Thoughts About Rings

[Raerick]

Body/Soul Keeping
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I have never used these. I don't know if anyone else has gotten a use out of them, but I have not. I can't say this about any other type of ring specifically as I have at least used rings of light, digging, and searching early on.

I believe the reason why I haven't ever bothered using Body/Soul Keeping is because they only seem to be useful for DLs that are far shallower than they typically spawn. I don't know if anyone else has gotten a use out of them. So feel free to correct me if you experience differs.

Reasons I never use these two rings:
-By the time I see these two rings I have better rings that I don't want to (or can't) go without.
-I have sustains on most stats from the rest of my equipment + racial sustain.
-Loss of a stat is easily recovered. I usually either have a stack of mushrooms of vigor that I am ready to throw away by the time these rings show up (for the reason above.) So even if I didn't have those sustains I have an easy recovery.
-If recovery would be hard for certain reasons, and leveling up isn't an option, then I would just avoid stat draining monsters.

My suggestion for these two rings would be to make them spawn at a shallower native depth or give them +1 to the stats that get sustained (though that would not make them much more useful.)

Feather Falling
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I have used these, usually because I have open ring slots when I find them, but they aren't really useful. The concept behind them doesn't really leave a lot of room to fix them either without making pitfalls or trapdoors deadly.

My suggestion for these would be to change them to something like 'rings of floating' and give them another small additional effect. I would suggest an increase to stealth (though that touches on another ring with a slightly less niche use), resistance to nexus (though boots of stability would be less useful due to that), or +1 movement speed (though I know that has been locked to footwear.)

Basically I don't see a reason for rings of Feather Falling to be the trash that they are. Yeah, they aren't negative, like trash consumables that need to be ID'd and then ignored, but that would even be better than what they are.

[malcontent]

My best use for a ring of feather falling is to buy it (very inexpensive) in order to learn the rune - which can be very handy at giving you a clue when you have found boots of stability.

I will definitely use body/soul rings to swap on to prevent stat draining if I know I'm about to encounter a stat drainer that could hurt a critical stat, even if it makes me slower/louder/weaker/whatever to wield it. I wouldn't say this happens most games, but enough to provide an alternative view point.

[Sphara]

Feather Falling - Absolutely useless unless you happen to be a low level char with no rPois and step on pit trap.

Soulkeeping - I basically never wear this. Early ghosts might be a reason to keep one. Shopkeeper id.

Bodykeeping - Probably slightly more useful than Soulkeeping, but this is usually an item I also give to shopkeepers just for the sake of id.

Additional:

Amulet of resistance - Deep item that is almost always completely useless. Why doesn't this item have rPois?

Amulet of lightning resistance - Junk item. When found, lightning attacks are very rarely dangreous. Energy hounds? Nah, automatic ignore is the way to go.

[Raerick]

My best use for a ring of feather falling is to buy it (very inexpensive) in order to learn the rune - which can be very handy at giving you a clue when you have found boots of stability.

I suppose that using it to learn the rune is indeed a use, but not a reason to wear it. I really don't like the idea of an object being useful only in order to ID the rune it has. I mean that is acceptable and happens with a lot of objects in a particular run, but those same objects have niche uses sometimes otherwise. For example I don't get a use out of rings of digging out of most runs, but sometimes (like when playing ironman) I get a use out of them.

Rings of feather falling though, I don't ever get a real use out of. They just warm up a ring slot till I have something better. If a character would die from being low level and falling (which I can't remember ever happening) I would just accept it and roll a new character. I've lost enough higher level characters by being ballsy around nasty uniques that I have no real emotional investment in a character until DL 30.

My point being is do Rings of Feather Falling ever add anything useful to a character I play? My personal opinion is no. Even the boots version at least gives some AC and are just as easy to find.

Feather Falling - Absolutely useless unless you happen to be a low level char with no rPois and step on pit trap.

Soulkeeping - I basically never wear this. Early ghosts might be a reason to keep one. Shopkeeper id.

Bodykeeping - Probably slightly more useful than Soulkeeping, but this is usually an item I also give to shopkeepers just for the sake of id.

How low does the level have to be for feather falling to be useful? If I am going to lose a character that is below level 5 to a trap I wouldn't even care.

Part of my point about Body/Soul rings is that I don't even need them for IDing the runes. I can't think of a time where I found one before I had learned all the sustain runes from IDing stat rings, amulets of wisdom, or various slay weapons. This wouldn't be true if they were shallower.

Amulet of resistance - Deep item that is almost always completely useless. Why doesn't this item have rPois?

Amulet of lightning resistance - Junk item. When found, lightning attacks are very rarely dangreous. Energy hounds? Nah, automatic ignore is the way to go.

