Warriors and Device Usage?

[Egavactip]

Has something been changed in a recent version to make it more difficult for warriors to use devices that cause damage (like a Ring of Flames)? In my current game, my warrior seems to have no real difficulty activating most devices, but he rarely seems to be able to get a damage-causing device to work at all. The last two times I tried to use it, it took about 10 failures before it worked. I can understand making it easier for spellcasters to use magic items generally, but it seems to me that something is amiss here, unless my luck has been really really bad for some reason recently.

[Nick]

Yes, something has changed. See this post and the links in it for more details.

[sffp]

Has something been changed in a recent version to make it more difficult for warriors to use devices that cause damage (like a Ring of Flames)? In my current game, my warrior seems to have no real difficulty activating most devices, but he rarely seems to be able to get a damage-causing device to work at all. The last two times I tried to use it, it took about 10 failures before it worked. I can understand making it easier for spellcasters to use magic items generally, but it seems to me that something is amiss here, unless my luck has been really really bad for some reason recently.

My 47th level human warrior with an intel of 18/100 had a greater than 50% fail rate on rods of magic mapping.

It really makes things like rods of drain life practically useless.

[Selkie]

My 47th level human warrior with an intel of 18/100 had a greater than 50% fail rate on rods of magic mapping.

It really makes things like rods of drain life practically useless.

This sounds broken to me. Not that a warrior would ever need to use a rod of drain life but I'm assuming a rod of TO would be similarly useless if MM failure rate is so high. Every warrior needs some TO.

[sffp]

You'd think so, but TO had a very high success rate

Things that did damage, magic mapping and healing were the real culprits.


I bought the drain life early on at the store when it would have been quite useful if it worked

[Egavactip]

Yes, something has changed. See this post and the links in it for more details.

The old usage penalties seemed quite reasonable to me over a period of hundreds of games. I'd go back to them.