Rods of detect traps and stairs/doors

[Timo Pietilä]

Hello.

Playing 3.2.0 warrior I noticed that rods of detect traps and stairs/doors are now a lot rarer than they used to be. I get detect treasure (which is overpowered IMO) a lot more often.

Those two rods are quite essential warrior tools. If I can't find any before I start to stumble upon detection rods, then they are too rare. Considering that I'm not a diver, not finding any before closing 2000' is a bad sign.

Maybe those should be made a bit more common? Unless you plan to do that LoS door/trap detection that has been suggested before.

[Derakon]

They certainly should be. I've complained about this occasionally, but never actually taken any action on it. I suspect this is a side-effect of TMJ that wasn't noticed (unlike the decrease in consumables) because only warriors really care about these items.

Looking at object.txt, all three of the rods you mentioned have the same distribution: rarity 20, levels 8 to 80. Detection has rarity 30, levels 50 to 100; Magic Mapping has rarity 10, levels 65 to 100. I'd guess this should look more like:

Trap Detection: rarity 70, levels 8 to 80
Door/Stair Location: rarity 70, levels 8 to 80
Treasure Detection: rarity 30, levels 20 to 80
Detection: rarity 20, levels 30 to 100
Magic Mapping: rarity 20, levels 40 to 100

This is just a guess, though, and frankly I don't know what exactly "rarity" means here so these numbers could be way off.

[Mondkalb]

Rods of Mapping are also too rare imo. I played a warrior recently and found only one while it seems to rain rods of detection when you are deep enough.

[buzzkill]

Make things less common, not more common.

[Derakon]

Make things less common, not more common.

Care to explain your stance? I can read it in any number of ways, e.g. "Make traps less common so the rarity of trap location rods isn't an issue", "make everything except trap location rods less common so they are relatively more common than they used to be", or "Ahh, screw warriors, nobody should ever play one."

[PowerDiver]

There used to be staves of trap location and of door/stair location, but they are gone now. Those used to be extra chances to make do until you got the rods.

[Pete Mack]

There used to be staves of trap location and of door/stair location, but they are gone now. Those used to be extra chances to make do until you got the rods.

This is right. I sometimes carried them with rogue characters too, until the spell failure got down to something reasonable.

[fizzix]

Also the fact that dstairs and dtraps are split only hurts warriors since the spells are now merged in both spell classes.

I was thinking about this the other day and I think that doors should be removed from detection, and maybe placed in mapping instead. Also there should be some device that can be used to detect visible monsters.

detect object (rod/scroll/rogue spell)
detect magic objects (mage spell)
detect stairs and traps (rod/scroll/spell)
detect outer walls/stairs and doors? (priest/paladin/rod/scroll/staff)
detect evil (staff/priest/paladin)
detect visible monsters (spell/rod or staff)
detect invisible monsters (staff/scroll)
detect vis+invis monsters (mage/ranger/rogue)
detect everything (rod/priest/paladin)

mapping feels too rare, everything else feels ok. (my current warrior is on dlevel 35 or so with only -dstairs)

[Derakon]

My brain parses "Detect visible monsters" (with your eyeballs?) very differently from "Detect non-invisible monsters" (ohhhh).

However, I'm not convinced that monster detection in item form is necessary. One of the major aspects of playing a warrior/priest/paladin is that your creature detection is significantly weaker until you get access to Detection (which in my experience also adequately covers "detect both visible and invisible monsters"). This doesn't need to be changed.

Likewise, mapping has high utility, but that doesn't mean it has to be readily available.

[Mondkalb]

Of course there are always the staffs and scrolls of mapping/door detection etc.

[Derakon]

As noted earlier, the staves are apparently no longer available. Scrolls are available, but not reliably; they also significantly increase the cost of playing even when available in sufficient quantities.

[buzzkill]

Care to explain your stance? I can read it in any number of ways, e.g. "Make traps less common so the rarity of trap location rods isn't an issue", "make everything except trap location rods less common so they are relatively more common than they used to be", or "Ahh, screw warriors, nobody should ever play one."

What I meant, not that you're going to buy it is, is that if a particular item is too rare in comparison to another item, make the second item rarer rather than the knee-jerk tendency to increase the frequency of the first. We still working on fixing TMJ, lets not start reintroducing it at the same time. It's got nothing to do with warriors in particular. When it gets to a point that the game is unwinnable with a warrior, then we'll talk.

[Derakon]

Okay, I can see what you're saying here. I happen to disagree with it, mostly because lack of rods of trap detection isn't ever going to make the game unwinnable (given the aforementioned scrolls and, ultimately, -Detection). It's just going to make it much less fun. Given how traps are a basically broken mechanic as it stands, I see no reason to not make trap detection readily available to all classes until such time as traps are fixed, especially since the required fix (to make trap detection readily available) is a one-liner that simply restores old rarities. From my perspective, denying rods of trap detection to warriors is basically just being a jerk for the sake of being a jerk, since the impact on game balance in this particular case is basically nil.

Everyone noticed when consumables were too rare, and that was fixed to bring them more into line with how rare they used to be before TMJ. This is just more of the same.

I'm curious -- how often do you play warriors?

[Timo Pietilä]

What I meant, not that you're going to buy it is, is that if a particular item is too rare in comparison to another item, make the second item rarer rather than the knee-jerk tendency to increase the frequency of the first.

In this case "the another item" is everything else in dungeon. There is no real alternative to those rods.

I don't think you want to drop frequency of everything else to bring those rods back in rarities where they need to be.