Amulets of resistance are indeed useless. rPois might be a good addition, but I think what would be even better would be for the Amulets to give basic four plus one or two random resistances.

As for Amulet of lightning resistance I think it was very marginally useful to fill a resistance hole for me occasionally back when dragons were more shallow. These actually have the problem where no matter how shallow they appear they have no real use, because there aren't any real lightning based threats that shallow.

[Selkie]

Amulet of resistance - Deep item that is almost always completely useless. Why doesn't this item have rPois?

By the time you find one is certainly useless. It either needs to appear much lower, so it's useful in the clvl 15-25 stage. Or, and I prefer this idea, it should be just as rare and deep, but gives resistance to every element high and base. Then you might at least have a small dilemma whether to wear it or not

[Pete Mack]

In 3.0 amulet of lightning resistance was useful. It was not uncommon to get to DL 40 with patched-together rBase. It's been a while since I failed to find Resistance fairly early.

[tangar]

in Tangaria all useless items buffed a bit, eg Soulkeeping or Bodykeeping gives additionally CON[1] I did it ages ago..

[fph]

I think "RElec plays a role in the learning experience, as it teaches how resistances work and what the base 4 (the most common ones) are. Also, it makes "RAcid harder to id-by-exclusion. Maybe one could consider adding an early electricity threat instead? This would also teach the player the side-effect of electricity early, when they don't have any valuable wands to lose.

Feather falling in general does not seem to have much value; I wonder if the intrinsic could go away entirely. Otherwise, maybe one could add FF to =Protection, to make two useless items into a slightly less useless one.

[wobbly]

Its not unusual for me to use an amulet of lightning resistance. Sometimes the body armour slot doesn't have rbase e.g. green dragon scale mail covering rpoison and rfire/cold in the ring/shield slots.

[Sphara]

In discussions like these, there are almost always cases that will break the rule. Just yesterday I dived pretty deep without finding an all-covering resistance item. Had a rElec hole, found amulet of RL but still left it on a floor. Just to keep my infravision amulet on. I was deep enough for a colbran to finish me in 1 or 2 turns. And I gotta give it to energy vortices: they are pretty scary without rElec, sometimes even with it. Anyways, I most probably did not play optimally doing that.

For feather falling, it IS junk, if my opinion was somehow misread. Just tried to come up with some scenario it could be used at

[solar_one]

in Tangaria all useless items buffed a bit, eg Soulkeeping or Bodykeeping gives additionally CON[1] I did it ages ago..

For my personal mod: I edited Soulkeeping by removing SUST_STR and adding HOLD_LIFE. I thought it made more sense. I increased the cost of the ring to like 1500. Btw - is there a way to know the base cost for each type of flag, etc.? I'm not sure 1500 is enough for a ring with two sustains and hold life.

[PowerWyrm]

For my personal mod: I edited Soulkeeping by removing SUST_STR and adding HOLD_LIFE. I thought it made more sense. I increased the cost of the ring to like 1500. Btw - is there a way to know the base cost for each type of flag, etc.? I'm not sure 1500 is enough for a ring with two sustains and hold life.

The base cost of the item is not used anymore, you have to tweak the power of the properties directly in object_properties.txt

[sffp]

Amulet of lightning resistance - Junk item. When found, lightning attacks are very rarely dangreous. Energy hounds? Nah, automatic ignore is the way to go.

Someone's never died from a lightning spark shot by an energy vortex

Early games, I'll use amulet of acid/lightning, armor of the same and ring of hot/cold (You change your mind...) to develop a low-level base resistance as soon as I can.
It's not like the alternatives are that great for amulet ringwear until later in the game - when you get damage/strength/artifact.

[Sphara]

Someone's never died from a lightning spark shot by an energy vortex

Early games, I'll use amulet of acid/lightning, armor of the same and ring of hot/cold (You change your mind...) to develop a low-level base resistance as soon as I can.
It's not like the alternatives are that great for amulet ringwear until later in the game - when you get damage/strength/artifact.

Heh. I have.
I just briefly wizmode-tested rElec protection on energy vortex sparks. Unresisted spark did over 100 dmg every time, resisted spark never reached above 40 dmg. I'm still not jumping for joy after finding a rElec amulet, but at least you made a better case for not ignoring it right away

[Nick]

My thinking on most of the items mentioned here (especially =FF) is that they have been a bit left behind by the onset of the diving phenomenon and gameplay changes in reaction to it. In the old days when people spent a long time on the early levels they may have been relevant, but now they're pretty marginal. One particular case is different: amulet of resistance is intended to be another option for advanced characters who may find not having to get RBase from their armour slots appealing.

A very very long time ago I posted plans for versions 4.1-4.3. The 4.3 plan was reconsider objects (and combat system...). Do we want to do this?