Nightlies

[Timo Pietilä]

So you're basically saying "undo every change you made to make the useless artifacts not useless". No thanks. I think most people would prefer they stayed in, and were adjusted differently where necessary.

I don't buy your basic premise that for everything that's added, something must be taken away.

I will be going through the standarts again before 3.3 is released to make more use of multiple pvals - and this time I'm going to weaken Thorin and get away with it!!

If you just add and never remove then game just gets easier and easier and easier.

Main problems are off-weapon brands, shots and blows. IE. Haradrim and Paurnimmen. It doesn't matter when you see them they are overpowered. Get a big-dice extra blow weapon or Pain with off-weapon brand and you see what I mean. In Cubragol it doesn't matter that much because I had activation for ammo branding before. Bard slay dragon is a bit too powerful, but somehow feels right.

I would also remove Palantir and restore clairvoyance activation to Arkenstone. Palantir is not a lightsource, it is at best same as walking with TV to illuminate your way. No matter what you do to Palantir you need to do something to Arkenstone, its activation is now next to useless, even magic mapping in Star is better.

Thorin has been weakened already, don't change it any weaker.

Items to remove:

Palantir
Evenstar

Both are new additions and IMO not successful ones so they can go without anybody missing them much.

Change:

Paurnimmen -remove brand.
Haradrim - remove blows and shots, change pval from 1 to 2.
Hammerhand - remove to_dam and to_hit bonuses and aggravation, add FA (make it basically improved version of Crown of might, like Dor-Lomin is of Crown of magi)
Angrist - remove acid brand, speed bonus is more than enough
Belangil - change back to 2d4. 3d4 in dagger doesn't just make any sense
Arunruth - change name to Aranruth. That's how Tolkien wrote it.
Ringil - change kill_demon back to slay_demon. It is powerful enough without kill slay, remove blessed-flag. Priests need to think before using it.
Anduril - remove slay undead and sust STR (sustains are too easy to get now).
Doomcaller -remove slay demon (slay evil and cold brand are enough)
Aiglos - change back to Aeglos. Both are used, but main name is Aeglos for Spear of Gil-Galad, change kill_undead to slay_undead (or remove that slay).
Durin - STR-bonus and both brands are later additions. Remove at least one, fire maybe.
Eonwe - change dice back to 4d4, remove kill demon (this is major weapon without those)
Mundwine - remove slay demon (it has slay evil)
Wrath - remove poison brand
Thunderfist - change dice back to 3d6 (added CON -bonus is more than enough)
Aule - restore it back to war hammer. 9d3 instead of 18d1 (d1 doesn't make any sense to me, IMO it breaks whole concept of random damage). Remove tunnel and change acid_brand back to elec_brand.

The whole set has changed to more powerful, so that previously useful items, even endgame quality like Anarion are now pretty much completely useless (sustains are too easy to get). I have temptation to suggest removing speed from Fundin and Eowyn, but those two have no comparable items and are quite rare. They are almost identical as items: same dice, same pval, both provide speed, STR-boost, nether resist, slay evil and slay or kill undead. Maybe drop pval from 4 to 3?

Paur* could maybe all change to their old boring sets with small to_hit and to_dam bonuses and make them give small STR-bonus. Kind of weak gauntlets of power with resist. +3 to to_hit and to_dam, +2 to STR? I wouldn't miss them if they are removed completely, there are enough powerful artifact and ego gauntlets without them.

[Magnate]

The game used to be reasonably balanced. For every item that used to be useless that you make useful, you need to take a different item that used to be useful and make it useless [or remove it].

For every artifact that had a frequency increase, you need to remove another artifact that was roughly equal.

For starters, remove every brand and bonus shot and bonus blow you added. The one exception is the fire brand on Cubragol is good as a replacement for branding activation, but that's about it. Remove unnecessary increases on the plusses of the thancs, and any increases to AC on anything. Deep monsters already do too little damage proportionally from melee compared to spells and breaths, and any change to make that less is bad for gameplay.

Timo: Magnate doesn't listen to me on this stuff. Please give your opinion on what you think of all of the changes to boost artifact powers.

So you're basically saying "undo every change you made to make the useless artifacts not useless". No thanks. I think most people would prefer they stayed in, and were adjusted differently where necessary.

I don't buy your basic premise that for everything that's added, something must be taken away. I'm quite happy to discuss individual cases, but a blanket "I don't like what you did, so undo it" doesn't work for me. There were a lot of complaints about the disappointment of finding a supposedly "special" artifact at a point in the game when it was junk, and they have stopped.

I do accept that the game has become easier over the last few years (for many reasons, not just this one), and this will be addressed. At the risk of sounding like Tony Blair - "Forward, not back".

I will be going through the standarts again before 3.3 is released to make more use of multiple pvals - and this time I'm going to weaken Thorin and get away with it!!

