attacks.

There is a new flag RES_STUN, which would prevent stunning from all of sound, gravity, force, plasma, water and ice attacks, but it does not yet appear anywhere. (This is mainly because there is nowhere to display pStun without redesigning the character sheet - see ticket #843. Also because the game is harder with unresistable stunning.)

Amulet of Magi now has rBlind instead of rConf.
Artifacts now have only one of rConf and rChaos (except Bladeturner), same number of each.

There is one exception to Timo's second rule above: rShards prevents cut damage from ice attacks. This has always been the case, but could be changed if people feel strongly.

[PowerDiver]

Amulet of Magi now has rBlind instead of rConf.

That's a shame for my dwarf warriors. It feels like a change that means I won't use them any more, but that may just be because of what I am used to.