I'm considering making a new Sil branch

[Quirk]

My impressions. Sorry in advance if they seem overly negative, it's easier to see things you don't like and say why rather than put forth one's own changes as you have done!

I don't want to come back in a negative way, because I do understand where you're coming from. I think though that you have a very different perspective than most other people, particularly when you say things like:

Warhammers: Are outstanding, and I use them often for high-str one-handers. Buffing them to 4d2 base would allow for 4d3 ones to spawn, which is... huge.

Nobody else says this. And with good reason, because mathematically... it's wrong.

At 4 strength - pretty high - a one-handed warhammer is 4d5. A one-handed bastard sword at 4 lb is 3d7. Both average 12 damage, the bastard sword peaks at 21 to the warhammer's 20 - and hits that peak more often. From there, everything gets worse.

- The bastard sword can be lighter, and make use of Momentum.
- The bastard sword has better criticals (and if lighter, more of them).
- The bastard sword is better with Slay.
- The bastard sword grants evasion.
- There are more artifact bastard swords.

At 5 strength, or 4 with Power, the balance tilts slightly. 14 average damage for the warhammer, 13.5 for the bastard sword, warhammer maximum possible damage is 24, same as the bastard sword (4d6 vs 3d8). This still does not seem to offset the other factors.

I think you need 5 strength and Power to even begin to talk about one-handed warhammers being advantaged vs bastard swords, and this doesn't happen often.

And I get this feel from your whole post. You don't want to see flavour lost, but you don't seem to be on the same page as other people with regard to effectiveness.

Take Knock Back for example.

It's not the most widely used skill by winners - in the first run of the stats here (http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=8157) it was used less than the widely derided Channeling. Why?

It doesn't add damage by itself, it's actually bad in the throne room, and it's at the top of the Power tree.

I do, for what it's worth, find it flavourful. And I've kept it and not Blind Fighting, but it's in the old Throwing Mastery slot. It might be a newbie trap there, it might need more buffing, but it's a start.

If you look at my release, rather than my first notes, I don't think you'll be too upset. Momentum is gone - which I think you'd consider a nickel and diming skill - for Smashing Blow, which gives some reason to use the formerly strictly worse greatswords over bastard swords; Throwing Mastery is gone for Impale, which I hope meets your standards for flavour.

Follow-through vs Feint: Feint is dull. Missing happens naturally for everyone, and the way to best use this ability... is to keep doing whatever you where doing, ie hitting random people.

No. The place you get to take most advantage of this is in using weapons where you miss a lot - e.g. axes.

But "Feint" and "axes" feels like a minor flavour crime, so I haven't implemented it so far.

Follow-through may have lost most of it's thunder with the removal of worms, but it's not bad. Its crime is more that whirlwind isn't good enough to beeline for over other things. (Even if they are both fun)

Whirlwind is better now. Might be too much better. Might not. Please give it a try.

Opportunist: Needs a prereq, as it's one of the strongest skills in the game (for non-Morgoth fights). Unless you bump it up to need 8 Stealth, otherwise the xp investment for brawlers is trivial.

Have kept the prereq for now.

Find Weakness: Another MMO skill, with nickels and dimes in boring boring areas. 10% armour reduction , even if it stacks, is dull and doesn't change anything that the player would be doing anyways, ie hitting the same guy over and over since he bought concentration.

On hold until Concentration is fixed, and I find out whether it's too good to add bonuses to once fixed. But it does change what the player was doing anyway, the same way concentration does. It makes it more worth keeping focus on the same opponent even if a unique has hauled in to attack you on the other side.

Sharpness: Ah, so I can kinda see what you're trying to do here? Get rid of Sharpness as a song, and spread it to other skills?

Sharpness and Slaying. The Song tree will be healthier if it doesn't have a bunch of skills effectively reserved for the throne room.

There have been a number of changes to the original plan over the course of the thread, I'd encourage you to take a look at them and play the new release.