[d_m]

So, this is not relevant to the artifact part of this thread, but I just wanted to say that we've finally pushed staging to master and so a whole host of bug fixes, refactors, etc. should be available.

This should fix many of the problems currently in the nightlies, including crashes, repeated messages, etc.

[PowerDiver]

No, you don't. You need to highlight the "bad overpowerings" and suggest alternatives.

The game used to be reasonably balanced. For every item that used to be useless that you make useful, you need to take a different item that used to be useful and make it useless [or remove it].

For every artifact that had a frequency increase, you need to remove another artifact that was roughly equal.

For starters, remove every brand and bonus shot and bonus blow you added. The one exception is the fire brand on Cubragol is good as a replacement for branding activation, but that's about it. Remove unnecessary increases on the plusses of the thancs, and any increases to AC on anything. Deep monsters already do too little damage proportionally from melee compared to spells and breaths, and any change to make that less is bad for gameplay.

Timo: Magnate doesn't listen to me on this stuff. Please give your opinion on what you think of all of the changes to boost artifact powers.

[Magnate]

3 out of 6, unless you've given priests and paladins the same glove restriction that the mage-types have.

Doh. Yes, thank you.

[Derakon]

It reduces mana for five classes out of six, and it can always be made deeper and/or rarer if necessary.

3 out of 6, unless you've given priests and paladins the same glove restriction that the mage-types have.

[Magnate]

It's just one of several bad overpowerings.

We need a birth option to allow playing with the 3.0 artifacts.

No, you don't. You need to highlight the "bad overpowerings" and suggest alternatives.

Further to the previous thread about weak brands, the one on Paurnimmen will drop to x2 when these are implemented. Yes it's still good with a x2 brand, but that's ok. It reduces mana for five classes out of six, and it can always be made deeper and/or rarer if necessary.

[PowerDiver]

Wait, frost brand? Seriously? That must have changed recently then, since last I looked it just had slow digestion. Frost brand is way too powerful IMO.

It's just one of several bad overpowerings.

We need a birth option to allow playing with the 3.0 artifacts.

[Derakon]

Wait, frost brand? Seriously? That must have changed recently then, since last I looked it just had slow digestion. Frost brand is way too powerful IMO.

[PowerDiver]

Paur*: boring, but they show up early, so what do you expect? Paurhach is by far the best with regeneration.

Paurnimmen is now overpowered with frost brand, and I have used Pauraegen more than once vs Morgoth in the past due to the way that the standard artifacts tend to miss covering rElec.

[Derakon]

Cambeleg is one of the best glove artifacts in the game; it gives significant combat boosts, +CON, and free action, and usually shows up early enough that it can be your first non-ring source of FA. Compare to its brethren:

Eol: very powerful, but aggravates. Also so rare that I've only seen it once.
Cammithrim: basically super gloves of FA; nothing very powerful on 'em.
Paur*: boring, but they show up early, so what do you expect? Paurhach is by far the best with regeneration.
Camlost: why would you ever wear these accursed gloves? At least in Zangband they gave immunity to fire and cold...
Fingolfin: a decent competitor to Cambeleg, but shows up much later, and trading 2 CON in for 2 extra DEX is usually not worth it.

IMO Cambeleg should probably show up later. Early artifact gloves are the Paur*s; then later you get Cammithrim so casters can have named gloves, then still later (post stat gain) you get Cambeleg for a nice combat boost. In the meantime gloves of Thievery, Combat, and Power get much more likely to be used.

[Philip]

Actually I can't reproduce now, and lanterns are immune to the low fuel stuff, which is a good thing.
On a related note, why on earth am I not playing a warrior? My Half-Troll Ranger is dishing out 140 damage per round against not cold resistant with Nimthanc and CAMBELEG. I don't remember when I last found it. It also lets me use a SI ring. Amazing.
EDIT: Who made elven cloaks have speed? I assume it was added as a compliment to multiple pvals, but an elven cloak of stealth [6,+4] <+5, +1> with 5 stealth and 1 speed is awesome. It turns my Poor stealth(so that's why Half-Trolls aren't great, breeders did mean close door and flee) into Excellent.

[Derakon]

Assuming this hasn't changed since I last played Vanilla, light radius for lanterns and torches depends on how much fuel they have left; I think it's if they're under 2000 turns that they go to a radius-1 light.

[Philip]

Another bug I noticed was lanterns with 1 light radius. At least the description is wrong if not the radius.

[fizzix]

I thought artifacts make exception of that rule that they can't be generated in town. I think early reasoning was to prevent them to be generated in stores (but now store code is completely overhauled).

Anyway I have never seen any artifact in town, including Phial when it was rarity 1 dlvl 1 item.

I'm pretty sure this is correct. There's a statement in the object generation code that prevents artifacts from being generated in town.