Resist system

[fizzix]

I just want to point out that I don't see a compelling reason to change the damage caps. I think having nether cap out higher than light or dark is good. (ooh, i made a garden path sentence!)

Changing variable to static resists is something I'm fine with, although I don't see the pressing need to do so.

Oddly the one proposal I'm in favor of is making a second resist count for something, at least on the base 4. At the very least I'd like it to be apparent to the player that timed resists + permanent resists do stack, but multiple perm resists don't. This is an essential part of gameplay that's hard to figure out, and I think that is problematic. I don't know how to present this seamlessly in the gameplay though.

[Shockbolt]

*edit : haha, I was the one in the wrong thread sorry about that!

[buzzkill]

Independent of other changes, what about removing the damage cap and instead somehow basing max damage on raw numbers (an equation involving HP's and native depth maybe). I never cared for the notion of damage caps. Since we're all discussing arbitrary numbers, these are arbitrary numbers.

[Nomad]

As it stands, the random higher resists currently reduce damage to:

* light and dark: 4/12 to 4/7 (33 - 57%)
* sound (and previously confusion): 5/12 to 5/7 (42 - 71%)
* chaos, disen, nexus, shards, nether: 6/12 to 6/7 (50 - 85%)

Rather than any major reworking of the resist system, to begin with I would propose just fixing those values to:

* light, dark, sound: 1/2
* chaos, disen, nexus, shards, nether: 2/3

I think that would do a lot to simplify the situation without (in theory) having much visible effect on gameplay.

[Timo Pietilä]

Or to put it less aggressively, we prefer to go forwards than backwards.

In my opinion going backwards is not a good way to go forward. That is what this change would do unless very very carefully and preferably slowly adapted with gameplay testing in between. Changing things for sake of change is not going forward.

Ok, so I had forgotten that you had changed your view (I am not sure I ever really registered this until now). But I think to describe is as a "pretty small change" is misleading.

But never mind. My point is simply that things aren't perfect.

Things aren't perfect, I agree, but changing them for "consistency reasons" is not enough. That's the reason why chaos resist originally lost confusion protection and it caused major (well, at that time major) change in gameplay: several things that had chaos resist were no more as good as they were before, Chaos and BalanceDSM and chaos blades especially.

Changing side-effect protections outside of resists was small change in gameplay. It had very small effect on playing, especially when you just plain converted confusion resists to confusion protections. Stun protection never was that important, and most items having sound resist still have it giving all the protection they used to minus that stun protection from other sources.

[Magnate]

I didn't campaigned for that for several years, in fact I reversed my own opinion when Eddie suggested something like that. I previously tried to contain several side-effects in single resist, not the vice versa (chaos being in question).

Side-effect movement off the resists in their own category was to change availability of protections in wider variety of things meaning easier access to required protections from side-effects. It didn't actually change resists much, sound lost stunning resist except from sound, confusion resist disappeared completely with around five monsters that had damaging confusion attack and was replaced with protection so minimal change there, blindness and fear didn't have damage reductions, they were already just protections....and that's it. All the rest remained same. Pretty small change if you think about it.

Other approach to that was to revert things to older version of things, where chaos did provide confusion protection and sound stun protection from any source. It would have had pretty much same effect, more affected attributes in less things meaning wider variety of things would be unnecessary.

I changed my opinion partly because I knew that "more is better" gets thru more easily than "less is better" approach.

Or to put it less aggressively, we prefer to go forwards than backwards.

Ok, so I had forgotten that you had changed your view (I am not sure I ever really registered this until now). But I think to describe is as a "pretty small change" is misleading.

But never mind. My point is simply that things aren't perfect.

[Timo Pietilä]

You yourself are the reason we separated resistance to damage from protection vs side effects - you campaigned for this for years, so you obviously knew the system wasn't perfect. It seems churlish to argue to retain an even greater inconsistency.

I didn't campaigned for that for several years, in fact I reversed my own opinion when Eddie suggested something like that. I previously tried to contain several side-effects in single resist, not the vice versa (chaos being in question).

Side-effect movement off the resists in their own category was to change availability of protections in wider variety of things meaning easier access to required protections from side-effects. It didn't actually change resists much, sound lost stunning resist except from sound, confusion resist disappeared completely with around five monsters that had damaging confusion attack and was replaced with protection so minimal change there, blindness and fear didn't have damage reductions, they were already just protections....and that's it. All the rest remained same. Pretty small change if you think about it.

Other approach to that was to revert things to older version of things, where chaos did provide confusion protection and sound stun protection from any source. It would have had pretty much same effect, more affected attributes in less things meaning wider variety of things would be unnecessary.

I changed my opinion partly because I knew that "more is better" gets thru more easily than "less is better" approach.

