Rebalance Sil-Carving to fit Song of Sharpness changes

[locus]

To carve a Sil, you need to do one point of damage more than the crown's protection roll. The crown has a huge protection roll. This means that the difference between SoS reducing the roll by 50% and reducing it by 40% or 30% is immense. Sil-carving is now much more down to whether or not you found a non-nerfed sharpness weapon (or two, if you're going for a multi-sil victory).

[half]

Is it really so difficult to get a single Silmaril? I'd thought that since we made that a lot easier many versions ago, it had become only difficult for stealth characters, and that others should be able to get one without any form of sharpness.

I agree that the second and third Silmarils are probably too difficult. The theory had been to require some form of sharpness to get all of them, which would be fine if people treated getting them as a small extra thing. But since the ladder uses it for sorting, this does make more of a big deal of it, and makes it less good to just leave that to the chance of what you were able to find.

[locus]

Requiring "some form of sharpness" was more reasonable when Song of Sharpness counted as a form of sharpness.

I dunno, even without the ladder, it's way more impressive to bring back all the Silmarils. It feels like you're a big man, instead of barely scraping out a win, comparable to multi-rune wins in Crawl or ultra wins in ADOM. And this is a good thing, you want it to be tempting to make Beren's mistake.

I guess the difficulty level of an ultra win in ADOM is more comparable to a Morgoth kill in Sil, but the point stands, it's nice to have different levels of victory.

[Derakon]

Maybe make it easier to get multiple Sils and far harder to survive getting them? I mean get seriously blatant about stacking the deck against the player when they have two or three Sils. Force the dungeon generation to make gauntlets of alert and angry monsters, give the player horribly bad luck, periodically make them make a Will save or be entranced by their new shinies, etc.

[Matoro]

Force the dungeon generation to make gauntlets of alert and angry monsters, give the player horribly bad luck, periodically make them make a Will save or be entranced by their new shinies, etc.

"You stare the beauty of the Silmarils hypnotically, completely forgetting everything around you. Unnatural lust for the jewels of treelight fills your mind. You lose x number of turns!
Morgoth, the Lord of Darkness, hits you! You die."

[taptap]

I really wonder why people have problems with the crown when playing a melee char with song of sharpness. I mean, seriously, get one of the greatswords that lie in the throne room (or suitable battle axe, great axe) and you should have a Sil. Some people need to get Sils out as archers or singers or with blunt weapons - and they do.

[debo]

I think the biggest frustration comes when you've already killed Morgoth, to be honest -- which you can reasonably pull off without a thing or a song (thong?) of sharpness. At that point, there is nothing in the throne room that can harm you, and you end up spending a billion turns trying to get the 3rd sil out. It's super tedious, especially if you're strong enough to have filed the ULTIMATE BUG REPORT.

Anyways, I personally still think the key to this is in some of Scatha's ideas around changing scoring. There were some ideas before to allow people to 'chip away' at the crown, which might be neat too.

I also don't really understand why the crown gets an evasion roll... have we ever considered removing this?

[debo]

I really wonder why people have problems with the crown when playing a melee char with song of sharpness. I mean, seriously, get one of the greatswords that lie in the throne room (or suitable battle axe, great axe) and you should have a Sil. Some people need to get Sils out as archers or singers or with blunt weapons - and they do.

The first one is easy. It's the third one that is silly. (Pun intended

[debo]

Maybe make it easier to get multiple Sils and far harder to survive getting them? I mean get seriously blatant about stacking the deck against the player when they have two or three Sils. Force the dungeon generation to make gauntlets of alert and angry monsters, give the player horribly bad luck, periodically make them make a Will save or be entranced by their new shinies, etc.

This already basically happens. Removing the second Sil doubles the number of monsters you meet on the ascent; removing the third forces you to roll each skill check twice, taking the lesser of two rolls.

Again, if you're strong enough to kill V and take 3 sils, it's unlikely that anything on the ascent is going to be very threatening unless you generate packs of Carcharoths and Glaurungs.

[taptap]

I think the biggest frustration comes when you've already killed Morgoth, to be honest -- which you can reasonably pull off without a thing or a song (thong?) of sharpness.

Locus has sharpness, no?

Morgoth kills without any sharpness are overall quite rare if I look at the ladder. If you are strong enough to kill Morgoth with a mattock, hammer or great axe without sharpness you can easily take out the 1st Sil or even consider taking the whole crown if you want more. (I believe Hugo started this business after failing to take out bonus Sils with a blunt weapon char.)

Knocked out or sleeping people get an evasion roll as well. It is not a representation of effort anyway.

