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I've been playing a fair bit of Angband the last several weeks and have been playing 4.2.X off and on since it came out. I've only been playing Ranger in hopes of finding bonker launchers (which I haven't found since an early 4.2.X version where I found an x6 +30 bow with cold brand and X7 +27 xbow on the same level while playing a Mage). Here are my thoughts on Rangers:
Stone to Mud spell is overpowered. More than any other thing in the game this is the one thing that cheapens my overall experience of replaying Angband a lot (particularly in the latter half of the game when my mana pool is plenty for abusing LOS corridors). It means that most of the dangerous foes I fight I have little to no interaction with. They die on their way to me in the diagonal, asymmetrical line of sight corridor I've made for them. A simple fix to me would be to make the spell cost around 50 mana or so instead of 5. This would make potions of restore mana more relevant to Rangers (at present, they are almost useless to a high level Ranger). It would also mean at least *sometimes* you'd run into difficulty using the diagonal method to kill dangerous enemies.
Slow monster wand/rods: I wonder if these items cheapen the overall experience of Angband? I think these items are really fun in the early game when you're happy for any kind of help you can find to progress, but part of me feels like their usefulness should start falling off once more dangerous enemies of a native depth of DL40 and deeper start to appear; and that they should be useless against greater enemies of the deep. Maybe then I'd actually have a use for the cure black breath spell Rangers get. But more importantly, the reason the early developers of Angband had speed increases drop off after +30 is to ensure the player can't get too much faster than the fastest enemies (like Morgoth). Slow monster makes it so you can trivialize most enemies in the game if you have +30 speed. Is this making the game too easy? (Though I have noticed it doesn't seem to affect "Incredibly fast" monsters very much, so that is good). It also means that you always slow monster before any important fight. This introduces a repeated action to the player that doesn't require any skill or thought (and so adds some tedium to the game). Although I suppose I could just squelch slow monster items once I reach DL50.
Random Artifact type distribution: It seems that all of my games there are sooo many amulet artifacts. Maybe their frequency should be reduced slightly?
Also, I think speed items are too common. Maybe the game shouldn't have both an overabundance of speed items and slow monster items?
It would be fun for me if there was an option in the start of the game settings to increase home inventory at the cost of the game being more difficult. Say... for each increase in inventory space all uniques get +10 % hit points. So if I got +3 inventory space in my home then all the enemies would have +30% hitpoints.
That or make a special part in the home for ammo. Half the inventory space of my home is taken up by ammo at the end of the game.
Or... maybe an option to upgrade the home for 100,000 gold pieces giving +1 to inventory. To upgrade to +2 to inventory would cost an additional 300,000 and to upgrade further to +3 would cost an additional 600,000. And the final upgrade to +4 would cost an additional 1 million.
Stone to Mud spell is overpowered. More than any other thing in the game this is the one thing that cheapens my overall experience of replaying Angband a lot (particularly in the latter half of the game when my mana pool is plenty for abusing LOS corridors). It means that most of the dangerous foes I fight I have little to no interaction with. They die on their way to me in the diagonal, asymmetrical line of sight corridor I've made for them. A simple fix to me would be to make the spell cost around 50 mana or so instead of 5. This would make potions of restore mana more relevant to Rangers (at present, they are almost useless to a high level Ranger). It would also mean at least *sometimes* you'd run into difficulty using the diagonal method to kill dangerous enemies.
Slow monster wand/rods: I wonder if these items cheapen the overall experience of Angband? I think these items are really fun in the early game when you're happy for any kind of help you can find to progress, but part of me feels like their usefulness should start falling off once more dangerous enemies of a native depth of DL40 and deeper start to appear; and that they should be useless against greater enemies of the deep. Maybe then I'd actually have a use for the cure black breath spell Rangers get. But more importantly, the reason the early developers of Angband had speed increases drop off after +30 is to ensure the player can't get too much faster than the fastest enemies (like Morgoth). Slow monster makes it so you can trivialize most enemies in the game if you have +30 speed. Is this making the game too easy? (Though I have noticed it doesn't seem to affect "Incredibly fast" monsters very much, so that is good). It also means that you always slow monster before any important fight. This introduces a repeated action to the player that doesn't require any skill or thought (and so adds some tedium to the game). Although I suppose I could just squelch slow monster items once I reach DL50.
Random Artifact type distribution: It seems that all of my games there are sooo many amulet artifacts. Maybe their frequency should be reduced slightly?
Also, I think speed items are too common. Maybe the game shouldn't have both an overabundance of speed items and slow monster items?
It would be fun for me if there was an option in the start of the game settings to increase home inventory at the cost of the game being more difficult. Say... for each increase in inventory space all uniques get +10 % hit points. So if I got +3 inventory space in my home then all the enemies would have +30% hitpoints.
That or make a special part in the home for ammo. Half the inventory space of my home is taken up by ammo at the end of the game.
Or... maybe an option to upgrade the home for 100,000 gold pieces giving +1 to inventory. To upgrade to +2 to inventory would cost an additional 300,000 and to upgrade further to +3 would cost an additional 600,000. And the final upgrade to +4 would cost an additional 1 million.