A fair way to nerf Zephyr Hounds?

[fizzix]

I'm not so sure it'd unfairly weaken them. If you were in a room full of hounds, you'd likely still have at *least* six or so able to breathe at you on any given round. I don't question the validity of luring hounds into a hallway and picking them off one at a time (or using a beam weapon if available), but I think there's a balance between enjoyment and challenge. Right now hounds are the only significant threat in the early/mid game until they are replaced/accompanied by G's. This is mostly due to the fact that they have devastating breath weapons, multiple physical attacks/round, never sleep, and utilize the best tactics of any creatures in the game.

I also wouldn't necessarily suggest the same change be made for dragons - though I would like to see their breath weapons act as beams instead of balls, thereby killing any thing without appropriate resist in between them and the @...but that's a different gripe

As you allude two there are two possible concerns with hounds.

1. they are too difficult.

2. they are too annoying.

Personally, I don't think hounds are too difficult either before or after pack AI became the standard. However, I do think that in both cases they are too annoying. A solution for me is one that either: 1) Makes hounds less numerous, reducing monotony. 2) Gives multiple new ways of dealing with hounds, including ways to use them to @'s benefit, thereby reducing monotony.

It's all about reducing monotony and getting back to what makes angband fun, randomly generated stuff and new challenges and places to explore on each level.

(tangentially, i think cones make a lot more sense for hounds and no sense for dragons. Probably because I think of a dragon as huge, towering over @ and likely everything else in the dungeon. The splash is not where the breath hits @, it's where the breath hits the floor underneath @.)

[tummychow]

I know the hiding around a corner thing doesn't quite work anymore. However, I often don't have the patience or time to stone-to-mud a short safety corridor. Only one or two hounds can hit you anyway - one by breath, one by h2h attack. In addition, if you let the hounds into the room, the problem is mainly with you and not the hounds. That's the point with group monsters - you are *not* supposed to let that happen. That's why forcing breath to target the first enemy would nerf all breathers. The hounds aren't supposed to get into the room. A careful player can tangle with a group of hounds without incurring too much risk (excepting perhaps earth hounds, whose shard attacks can get pretty nasty if you let them stack up. Careful use of detect resolves that issue. Nexus hounds are just annoying with the teleport, not dangerous.). I only got close to being killed by hounds once. I never made the mistake of fighting them head on again.
I turn off the smart Ai for group monsters. They are really quite vicious with it on and I find life much easier without it. Just flip it off if the hounds are too much to handle.

[Hariolor]

As you allude two there are two possible concerns with hounds.

1. they are too difficult.

2. they are too annoying.

I had a more precise division between these two points in the OP, but yes.

Fighting them is *always* annoying (at least until you get some speed and decent resists)

As for difficulty - I have no problem with them being hard to fight when bunched up in a room (see the OP). The issue I have is when you encounter a mob of them in a hallway and get hit 10 times in a row, often from well off the screen. Now, I know the old 'detect detect detect' line, but I think there's a balance to be struck, and we're not at it. Having to detect every few steps because of a fear of hounds in the hallways is not, IMHO, fun. Detecting occasionally so you don't get YASD'd by a big-shot enemy, on the other hand, seems strategically sound.

(tangentially, i think cones make a lot more sense for hounds and no sense for dragons. Probably because I think of a dragon as huge, towering over @ and likely everything else in the dungeon. The splash is not where the breath hits @, it's where the breath hits the floor underneath @.)

Point taken, but this tweaks my frustration with angband hallways in general. How are purple worms, nightwalkers, ancient wyrms, etc taking up exactly the same space as a shambling mound or giant louse?

I'm not saying make enemies bigger - but more double and triple-wide hallways might be interesting - and more thematically appropriate at lower levels.

[fizzix]

I had a more precise division between these two points in the OP, but yes.

Fighting them is *always* annoying (at least until you get some speed and decent resists)

As for difficulty - I have no problem with them being hard to fight when bunched up in a room (see the OP). The issue I have is when you encounter a mob of them in a hallway and get hit 10 times in a row, often from well off the screen. Now, I know the old 'detect detect detect' line, but I think there's a balance to be struck, and we're not at it. Having to detect every few steps because of a fear of hounds in the hallways is not, IMHO, fun. Detecting occasionally so you don't get YASD'd by a big-shot enemy, on the other hand, seems strategically sound.

