Questions from an old timer getting back into the game

[Worblehat]

I played Angband a lot back in the '90s and '00s (won once with a dwarf paladin). Wow, a lot has changed! So far there's a lot I like, some things that just seem weird (blackguards and necromancers - everyone else is trying to kill the Big Bad, these guys are ... "aggressively negotiating" for a promotion, I guess?), and plenty that's just different. I'm hoping I can ask questions here to avoid fatal discoveries in game.

Are there still instadeath consumables, or is it safe to "try it and find out" with potions and scrolls? I've already lost out on !augmentation and ?acquirement since I donated them to the shops and didn't have the money to buy them back (the new-to-me system of not selling loot for money took some getting used to but I kind of like it now). On the other hand I'm pretty sure there used to be a Potion of Death, or maybe it was a mushroom, back in the day.

What changes from how things worked ~20 years ago could kill my character now? Sorry, open ended question and depends on people knowing how the game has changed, so maybe this isn't answerable. I saw something in another thread about the Nazgul having something called black breath now? That didn't used to be a thing, is obviously canonical, and sounds dangerous. Is there some resistance to prioritize before I start seeing those guys? I remember endgame involving careful juggling of resistances, since any unresisted damage type was a potential instadeath.

Is it my imagination, or are artifacts rarer now? I'm around 1400', character level 28 or 29, and I just have the Phial, Hithlomir, and Narthanc. Perhaps my memory is misleading me, but I thought characters at this level already had quite a few more artifacts than that in the old days. Most of my equipment seems pretty underwhelming, though I'm doing just fine (high elf mage, sadly I'll never cast from Raal's Tome of Destruction though I'm sure one of the reworked spellbooks has the same functionality) with spells for offense and with Hithlomir covering the basic resistances.

Thanks. I'll post more questions as they occur to me.

[Cryomaniac]

I'm not that familiar with modern base Angband version either (more of a Heng player), but from what I know, use-ID'ing is a lot safer in base Angband now - though stat drain still might occur.

[Nick]

ID by use is definitely safe, and mostly the best way to ID stuff. There's also been a smoothing out of difficulty down the dungeon, rather than most of the new monsters coming before level 50 and the remaining dungeon being more of the same. Artifact density I think is not too much changed, although there's been some back and forth on object allocation over time.

[PowerDiver]

There has been a long process of reducing instakills. E.g. when you descend a level, you are unlikely to be in LOS of a monster. ID-BY-USE is expected. I wish there was an option to make the best 5 or 10 objects known, as I hate losing a rare potion like Life to testing. There is a birth option to know all flavors you can use depending on your fancy.

ID-BY-USE is the biggest change. It is implemented generously, and you often learn things you might think you should not, like neutralize poison when not poisoned.

Another big change is that there is no trap detection, and searching bonuses matter. You can overcome the problem with Trap Immunity, but that rune is pretty rare.

There are new bigger badder dragons that are better avoided. They also summon, which is ridiculous. Summoning has been tweaked, but it is still out of control. I'm probably hallucinating, but the "summons some friends" seems much much worse than whatever e.g. priests would summon in the old days.

The second biggest change is that the useless spells work quite often now. Slow and Stun are particularly useful. Proper usage after you learn which monsters resist what makes the game a lot easier. Note that Slow needs a minimum of two uses to get to full power, and bleeds off continuously rather than just stopping after a fixed amount of time. Also note that slapping a sleeping monster with a Stun leaves it asleep, but using the lullaby Slow wakes it up.

Monster memory has been factored out of the savefile into lore.txt in .angband/Angband in my build. I think you can copy lib/gamedata/monster.txt to that file and get full monster memory if you like.

Thrown items are crazy now if they have an ego. You need to double check the descriptions. E.g. you probably do more damage throwing an ego sling stone compared to shooting it from a +5+5 sling.

[Worblehat]

Note that Slow needs a minimum of two uses to get to full power

Thanks everyone, much appreciated!

I thought searching was different, but seems to work well without having to manually do it. Like the identify rune system, it's different but seems beneficial overall once I got used to it.

Regarding the two uses of slow to reach full power, I tried the same idea with resistances, and indeed something seems to have happened. The resistance matrix on the character screen went from white + signs to green exclamation points in the affected types of resistance. Does that mean that double-resist X becomes immunity to X? That seems amazingly good, but I'm not sure what else it might mean. I remember immunity to acid was really precious (grumble grumble packs of water hounds grumble...). I'll see if I can find a safe way to experiment in-game...

And yes, Slow has been a key element since I found that wand! Annoying that a recharge eventually blew it up (inevitable, sooner or later) but thankfully the store had another for me when I was back in town. Mages certainly have a very productive relationship with wands, which I don't think I properly exploited in long-past mage attempts. I didn't get a lot of use out of Stun; it wasn't entirely clear what it did. I'd have expected it would render the target inactive for a few turns, but that did not appear to be the case when I tried it.

[PowerDiver]

And yes, Slow has been a key element since I found that wand! Annoying that a recharge eventually blew it up (inevitable, sooner or later) but thankfully the store had another for me when I was back in town.

The rules about stacking resistances have not changed. There is a darker green for immunities. There are vulnerabilities that override and cancel other resistances but do not override immunity. Those are marked with a minus.

If you really care about a wand that is commonly sold by the store, donate it and the shopkeeper will recharge it. Then buy it back. That works with slow monster.