[Magnate]

That's the difficult part when you are messing with game basic mechanisms. When you change how things are calculated, you are basically changing every single monster, item and game tactics. This resist thing in particular is a very hard to do better than what it has evolved to be in two decades.

You could see that in AC change. That was just one minor variable changed, and it still went wrong, affected game seriously and needed few iterations before it got better, and it is still arguable is it any better than before changes began in first place. Changing how resist are calculated changes a lot more than just one variable of the game. AC affected only monsters melee and one variable in armors, changing resistances changes practically every artifact, most ego, several basic items, all the monsters with something else than melee-attack and your behavior in how to deal with the items and monsters.

I seriously doubt that you can get it better than it is now without few years of vigorous playtesting (which is currently non-existent, based on "development" speed vs reports of games played).

Hmmm. I respectfully disagree that the game has evolved to near-perfection over two decades. In almost every aspect, the game has arrived at its current state by accident rather than design - fractional speed being an exception, but resists and damage caps certainly not.

It is rather more accurate to say that you, and other long-time players, have got very very used to the way it has been over that time. Because you like the game, the way it is is good, and changing it is bad. It would be good if you kept in mind that that isn't the case for the vast majority of players, who haven't played it for two decades and haven't memorised every single item and constant in the game.

Yes, the AC changes took a while to get right - but things are definitely better now than they were before, because heavy armours are now worth considering for their AC, when they weren't for most of the past two decades. It was pretty silly to have a combat-orientated game in which AC was almost entirely irrelevant.

So I don't agree that the resist system can't be improved. I did say at the start of the thread that I wasn't sure exactly *what* the proposals were trying to improve - and as Derakon says, the most important thing is to know why any change is being made and what it's trying to solve. Then we can weigh up whether the solution is worth all its consequential balancing issues.

It is perhaps unnecessary at this point to make a fundamental change like making a second permanent resist have an effect. But players have struggled for years with the inconsistent behaviour of high resists and the different damage caps, and I don't see any harm in rationalising them. You yourself are the reason we separated resistance to damage from protection vs side effects - you campaigned for this for years, so you obviously knew the system wasn't perfect. It seems churlish to argue to retain an even greater inconsistency.

If we're sticking with 2/3 and 8/9 (which I accept is not in dire need of change) then let's at least make all high resists 1/3. People can easily understand that resists matter slightly less for reducing damage against high elements - you have said yourself, it's more about the side effects.

I'd quite like to see the damage caps aligned too - do we have just one cap for all resistable high elements (exc. poison), or do we have one for light/dark/nexus and a different cap for nether/chaos/disen? 400 and 600? All at 500?

[Timo Pietilä]

In other words, reworking how resists and damage caps are handled is a difficult problem, and will require multiple iterations to get right. So before it's tackled, you should really decide what problems you're trying to solve and what your desired results are (that is, what kinds of behavior do you want to encourage from the player?).

That's the difficult part when you are messing with game basic mechanisms. When you change how things are calculated, you are basically changing every single monster, item and game tactics. This resist thing in particular is a very hard to do better than what it has evolved to be in two decades.

You could see that in AC change. That was just one minor variable changed, and it still went wrong, affected game seriously and needed few iterations before it got better, and it is still arguable is it any better than before changes began in first place. Changing how resist are calculated changes a lot more than just one variable of the game. AC affected only monsters melee and one variable in armors, changing resistances changes practically every artifact, most ego, several basic items, all the monsters with something else than melee-attack and your behavior in how to deal with the items and monsters.

I seriously doubt that you can get it better than it is now without few years of vigorous playtesting (which is currently non-existent, based on "development" speed vs reports of games played).

[Derakon]

Oh come on, now you're just hyperbolizing for the sake of hyperbole. I guarantee the move to decimal speed had more of an effect than this would, just as one example.

Now, I will say that making high resists more desirable is a tricky road to walk, because it's very easy to make the resists desirable by making the attacks more deadly without the resists. However, we're already skirting the limits of how much harder we can make the game via making the player take more damage; too much in that direction and we end up with a game where you can't help but be at risk of instadeath past a certain point. That's hard, sure, but it's not a good hard.

In other words, reworking how resists and damage caps are handled is a difficult problem, and will require multiple iterations to get right. So before it's tackled, you should really decide what problems you're trying to solve and what your desired results are (that is, what kinds of behavior do you want to encourage from the player?).

[Timo Pietilä]

I disagree with this. Big nether breathers will breathe max 550. With resistance it changes from 275 - 440. Now that may not seem like a huge reduction, but it certainly makes a difference on how often you need to drink healing potions.

471, not 440. Heavy nether breathers are rare, Dracolichs, Nightwalker (or was it -crawler), Azriel, Carcharoth. I think that's it. If you don't have the resist, don't fight.