I think we're pretty much in agreement then about the main problem. Hounds aren't fun. Frankly, to me any mitigation would be welcome.

Also detection doesn't work if you are prayer based, since hounds are not evil.

[Sirridan]

I think we're pretty much in agreement then about the main problem. Hounds aren't fun. Frankly, to me any mitigation would be welcome.

Also detection doesn't work if you are prayer based, since hounds are not evil.

This usually isn't a problem, because telepathy does detect them and because they bash down doors and such so sometimes you do get warning, and between CL 20 and CL 40 you can just assume every hallway has hounds until proven otherwise.

But I agree that hounds are not fun, they are often difficult to run from, and are not profitable to fight. In many cases, fighting hounds in fact causes a net loss, for minor exp gain. (The exception being dark/light/clear hounds which are just annoying bags of xp).

Acid hounds destroy armor/staves/scrolls/arrows
Fire hounds destroy scrolls/staves
Elec hounds kill wands and rods (MY LAST -teleOther!)
Cold hounds kill potions (Lost a potion of life to one, then found Nenya right after, lol)
Inertia/Gravity/Plasma/Impact/Chaos can screw you up fast
Nether/Ethereal often drain more xp than they give you
Aether hounds are a gamble, and one not worth taking.

Time hounds make you leave the level (if you're smart...) they are arguably the most dangerous non-unique in the game with few other challengers.

EDIT

Earth destroy potions on the ground, Vibration stun you (if no rSound) and our favorite Air Hounds make you want to reroll kobolds or play a pre r1678 to get the always rPoison on Aman/Elvenkind bug.

[Pete Mack]

As the guy who originally set smart-packs to true as the default option, I can only say: mwahahaha!

[Bill Peterson]

As the guy who originally set smart-packs to true as the default option, I can only say: mwahahaha!

My sentiments exactly. The fact that so many are looking to nerf hounds is good reason to keep them exactly as they are. You're never going to be successful at Angband until you learn when to run, and the hounds are in the game to teach that lesson to any who didn't learn it by 1000'. There are birth options to vary how smart monsters are, turning them all off should be plenty of nerfing.

[fizzix]

My sentiments exactly. The fact that so many are looking to nerf hounds is good reason to keep them exactly as they are. You're never going to be successful at Angband until you learn when to run, and the hounds are in the game to teach that lesson to any who didn't learn it by 1000'. There are birth options to vary how smart monsters are, turning them all off should be plenty of nerfing.

I don't follow that logic.

Again, it's not that the hounds are too hard (at least for me). It's that they are too annoying and not fun to deal with. If you want to teach the lesson of when to run, keep them the same but change their rarity. You'll still get that lesson, but you won't have to deal with it on *every* level.

The AI has very little effect to me on how annoying they are. They were annoying before, and they are annoying now too. Before it was hide in a corner and kill them 1 by 1. Now it's avoid them if they are in a room, find an alternate route, or have them follow you to another room and knight's-move them again.

It's all about maximizing fun. Threads like this are good ways to find out the certain aspects of the game that people don't find fun. Maybe there are people that really enjoy knight's-moving large groups of hounds individually. I'm not one of them.

[azfalt]

two comments on the hounds situation

1. They aren't so hard/annoying that they need to be nerfed.

Smart AI has made hounds easier to deal with actually, since they're such chickens now that it's easy to pick them off one by one... old-style hounds that chased you down long hallways were much scarier.

Early on, weak hounds are valuable XP. Hounds are fairly easy to avoid, as well. Just leave the level - there will be another vault soon... don't use teleport self as an escape at Gravity Hound depths... I have lost two mid-range characters this way. It was a lesson in using teleport level, or *destruct* for emergencies.

Lastly, priests and paladins do have extra difficulty with hounds since they're not evil, true, but I'd call this important for game balance. They already have such a breeze slaughtering low-level and mid-level evil creatures, that something has to exist to give them pause (and it's really pretty easy to just OoD them).

