Sil 1.3

[wobbly]

Is there some error with handling monster turns while confused?

|^T|
|.@|

Here's my message log (normal speed, hallucinating, confused), I'm trying to attack the troll each round:

You hit the Amethyst serpent.
The Amethyst serpent batters you.
You are knocked back.
A vapour fills the air & you feel yourself becoming lightheaded.
You are confused!
You recover your footing.
You are confused. (move SE)
There is a wall in the way! (free wall head-butt?)
You miss the Amethyst serpent. (free turn?)
You are confused.
There is a wall in the way!
You hit the Amethyst serpent.
You feel less confused now.
The amethyst serpent misses you.

As far as I can see I've gained a free attack & headbutted the wall several turns without being attacked. The troll was not next to the trap when I triggered it:

|..T.
|.@|
|^.|

[Jabberwock]

What's it take to kill Morgoth these days? I have a fair amount of experience in Sil (40-50 hours, 1 sil win, 3 sil win, 3 sil ascension run death), but I don't feel like I've ever come close to killing him.

Last character to meet V managed to win with three sils, but could not damage fast enough to get through his regen. He had 40 evade so damage wasn't really an issue, but probably didn't average more than 10 or 15 damage to V a turn.

Thoughts?

[Jabberwock]

Well I guess I'll answer my own question.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=18865

I built this character to kill the big V, which happily he was able to do.

Some things I learned over the course of this run:

- Two weapon fighting is not mututally exclusive to rapid attack, nor does it stack stat penalties. I'm not sure exactly why I thought you can't use both at once, but in any case you can, and it's really, really good.

- Related to the above, Galadriel is amazing in the offhand, providing 3 evasion and riposte, alongside some decent additional damage

- I learned this a few runs ago, but bane affects all rolls, not just your attack rolls (i.e. it buffs your evasion and will as well). Rauko bane has become easily one of my favorite abilities for this reason (thanks wobbly!). +5 or +6 bane is just a huge adjustment to a large swath of the most dangerous and annoying enemies in Sil. In any case, it's in-game description could probably be clearer.

- Stealth kind of sucks. My vague sense is that the perception is that non-stealth characters are significantly harder, but this seems clearly wrong. Ignoring stealth (except for oportunist, which is amazing) gives you tons of extra xp to use on combat stats, and it means you can wear much better armor, instead of watching weight and wearing X of stealth, etc.

- Without stealth, "Light armor" builds don't really make any sense. The amount of evasion you pick up by sacrificing protection is generally a bad trade. Corslets seem like the clear sweet spot to me (subject a little bit to what happens to drop). The key is to get critical resistance to protect yourself from cats and other high accuracy enemies.

- Smithing seems OK, but it feels a little frustrating to constantly be trying to calculate whether spending X experience on smithing to forge Y is better than just spending X experience on melee / evasion. Also, accumulating smithing / grace bonuses is an inventory nightmare. I guess I wish investing heavily into smithing felt like more of a unique playstyle vs. hoping to come out ahead vs. a 0 smithing build. I'm not really sure how to do better than the current system, but it doesn't feel quite right to me. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

[Infinitum]

Congrats! Rapid Attack applies to the main-hand and Two-Weapon fighting to the offhand weapon so both penalties do apply (albeit without overlapping). Since endgame Sil is defined by overcoming enemy protection the tradeoff of a low-power extra attack that precludes Subtletly is usually seen as not worth it however, albeit Galadriel is as you noted essentially the best shield in the game for all intents and purposes.

Some stealth is paramount to most builds (maybe less so now that wormsplosions are less common), albeit you typically don't need a lot of it as long as you back off early. Surviving early Giant, Balrog or Kemenrauko/Cat depth without it altogether is chancy though.

[wobbly]

Re: Saying stealth sucks is like saying melee sucks, a high-end stealth character can walk straight down the middle of the throne room, sleep morgoth, take a shiny with a sharpie & walk out with zero hassles. Basically you can win without either stealth or melee. For a warrior? 3 stealth+disguise (1100pts), not enough for an extra point of melee/evasion/will endgame, enough for an elf to poke his head in to a room, see a giant or troll, step back, close the door. At the start? All melee/evasion is 7 & 6. You quickly reach the stage where it's only 1 pt. It's only if you start putting pts in perception or will or song or smithing as well that it starts adding to a big drop as a warrior. Basically you can have a few in 1 or have a pt in each with only a tiny drop in melee.