But, more than this: you like flavour. You like interesting gameplay. I dig that. I'd encourage you to come up with skill ideas, particularly in Will and Perception, because I'd rather have an interesting skill which needs a lot of tweaking to balance than a perfectly balanced dull skill. A skill that makes greatswords viable, or axes, or polearms is from my point of view worth having even if it's a little on the dull side, because it breaks us away from the inevitable progress toward finding the best sword and keeping it until the end of the game.

[t4nk]

What about improving Sil's UI? (e.g., tiles)
Also, any interest in C++ rewrite?
Also, please do something about monsters that constantly run away! This is so annoying. Maybe Poschengband style solution ("the monster is paralized by fear" - that could happen to player, too, so it wouldn't be an overall buff...)

[Quirk]

What about improving Sil's UI? (e.g., tiles)
Also, any interest in C++ rewrite?
Also, please do something about monsters that constantly run away! This is so annoying. Maybe Poschengband style solution ("the monster is paralized by fear" - that could happen to player, too, so it wouldn't be an overall buff...)

Tiles would I think be a fairly big job.

A C++ rewrite would be a bigger job. I'm mainly a C++ developer myself, and a lot of this doesn't look like production code, so it would be nice to have. Sil is built on top of an old Angband codebase, and some of the code stretches back about 20 years. Re-engineering the whole thing would probably take months. In an evening at present I can add a skill or two, but I don't have the free time to do a rewrite.

Fear is I think actively utilised by some archery builds, so I'm not sure everyone will want it reconfigured.

[Serephina]

You seem to have taken exception with me liking warhammers! 4 Strength is not a lot however - a lot of elves start with 3. Its pretty midrange honestly for a facebeater. After rings, gauntlets, and artifacts I tend to get 5-6 unbuffed Str before power. Once had 9, that was a fun time! Of bloody course having a midrange Str value makes warhammers seem meh. The artifact sharp bastard and greatswords are ideal endgame weapons, almost incomparable, but sometimes I find an Arty shield I like and keep an eye out for warhammers, the fine-r the better.

We agree that knockback is great. Please no touchy-touchy. You seem to want to balance for the breakdown of the currently-favorite-of-winners powerskills, which actually can change depending on the surrounding skills and dungeon. (Recall that knockback was once OP when it proc'd opportunist, eh!)

Momentum, while it seems flavorful has shown itself to be one of these favorites that might be too powerful. But it's not a nickel-and-dime skill, it does something dramatic and unique rather than being a accumulation of small percentiles that individually make no splash. Eg an extremely low level sharpness song. Nickel and dime skills where also touched on by Infinitum - they are ugly and bad and should be avoided.

Feint: the bonus works on any misses, and is similar to Parry in all the wrong ways. Parry exists so Riposte can be locked behind it, and to reinforce that theme. Feint, if you wanted to theme it, could maybe have other skills elsewhere that proc off of missing swings?

Songs: Funny, I tend to sing Este then Freedom in the Throne room. Am I doing it wrong?

Also, this forum is super sleepy and I check it infrequently so you'll excuse me if I take a moment to catch up with your rapidly permutating builds

[Quirk]

I get the impression you play the game differently from a lot of other people. Unfortunately this means you're going to have to put up with the occasional buff to strategies you find fine but other people rank somewhere from barely playable to wildly unplayable.

Momentum, while it seems flavorful has shown itself to be one of these favorites that might be too powerful. But it's not a nickel-and-dime skill, it does something dramatic and unique rather than being a accumulation of small percentiles that individually make no splash. Eg an extremely low level sharpness song. Nickel and dime skills where also touched on by Infinitum - they are ugly and bad and should be avoided.

Eh, I dunno. It makes you do more damage with light weapons. That doesn't seem very flavorful to me. It's a have-your-cake-and-eat-it skill. If it's not a nickel-and-dime skill, it's only because it's overpowered.

And I'm not saying that it's automatically wrong to have some fairly dull skills that exist to reward particular weapon choices, but calling it "flavorful" makes me start doubting your objectivity.

Feint: the bonus works on any misses, and is similar to Parry in all the wrong ways. Parry exists so Riposte can be locked behind it, and to reinforce that theme. Feint, if you wanted to theme it, could maybe have other skills elsewhere that proc off of missing swings?

