on heavy curses

[PowerDiver]

Noone like my idea for using rare enchant scrolls to break heavy curses?

How does that help if the heavily cursed item already has maximum plusses? Also, it cannot be too rare. If you want to wait for a rare consumable in these days of too few consumables being dropped, there's already ?*REMOVE_CURSE, but I expect to find 30 artifacts before I find my first one of those.

[TJS]

How does that help if the heavily cursed item already has maximum plusses? Also, it cannot be too rare. If you want to wait for a rare consumable in these days of too few consumables being dropped, there's already ?*REMOVE_CURSE, but I expect to find 30 artifacts before I find my first one of those.

You must have missed my earlier post which says make heavily cursed items all have negative to-hit and/or to-damage values. So you break the curse by enchanting them above zero.

By rare I mean enchant scrolls in general should be made rarer and more powerful ie. they shouldn't be in large stacks in shops, but still found here and there in the dungeon a bit like ?WoR say.

So for heavily cursed items you can use ?*Remove Curse*, ?*Enchant* or a couple of ?Enchant

As a side note I think consumables should be made a little more common in general perhaps (especially if you find 30 artifacts before a particular type of scroll).

[TJS]

I don't think no-one likes the idea - it's just that it's the kind of idea which is trickier to implement than the alternative (which is to give existing enchantment scrolls a chance to break curses which is separate from their enchantment process). Personally I prefer your idea - but it means creating a whole new scroll type, coding a new effect etc. etc. See the bug tracker for more on this.

Ah right fair enough, I guess all changes are work for someone. Perhaps I could get involved in the coding side of things, although I'm not the best coder. I might make a mini-variant to practice first.

[Netbrian]

I enjoy level-clearing (at least until hounds start showing up), and would love to see heavy curses go. At best, it's an irritation, at worst, it's frustrating, but it never really adds much to the game. If we want to make the game harder, at least make it harder in more interesting ways.

In any event, my proposal would be to remove them altogether.

[d_m]

In the bold tradition of acting unilaterally, I have (with at least some blessing from Takkaria) decoupled the enchanting and the curse-breaking power of the "Enchant X" and "*Enchant X*" scrolls.

As of right now in HEAD, each basic enchantment scroll read on an item has a 20% chance of breaking a curse (if present) regardless of whether the item's bonus goes up (or even if it is able to go up). This chance (like the chance to enchant successfully) is halved for artifacts to 10%. The greater enchantment scrolls get to make multiple tries to uncurse in the same way they make multiple tries to enchant.

Since the curse-breaking power of these scrolls already existed, it didn't seem like too big a jump to make it more generally useful. Magnate, apologies for changing direction on this after our IRC discussion, but I was thinking about it tonight and I think (hope? foolishly believe?) this change won't be that controversial.

Get it while it's hot at r1766!

[Magnate]

In the bold tradition of acting unilaterally, I have (with at least some blessing from Takkaria) decoupled the enchanting and the curse-breaking power of the "Enchant X" and "*Enchant X*" scrolls.

As of right now in HEAD, each basic enchantment scroll read on an item has a 20% chance of breaking a curse (if present) regardless of whether the item's bonus goes up (or even if it is able to go up). This chance (like the chance to enchant successfully) is halved for artifacts to 10%. The greater enchantment scrolls get to make multiple tries to uncurse in the same way they make multiple tries to enchant.

Since the curse-breaking power of these scrolls already existed, it didn't seem like too big a jump to make it more generally useful. Magnate, apologies for changing direction on this after our IRC discussion, but I was thinking about it tonight and I think (hope? foolishly believe?) this change won't be that controversial.

Get it while it's hot at r1766!

Nicely done.

[Philip]

So, this thread has tuned into war between divers and level-clearers because of a suggestion by Eddie to do something to benefit both sides.
Anyway, i'm kind of a part diver. In the beginning i go pretty deep and take most stairs if not on a very good or better level. Deeper it turns into superb and better and then special. But, not to go off topic.
Because we have ID-by-use i think heavy curses should be toned down but not removed. It should not be deadly (morgul weapons) nor should there be a scroll that renders anything useless. Someone will say (I predict Eddie.) that it does not make an item useless, nor does it end the game (Eddie's paladin). Heavy curses should be like the previous cursed stuff.
Exception: Mormegil, and the other cursed artifacts. And remove *Remove Curse* and make Remove curse rarer but availible (for around 300 in the temple every so often).

[bebo]

In the bold tradition of acting unilaterally, I have (with at least some blessing from Takkaria) decoupled the enchanting and the curse-breaking power of the "Enchant X" and "*Enchant X*" scrolls.

As of right now in HEAD, each basic enchantment scroll read on an item has a 20% chance of breaking a curse (if present) regardless of whether the item's bonus goes up (or even if it is able to go up). This chance (like the chance to enchant successfully) is halved for artifacts to 10%. The greater enchantment scrolls get to make multiple tries to uncurse in the same way they make multiple tries to enchant.

Since the curse-breaking power of these scrolls already existed, it didn't seem like too big a jump to make it more generally useful. Magnate, apologies for changing direction on this after our IRC discussion, but I was thinking about it tonight and I think (hope? foolishly believe?) this change won't be that controversial.

Get it while it's hot at r1766!

Good - as a side note I'd like to ask if it's possible to update the scroll description to reflect the new probabilities in some way.

I'm not good at reading code though, so I guesss I'll have to ask here - does this 20%/10% chance also work on heavy curses or only on normal ones? Because if it doesn't I'd imagine we're ignoring the bigger part of the problem

- not that I'm suggesting to make a *remove curse* effect as common as a normal remove curse one. Maybe we could reduce the probabilities to 10%/5% ?