[MarvinPA]

For mpa-sil, absolutego made a patch making the second and third sils use the same difficulty as the first one. I've not played much recently so can't really comment on how well it works out (but I think the first sil's difficulty is still in an okay place?). As debo mentioned though, this is mostly aimed at cases where you've killed Morgoth and are in no danger from anything else, and can just take as long as you like cutting. So maybe changes making it even harder to become ridiculously strong and kill Morgoth would be good for making that less likely to happen in the first place. :P

[bron]

Morgoth kills without any sharpness are overall quite rare

It's not really all that hard to kill Morgoth without sharpness. I've done it several times using Rapid Fire and Poison Flaming arrows. Flaming arrows of Piercing also work. And of course a good Song of Slaying Bonus helps a lot.

The theory had been to require some form of sharpness to get all of them

It's a reasonable theory, even if I don't really like the idea that winning big virtual requires that you get lucky (or be a smithing character). The trouble is that to win big you either need to be lucky enough to have a weapon break on the 2nd Silmaril (which is maybe just barely possible without a sharp weapon), or you need to be lucky enough to find TWO sharp weapons, since one of them is going to break on the 3rd Sil. I dislike the idea that exactly when the weapon breaks can have a large effect on the level of victory (i.e. whether or not you are able to remove the 3rd Sil), yet it is completely random, and the coin isn't flipped until the very end. This is a large part of the reason why I've been playing almost exclusively Smithing characters with 1.2.1: by making my own sharp weapons I can remove the uncertainty (that, and I like smithing).

I will say that in fact I personally really like the idea that there are different levels of victory possible, at ascending levels of difficulty. So (despite the preceding paragraph) I don't actually have any real problem with the notion that "to win big, you have to play a smith," any more than the notion that "to be a great archer, you have to play an elf." But I don't think that is the intent.

I don't pretend to have the right answers here. Perhaps one could simply not give extra points for additional Sil's and/or for killing Morgoth. So then the game itself only acknowledges one level of victory, and the rest is just for personal satisfaction. You already don't get extra points for the in-game "no artefacts" or "disconnected stairs" challenges, or even for Edain vs. Noldor, despite the added difficulty. And there are a host of other challenges people set for themselves (e.g. "3 Skills"). So the notion of getting 3 Sils and/or killing Morgoth won't go away. But perhaps (?) if the ladder stopped acknowledging it, there would be less angst about it, and more games where a player wins by grabbing just one sil and getting out.

[locus]

You can't make people not care about getting 3 Sils unless you make it literally impossible or you make it just as easy as one. Pretending it doesn't matter on the ladder is just going to make the ladder worse, not actually solve the problem.

[taptap]

It's not really all that hard to kill Morgoth without sharpness. ... Flaming arrows of Piercing also work.

Well, flaming piercing arrows or double branded arrows probably do work, but both are stacked armour breaking effects. Piercing arrows actually ARE unnerfed sharpness in its full beauty - just not triple stacked (w. song of sharpness, fire, poison) as archers went in 1.1. Also, it should be quite possible to kill Morgoth with a subtle deathblade without any additional sharpness. (Imo easier than doing it with a heavy weapon which is otherwise more obviously armour breaking.) Yet, somehow the nerf to sharpness seems to have made most players rely more on other sources of sharpness, not the alternatives to sharpness.

The other sharpness (flaming arrows):

Personally, I would get rid of flaming arrows altogether and make piercing arrows a little more common - or make it more obviously magic (by moving it to the song tree) or writing a message when used the first time. It is a silly trope that should offend every Englishman (and everyone who ever drew a bow). It may have its origin in JRR Tolkien - meant to be magical with him - but well you see "armour breaking" flaming arrows in tons of games, not meant to be fantasy but medieval, nowadays. This is just wrong. If anything armour penetration, precision etc. is worse when you shoot an arrowhead with a small "payload" of incendiary material. Good enough for the roofs of times past, but in no way burning through armour (or burning mount and rider wholesale as in total war games).

Ladder:

You could just sort it differently, say turncount only or winner with lowest experience spent. If there are no bonus points for creating a bug in the game (killing Morgoth) people might try the canonical way (I might say I came quite close in the last competition by singing Lorien to put Morgoth to sleep, taking one Sil, losing Angrist in the throne room and death at 50ft although to a different opponent) more often In fact this is a luxury problem only a few players care about (and they shouldn't necessarily drive the balancing).

[locus]

The "canonical way" is to care about getting multiple sils and to break angrist trying to get a second one out.