Sa'n & Mogth

[Voovus]

As things stand, @ has no incentive to go after Sauron. The only reason to do so is if @ wants to finish off Morgoth. That makes the battle with Sauron - who is "historically" a pretty nasty chap - very anticlimactic.

Suggestion: after popping off Sauron, allow @ to descend to arbitrary depths of Angband, not just to 5000', and make Morgoth spawn on each level below 4950' until he is killed.

This way @ will get the option to search for even greater loot while dodging the big bad boss, which might be fun to try. It also creates a reason to go after Sauron before being fully prepared for Morgoth. (Might be worth increasing the chance of greater vaults at these depths in this case - the deeper, the greater the chance. Maybe also make Morgoth respawn if *destructed*. But these are fine-tuning issues.)

I should say that this kind of thing worked in Moria. There you pretty much had to have at least one ring of speed to take on the Balrog, but these rings only began to have a decent chance to spawn at Balrog depths. Exploring those depths was a good way to get your heart rate up.

[Selkie]

I get your point, but for me I'm never interested in further loot collection. Depending how easily I dispatch Sauron, I'll usually go straight for Morgorth. I get bored easily in the end game and killing Morgorth is a nice closure. The early game is twice as fun for me as the late game

[archolewa]

I feel like this could be reasonable if we tweaked Morgoth's AI so that he didn't always know immediately where the player was and made a beeline for them. Maybe he spawned awake and searching, and your stealth controlled how long before he found you (which admittedly would be very different from how stealth currently works, which is how long enemies stay asleep).

Creeping through the lower levels dodging Morgoth before you had the gear you really needed to fight him could be a fun final test of the most important skill in Angband: dodging really nasty monsters to get the loot.

However, as it is now, I think it would mostly be an annoyance where you had to TO Morgoth every ten steps, without any real tension.

[Voovus]

The adjustment I'm suggesting will let you continue playing exactly as you're doing now. It will give you the option of playing hide-and-seek with Morgoth, which, I hope, might liven up the late game. I'd like to believe that this is not hard to implement, but I'm no expert. It is meant to be an experiment - if, after playtesting, people find it fun, we can discuss making it an integral part of the experience. We can then also discuss adjustments to Morgoth's AI and other necessary details. I agree that there a danger that it will just result in an exercise of endless TO, but, as I mentioned, this kind of thing worked well in Moria.

[Sphara]

I'm really not into prolonging the endgame, but this almost certainly would've left a few ironman characters of mine a much higher odds of winning the game.

How would this change has any effect on players that don't have forced descent or ironman on? Just loot dlvl 99 over and over again. I mean, I don't know how much better loot you get on level 120 compared to 99, but I feel it's quite negligible.