It is easy to win without high resists (barring poison) except for where you need to counter the side-effect. Nether is luxury resist. You don't need that. So game should not make it desirable to want it, it diverts people from real game winners: detection, speed, offense and evasion. If you make it desirable, or worse needed, you severely change the game balance. Entire gameplay changes. You have something that isn't Angband anymore. Absolutely nothing in game history has been more drastic change than this suggested thing.

[Timo Pietilä]

While the resist system has worked fine for the base 4 + poison, the high resists are just screwy and impossible to really understand without spoilers or looking at the code.

If nothing else is done, the high resists should be changed to a fixed 2/3rds damage reduction like base4/poison. That is what newer players expect once they understand the base resists.

I don't see any reason to "understand" the resist, it is enough to know that they have variable effectiveness and rough understanding of how high damage max they can do without resist (basically you need to know that nether maxes out at 550 points of damage, rest you can ignore). IMO it would be better to remove those resists completely than to make them stronger, replacing them just by protection to side-effect.

[Nick]

The O system is essentially percentage damage reduction for every resist, with two percentages (25 and 40) possible. FA is true percentage damage reduction, with lots of percentages possible.

While I clearly am not against that for FA, I actually like the V system as it is. Or more precisely, as it was before side-effects were taken out of the high resists. If I were to change it, I would make the side-effects part of the high elements again, and add (as in O/FA) stat-drain side-effects for unresisted base element attacks. I also like the varying danger levels of the high elements, and the varying damage reduction from the high resists, although it would be good to make that information more readily available to the player.

[Antoine]

Now we're talking. We seem to be converging on two slightly different issues now:

1. Making all damage reduction a simple, fixed amount - specifically, removing the random element from high resists. I like this. I like the suggestion of a straight 50% and another 50% - it would be a lot for veterans to get used to (!), but 1/2 and 3/4 is easier to remember than 2/3 and 8/9 (let alone 5/7 to 5/12). I like the suggested damage caps too (though I don't really see why light and dark need to be in a category of their own - nor poison for that matter). I think this would be a lot easier for new players to understand. "Low" resists means big damage, "high" resists means less damage (but nastier side effects).

2. Make a second resist count, even if it's the same type as the first (i.e. both permanent). Personally I favour this change as it makes equipment choices more interesting and helps warriors (traditionally the last beneficiaries of most changes). It wouldn't actually be too difficult to code - just a single function that checks for a second occurrence of the required flag. I'd be interested in other views on this.

I like the look of (1), but (2) looks like a real can of worms that could upset balance for some time

A.

[Jungle_Boy]

Now we're talking. We seem to be converging on two slightly different issues now:

1. Making all damage reduction a simple, fixed amount - specifically, removing the random element from high resists. I like this. I like the suggestion of a straight 50% and another 50% - it would be a lot for veterans to get used to (!), but 1/2 and 3/4 is easier to remember than 2/3 and 8/9 (let alone 5/7 to 5/12). I like the suggested damage caps too (though I don't really see why light and dark need to be in a category of their own - nor poison for that matter). I think this would be a lot easier for new players to understand. "Low" resists means big damage, "high" resists means less damage (but nastier side effects).

The reason light, dark and poison have their own category is because that is the way they are currently, those values actually weren't changed. It seemed a bit much to move them 200 points in either direction.

2. Make a second resist count, even if it's the same type as the first (i.e. both permanent). Personally I favour this change as it makes equipment choices more interesting and helps warriors (traditionally the last beneficiaries of most changes). It wouldn't actually be too difficult to code - just a single function that checks for a second occurrence of the required flag. I'd be interested in other views on this.

I like this idea since warriors are my favorite class and I have lost two very good ones to 500 point breaths from the tarrasque, which is what started this thread. I like making the second resist count but not any further than that 75% reduction should be max, then comes immunity.

I don't think it would benefit warriors, I think it would just make them to seek out resistances when they should be looking for offense, detection and escapes. I would personally hate needing more than one object with a resist. What has been suggested increases damage from all lesser creatures, even that cap has been lowered (very few monsters actually breathe basic 4 anywhere near full strength). This suggested change would make AMHD breathe ~350 points of damage for each of its breaths with resist instead of 233. Lesser Balrog would breathe fire for 440 points instead of 293. Even Greater Balrog 500 instead of 488.

The point is that you would not NEED the second resist for anything, it would jut be a nice boost and now warriors can get it just like all the other classes can already. I also like the change that it makes some lesser monsters more dangerous, really if you are running around with AMHD's with 300 hp you are asking for trouble anyway. The max damage taken is still going to be lower than previous, players should know if you are running around with less than 500 hp you could be instakilled, no different than it is now. I could be wrong but I don't think most players know the breath values of each monster. When I'm fighting a deep breather I assume I need enough hp to survive a max hit, whether or not that monster is capable of delivering such a hit. So having some monsters in the middle breathe for more damage is not really going to change my playstyle though I could see it making a difference to some players who push the envelope.