2. Cone style breath = YES

It sounds fun, and if we allow hounds to simply breathe through each other (I think they should), they'd be just as nasty as before. The chance to hit other monsters in the line of fire is very entertaining. I once had a pack of light hounds trash the Witch-King of Angmar for me, and I'd like to see more of that

This would also fit in with my other cause of "more interesting spell effects for mages" - cone attacks could be expanded to them, too.

[Atarlost]

One thing that may help is a cone breath that follows the inverse square law. That would make hounds at the back do less damage without doing none at all.

[Pete Mack]

Inverse square breat damage is a feature in some variants, notably npp. I liked it for a while, but it's just too easy to exploit. (smarter AI makes it pretty much a necesity, though.)

[Nightmarjoo]

This usually isn't a problem, because telepathy does detect them and because they bash down doors and such so sometimes you do get warning, and between CL 20 and CL 40 you can just assume every hallway has hounds until proven otherwise.

But I agree that hounds are not fun, they are often difficult to run from, and are not profitable to fight. In many cases, fighting hounds in fact causes a net loss, for minor exp gain. (The exception being dark/light/clear hounds which are just annoying bags of xp).

Acid hounds destroy armor/staves/scrolls/arrows
Fire hounds destroy scrolls/staves
Elec hounds kill wands and rods (MY LAST -teleOther!)
Cold hounds kill potions (Lost a potion of life to one, then found Nenya right after, lol)
Inertia/Gravity/Plasma/Impact/Chaos can screw you up fast
Nether/Ethereal often drain more xp than they give you
Aether hounds are a gamble, and one not worth taking.

Time hounds make you leave the level (if you're smart...) they are arguably the most dangerous non-unique in the game with few other challengers.

EDIT

Earth destroy potions on the ground, Vibration stun you (if no rSound) and our favorite Air Hounds make you want to reroll kobolds or play a pre r1678 to get the always rPoison on Aman/Elvenkind bug.

This! They don't even drop objects to make it worth while!

Maybe add a common scroll to game instead of nerfing the hounds: "Banish Hounds".

[TJS]

I agree with others that hounds are more annoying and boring than dangerous.

I don't mind genuine danger of death from teleporting into a pack of chaos hounds so much, because it is teaches you about the dangers of using teleportation, which is what Angband is about.

What annoys me is when you get loads and loads of hounds on every level, which you can usually deal with, but it just takes ages and is very very dull.

My solution would be to make them rarer and the packs smaller, but give them more HP and make their breaths much more powerful (and you get more xp for killing them).

So if you see a pack of fire hounds you'll really need to escape fast, especially if you haven't got rFire. Also it makes carrying swap rings of rFire/rCold etc. more worthwhile, since they are pretty much junk at the moment, because you don't need them until depths where you will probably get rBase from an item anyway.

While I'm at it, there are too many items which have rBase that it makes so many egos useless such as a robe of rAcid etc.
Perhaps some egos that have immunities, or can activate for double resistance would spice things up a bit?

[dhegler]

I just got back into Angband recently (seems like every few years I get a major itch for it)...

Hounds are annoying, that much we can agree one. Water Hounds are the most annoying hounds of all until about level 20 when you start to get resist acid or "cannot be harmed by the elements" equipment. I have only seen a few time hounds and they are now the most annoying. However, I seem to get 3-4 packs per level. Then, I see what should be relatively common creatures every 5 levels or so. I think the major problem is the repetition. Everyone has detection by the time they get dangerous enough to kill a character - at least I never found them that dangerous until levels 30-40 when you find vibration/inertia/gravity hounds when it is tough to find resists for them by that time. Why not make an average of 1 pack per level, or 1 pack per 2 levels? That seems to be the easiest solution...

Is there any chance it could be programmed to give a breath a 25% chance of being "blocked" by a creature it needs to pass by? It makes no sense that my arrows/bolts can't get by a hound, but their breath can go through an entire pack of 12 down a hallway.

[pav]

While I'm at it, there are too many items which have rBase that it makes so many egos useless such as a robe of rAcid etc.
Perhaps some egos that have immunities, or can activate for double resistance would spice things up a bit?

All you need is to introduce percentile resistances that add up.

Ey had them. Great times.