[the Invisible Stalker]

Identify by use

It wasn't my intent to start a fight between divers and level clearers, particularly when I, like the people who seem to be objecting to what I wrote, am a diver. My point was that the game is most fun when the decisions are not obvious. I think people are perhaps confusing two possible meanings of "identify by use". One meaning is that using things enables you to identify them, more or less. This was the single biggest recent change, except for the dubious change to the level of drops, and it's one I support. The other meaning is that using things is *the* way to identify them. I don't like that because it removes an interesting choice. I think testing an item, especially by wearing or wielding it, is something you should be forced to think about carefully. Can I live with the curse until it can be removed? Do I really need a better item in that slot? Would this item be worth it if it's ego or artifact? Can I wait for pseudo-id? I want the answers to these questions to matter.

[Philip]

It wasn't my intent to start a fight between divers and level clearers, particularly when I, like the people who seem to be objecting to what I wrote, am a diver.

I was talking mostly about Rizwan.

[d_m]

Good - as a side note I'd like to ask if it's possible to update the scroll description to reflect the new probabilities in some way.

I'm not good at reading code though, so I guesss I'll have to ask here - does this 20%/10% chance also work on heavy curses or only on normal ones? Because if it doesn't I'd imagine we're ignoring the bigger part of the problem

- not that I'm suggesting to make a *remove curse* effect as common as a normal remove curse one. Maybe we could reduce the probabilities to 10%/5% ?

Enchant X scrolls have always had the same chance to break normal and heavy curses (but not permanent curses, obviously). The change I made doesn't affect this. If this change ends up being "over-powered" then I'd certainly consider making those probabilities different.

[Rizwan]

I was talking mostly about Rizwan.

It was not my intention to start a fight either. What it seemed to me was that curses were being increased (in number and/or severity ) with a reduction in means to avoid/recover from those curses (making ?id and ?remove curse and ?*remove curse* scarcer). Because my enjoyment from this great game comes from finding the best gear (non cursed) and using that to kill monsters.

Edit: And if you see my previous post I have nothing against cursed artifacts, in fact the more the merrier, just don't expect me to use them. I like my artifacts squeaky clean

[PowerDiver]

Enchant X scrolls have always had the same chance to break normal and heavy curses (but not permanent curses, obviously). The change I made doesn't affect this. If this change ends up being "over-powered" then I'd certainly consider making those probabilities different.

Over-powered? Did you calculate how many enchant scrolls it takes to get to 99% likely to break the curse? This is a game of tail probabilities on bad effects, not average probabilities. There is a noticeable difference between .8^n and .75^n.

I could well be wrong, but I thought In the old days, it was 50% to break a curse. Then it dropped to 25%. Now down to 20%. Getting the benefit before you enchant up to 0 makes up for a lot, but it doesn't help at all on the items you would have disenchanted down to 0.

I will still have to save all id scrolls to use on scrolls, but at least this was a step in the right direction.

[Philip]

It was not my intention to start a fight either. What it seemed to me was that curses were being increased (in number and/or severity ) with a reduction in means to avoid/recover from those curses (making ?id and ?remove curse and ?*remove curse* scarcer). Because my enjoyment from this great game comes from finding the best gear (non cursed) and using that to kill monsters.

Edit: And if you see my previous post I have nothing against cursed artifacts, in fact the more the merrier, just don't expect me to use them. I like my artifacts squeaky clean

And indeed am i sorry for accusing you. I merely thought that there should probably be a different thread for rebalancing between level-clearing and diving. And i
agree with most of what you said.

[d_m]

Over-powered? Did you calculate how many enchant scrolls it takes to get to 99% likely to break the curse? This is a game of tail probabilities on bad effects, not average probabilities. There is a noticeable difference between .8^n and .75^n.

I could well be wrong, but I thought In the old days, it was 50% to break a curse. Then it dropped to 25%. Now down to 20%. Getting the benefit before you enchant up to 0 makes up for a lot, but it doesn't help at all on the items you would have disenchanted down to 0.

I will still have to save all id scrolls to use on scrolls, but at least this was a step in the right direction.

Prepare for a gigantic math post!

You forgot that the chance was multiplied by the chance to enchant successfully, since a failed enchant will never break a curse.

Before r1766 your chance to break a curse assuming you already succeeded on enchanting (and that the bonus was greater than zero) was 25%. So when enchanting up from negatives, your odds were 100% to enchant multiplied by 0% to break curse. After that you got 15 chances to break a curse going from +0 up to +15, with probabilities from 25% down to 0.025% (half that for artifacts).

Currently, your chance to break is 20% unconditionally (10% for artifacts). While being 99% sure to break a curse on Calris still takes 40 enchant attempts (with *Enchants* giving you 4 tries on average), the math was much worse before, even when disenchanting. I think it took more than 200 tries to even be guaranteed a 98% chance to uncurse a basic item (artifacts are obviously twice as hard). Also, if you succeeded in enchanting but failed to uncurse, your odds get much worse (at +9 you only have a 2.5% chance to even enchant an artifact, which gets you a 0.625% chance to uncurse at that point).

The math on calculating the exact odds is tricky because of how the table affects the probabilities... I wrote a program to figure it out which I can share if you're interested. The cases that are worse for artifacts in the new system are when an artifact is between +0 and +4, where each attempt in the old system has a 10-12.5% chance (versus a straight 10% in the new). Before that it's impossible and after that it gets much harder much faster.

That said, I'm not ideologically opposed to 25% and 12.5% either, I just wanted to show off my stupid calculations.