So come up with something more interesting! I'm open to ideas. But I want to encourage people to use the weapons and armor types that are currently not used very much, to change up the way they assign skills and pick their equipment. I'd also much rather have an interesting skill that gives an incentive to do this than a dull one, but I'd rather have a slightly dull one than yet another shiny reason to use a sharp artifact sword.

At minimum I want to displace what the "best" build is and let people have the fun of finding a new one, but I'd love to have more options considered viable.

Songs: Funny, I tend to sing Este then Freedom in the Throne room. Am I doing it wrong?

You're doing it differently from everyone else, which isn't wrong, but may lead to your preferred style getting easier...

Also, this forum is super sleepy and I check it infrequently so you'll excuse me if I take a moment to catch up with your rapidly permutating builds

No worries, it's just slightly frustrating on my end to have to rewind to the state of conversation some days ago and explain what's changed since.

[Infinitum]

I rather like feint from a balancing standpoint since it makes heavy, low accuracy weapons more viable (as previously mentioned). Still, at heart its just another ability that adds numbers like Parry.

I've harped about this with little prompting before, but I feel greatweapons and one-and-a-half-handers should be folded into one weapon cathegory. Historically, "Greatswords" weren't really a thing pre-renaissance anyhow. Also, player strenght >5 is rare unless one smiths specifically for it or play a charge character (3 base strength, +1 from the melee tree, +1 from gauntlets; strength rings are easily replaced by damage ones and Gundor is the only other permanent nonweapon source), making high weight weapons a liability even before rapid attack/momentum under the current system.

[Patashu]

Incidentally that reminds me of a related suggestion in another one of these threads:

Removing Rings of Damage (and keeping Rings of Strength).

Combined with removal of Momentum, this makes heavier weapons more worthy of consideration.

[Quirk]

What's the complaint with Concentration?

Riposte doesn't break it. Rapid Attack doesn't break it (doesn't tick it up though). Two Weapon Fighting doesn't break it (or tick it up). Zone of Attack and Opportunist feel like they should break it.

I'm not entirely clear what people want it to do. The 1.3.0 code is identical to the latest on the mpa-sil 1.3.0 branch.

[ebering]

You'd do well to read some of the old threads in this forum. There's been a lot of Sil bike shedding accumulated and even other forks.

Judging from the changelog you're aware of mpa-sil so you'd probably eventually find my fork based on that, but I hope you'll pull my bug fixes:

- bugfixes
        - Correctly apply monster protection to earthquakes.
        - Correctly give chanelling bonus to staff of earthquakes.
        - Fix Gorthaur's song to summon the correct monster.

and take a look at some of my ideas.

I can't support you at all though because my first inclination was to remove the UI screw from Throwing and then think about ways to buff it so good luck and may you meet infinite sorrow or something because throwing is the best.

(In all seriousness: enjoy hacking on Sil, I'm interested in what you come up with, my fork is dead as I have Real Job duties and might not be back to roguelikes in a serious way in a very long time.)

[Quirk]

You'd do well to read some of the old threads in this forum. There's been a lot of Sil bike shedding accumulated and even other forks.

Judging from the changelog you're aware of mpa-sil so you'd probably eventually find my fork based on that, but I hope you'll pull my bug fixes:

- bugfixes
        - Correctly apply monster protection to earthquakes.
        - Correctly give chanelling bonus to staff of earthquakes.
        - Fix Gorthaur's song to summon the correct monster.

and take a look at some of my ideas.

I have been pulling stuff across from mpa-sil, and sometimes reimplementing bits. Channeling works slightly differently now, but I'll look at the other two bugfixes and your ideas for sure, and thanks for bringing them to my attention. And if you have new ideas and no time to implement them, I promise I'll consider them seriously.

I can't support you at all though because my first inclination was to remove the UI screw from Throwing and then think about ways to buff it so good luck and may you meet infinite sorrow or something because throwing is the best.

(In all seriousness: enjoy hacking on Sil, I'm interested in what you come up with, my fork is dead as I have Real Job duties and might not be back to roguelikes in a serious way in a very long time.)