I've noticed a change in auto-id for hunger. In older versions if I had un-ided regen (or hunger) & un-ided sustenance then they didn't auto-id crossing a hunger threshold. If 1 was ided the other would crossing the threshold. My last game I was wearing ided regen, un-ided sustenance. It did not auto-id sustenance, not a fan of that change. If it was deliberate, can I ask why?

Otherwise mostly a fan of the new version though there's 2 things I think you might want to look at. _revelations. My last smith had 3 & considered dropping 1 to make inventory room. Most of my stealth characters mapped the whole ascent. The other is masterpiece on a hammer. Even a 1 grace Eden can build a sharpy this way. A high grace finarfin can build some ridiculous stuff by putting most of the smithing tree on hammers. Now generally smiths are harder & don't really need a nerf, but still, I've turned a couple of the non-smith races in to high end smiths with this trick. It's not that hard to get over 30pt artifacts with 3 abilities & a masterpiece hammer (& you can add danger to it if it's a throw away).

[Jabberwock]

@Infinitum Thanks!

@wobbly I guess I don't disagree that stealth works, and that very small investments in stealth are cheap and reasonable (even the above character had six points + 1 skill, opportunist). It's more that significant investments (getting up to 11 skill points, lots of skills, multiple pieces of stealth equipment + light armor) seem like generally a trade that makes the game harder.

It would be one thing if being very stealthy allowed you to get things you otherwise couldn't, but in practice I've found this mostly not to be the case. Robbing dragons is pretty good, but a straight warrior can just kill them so it still feels like late game the stealth character comes out behind. Robbing vaults is done at your peril.

My first win was with one sil on a stealth character, who had stealth in the mid to high 20s + vanish and he felt like the angel of death dropping giant assassination stabs on monsters. That said, it took a lot more tries than literally my first dwarf (who of course has stat penalties vs. the noldor) who had 0 stealth and a very smooth ride to V and took three sils (admittedly getting killed on the ascension run, but that was unnecssary).

By getting the right core skills and armor (hardiness, poison resist, crit resist, heavy armour use), it was just very smooth sailing vs. investing into stealth which leaves the character in much greater trouble when things inevitably go wrong.

Anyhow, not knocking the stealth playstyle, it's definitely fun and works, I just think it is underpowered vs. mostly skipping stealth and mentioned it because it seemed like the "conventional wisdom" was the opposite.

[Fendell Orcbane]

Thanks for the hard work !

I'm loving 1.3 I really like the rebalancing Half and Scatha did on the early levels. I hated getting killed by orc warriors charging me over and over again. But shouldn't monsters lose a turn when they switch places in a corridor ? Not a huge deal, though.
Honestly I got kinda bored with Sil and I was afraid I'd be bored with this new iteration, but nope it has me hooked.

[wobbly]

Is there a way to turn off auto pickup for thrown weapons? I didn't find it in interface options or under ?. I sometimes use throwing weapons of slay as lights & it's pretty frustrating to have the lights go out when you walk on them.

[wobbly]

So it seems I can create arrows out of thin air just by dropping them. If I have say 80 arrows in the quiver & 20 in inventory and I drop the 80 from the quiver they 1st move to inventory combining to form a stack of 99 & a stack of 1. The stack of 1 disappears, I drop 80 arrows on the ground & I'm left with a stack of 99 in inventory.

[seraph]

So it seems I can create arrows out of thin air just by dropping them. If I have say 80 arrows in the quiver & 20 in inventory and I drop the 80 from the quiver they 1st move to inventory combining to form a stack of 99 & a stack of 1. The stack of 1 disappears, I drop 80 arrows on the ground & I'm left with a stack of 99 in inventory.

confirmed.

[seraph]

had an idea for adding flavor. it'd be neat if curved swords could be found with poison brands.

[seraph]

what is the difficulty to beat when eating bad herbs/potions? also, what is the probability of acid traps damaging equipment?

[mibert]

I noticed the following odd behavior:

Using a staff of light will make sleeping and unwary orcs cringe, but not wake them up or alert them.

Also I've seen unique orcs carrying weapons of Gondolin

[seraph]

eye for detail could stand a buff, as valuable as perception abilities are. just had a game in which i fell through no less than four false floors. the last i had eye for detail. i think my perception was > 10 as well.

[wobbly]

So Boldog, 5lb 1d10 spear for 1d15, but as a 1 dice monster he's criticals are calculated at 1lb. Just died from 25 hps, [+8, 7-23] even with him stunned. It's a bit over the top against high protection characters especially at the depth he appears.