I did play about with making throwing easier (I think you put more work into it than I did, I threw together some code for a throwing slot and wandered around using it for a bit), but my ultimate logic ended up as I said in the other thread:

In short I saw this stretching into a major undertaking and becoming self justifying labour; "All that work in improving the throwing UI and still nobody uses it, throwing weapons need to be better"... "Well, if people had skills that relied on it they would use it..."

I personally think trying to make a second ranged option viable is going to inevitably end up sort of awkward, but I completely understand where you're coming from and couldn't fault you for taking a different perspective.

[bagori nd]

I think you need 5 strength and Power to even begin to talk about one-handed warhammers being advantaged vs bastard swords, and this doesn't happen often.

Maybe this should be in the other thread, but I disagree. Warhammers are fine. If people don't use them much, there are lots of plausible reasons for this other than that they're too weak. Specifically:

(1) 4d2 warhammers aren't that uncommon (and aren't that hard to smith). A 4d2 warhammer substantially outdamages a 3d4 bastard sword with 4 Str + Power, a realistic proposition by midgame.

(2) Comparing the one-handed warhammers to the one-handed bastard sword in isolation is comparing them in a context that heavily favors the sword. The warhammer's niche consists in the fact that it gains more than the bastard sword does from (a) two-handing and (b) Charge.

(3) If hammers are actually good, why don't people use them more? I conjecture this has a lot to do with the following:

• Most people play elves, and elves are better with swords.
• For lore reasons important to Sil's immersiveness, there are more and better artifact swords.
• Momentum does make swords too good, but the problem there is with Momentum, not with swords. Consider seeing how just removing Momentum plays out before further buffing hammers.

[debo]

Warhammers also get way better criticals than greataxes.

[wobbly]

Hmm, this rant turned out longer than I expected. Anyway:

It's quite common for me to use a battle axe, though part of this is just how common Dramborleg is. It's quite rare for me to use a warhammer which struggles to compete with the axe. Now while it's possible for hammers to beat out axes under prime conditions, it's the point where an axe is liable to punch straight through an ancient serpent anyway.

So with a 4d3 hammer at 5lbs, 2 handed, charging/power 4-44
3d6 axe at 5lbs, 2 handed, charging/power 3-42. you've lost the tiniest inch for something that will outperform with a shield, outperform if you attack without the charge bonus, outperform on the critical. It's worse if you compare slaying weapons. It's worse if you have a large song of slaying bonus & expect to critical. It's worse with song of sharpness which flat out wont work for a hammers.

Now certainly a hammer will kill Morgoth but it's very hard to get a situation where the hammer is better than the axe at the job. The 5lb hammer looks better at the job buffed but you can reach double & triple criticals from a 5lb axe with finesse & a large slaying bonus. You really need something over 5lbs to beat it & you need to not be using sharpness.

I'm not convinced removing momentum favours hammers over axes. On the one-hand 10str from a 5lb is better for the hammer then the axe. On the other it's slightly easier to find heavy hammers than heavy axes. I don't know the weight range is pretty close.

[bagori nd]

I'm not convinced removing momentum favours hammers over axes. On the one-hand 10str from a 5lb is better for the hammer then the axe. On the other it's slightly easier to find heavy hammers than heavy axes. I don't know the weight range is pretty close.

fwiw, I like that analysis. In a game without Momentum, it would probably be a good idea to tweak hammer weights a bit. Maybe a median weight around 7 lbs.--i.e. greatsword weight--is a good idea. It might also be a good idea to give dwarves a racial bonus with warhammers in addition to axes.

[bagori nd]

lastly, one more suggestion re: hammers.

There was an awesome thread a while back (which I can't find) about Rog, Lord of the House of the Hammer of Wrath. As was pointed out in that thread, it's kind of a travesty that Rog's hammer isn't in Sil already.

As a starting point for representing the Warhammer of Wrath, I suggest a warhammer of fury that simulates rage by granting the stat mods (+1 Str & Con, -1 Dex & Gra), has resist fire, and slays raukar.