experimenting

[PowerDiver]

I've been playing with several gameplay changes for a while now, long enough to form opinions.

I prefer to do damage via melee, and the game is completely broken. Even with my chars optimized for melee, more than half the time they were doing more damage with a ranged attack for noticeable stretches of the game. This is gross.

My first mod was to double the class multipliers and raise the minimum weight to 100 lbs/10. This was a decent change to melee, perhaps even a little too much for game balance, but it still was not enough. Ranged attacks were still better too often for my tastes. My second mod was to swap the early egos so that good ones such as power were melee egos, and the junk slays were ranged. Finally my melee attacks were consistently better than ranged. Blessed launchers also give the melee player a chance at a random protection from the (b) slot. This is not the right final solution, but it is a whole lot better IMO.

There are some old things that were always stupid and just need to go. I removed curses from object creation entirely, and made aggravation have no effect. Both changes reduce junk, and I haven't missed having those effects one iota(*). These are trivial changes that improve the game. (*) Well, I might have missed the no-teleport curse for a swap item, but squelching is completely inadequate so even when I might have been interested I never saw the rune because such items were squelched.

My next change is for the moment just play style, as I haven't worked out how to code it. I only use teleport other on adjacent monsters. Teleport other is way too powerful, and even with this change it is still uber powerful, but at least there is some danger. Also, if the emperor Q is down a long straight passage in a vault, maybe there's nothing you can do. An unbreachable vault on rare occasions is a good thing IMO.

I didn't know how easy it was to increase the home until ewert's recent post. I changed the setting to 240 slots as suggested, and the game is much better. I used to obsess about which items to throw away, but truthfully the items I saved never really mattered that much. Now I just keep everything until it is completely obviously pointless. This is a lot more fun, and keeps the game moving when it used to get bogged down.

[PowerWyrm]

For me the main issue with game balance is not melee vs range but melee vs magic. In late game it's not uncommon to find a weapon that deals 600-800 damage over 5+ blows with usually around 5% chance to miss each blow. If you consider the most damaging spell in the game (Mana Storm), it does only 400 damage per round with a 14% chance of failure. Plus it costs SP to cast, while swinging a melee weapon is totally free. If I have time I would experiment with the following: up the damage of spells to roughly match melee output at their level, decrease (or sometimes increase) failure chance so it's around 5% when the spell becomes commonly used, and add a "stamina" bar for melee (in the vein of what is done in Dark Souls) to reflect "fatigue" when using a melee weapon, forcing you to wait before you're able to use melee again.

[Estie]

It has always been a feature of Angband that classes had few restrictions to the different ways of dealing damage. Fighters have used bows as much as swords and while mages and priests used to be the only classes with access to relevant spell damage, it was always supplementary to other forms, be it melee or ranged. Likewise, rangers are often better with swords than bows, depending on what they find.

Changing that to the point were a class is best served by specializing in one form to the detriment of others would be against doctrine; that being said, have you played blackguard ? You dont specify which class you use and blackguards are terrible at ranged and, once their spells kick in, have mechanics somewhat akin to a melee resource.

Edit: I forgot to mention the 4th way of dealing damage, devices. The same applies: everyone has access and there is never a game without a phase where using them is the best option.

[PowerDiver]

My problem is not about classes per se. I find shooting and then picking up ammo to be tedious. Ranged attacks have *so* many advantages that they should be significantly weaker than melee, but that's a different discussion. It's also about canon. Gandalf fought the balrog with a sword. But I digress.

When I say specialized in melee, I meant less about class and more about items. Carrying 3 melee weapons with different slays, wearing two rings that best help melee, dwarven armor etc, doing everything possible to favor melee over ranged, and still it isn't even close.

Blackguards are really broken. Do you know the key to playing a blackguard for the first 30 levels? Find a good sling [or other launcher, but usually a sling]. That's for a class that was described as one to embrace heavy weapons. Blackguards break doctrine in multiple ways worse than what I am doing.

Anyway, my post is for other players who might to make these sorts of mods. They are pretty easy to do, and I can't be the only person who thinks the blows table is utterly stupid.

[Sky]

.. did we not already have this discussion, idk like 5 years ago, and we covered these exact same things?

Ranged is .. good in some ways. Against a single target it's almost always better than melee, because of the damage, because of the fact that you don't take damage, because ammo is cheap and potions are not endless. But as a ranger, once you get down deep, arrows become precious, and there's a ton of mobs that exist for the sole purpose of breaking stuff on the ground. A dumb plasma vortex, a fire hound, a baby dragon, a xorn, an acid dragonfly, just waiting with glee to burn the stack of arrows you have dumped on the ground.

Also, let's say as a warrior, with a nice crossbow of the haradrim, well that's another 20lbs. of weight just for the weapon, and then there's the ammo. Same for the stones if you are using a sling.
If you're not a fighting class, your to-hit will be abysmal, as well.

Arrows break. The good ones. The bad ones from the shop who cares, provided that you're not on a level with your first artifact and you're down to your last 20.

If you shoot a mob with magic, you can run away, rest, and come back and shoot it some more. You cannot do the same if you run out of arrows - resting does not recover your arrows, and your arrows are now on the floor next to that mob you couldn't kill.

Melee weapons have slays.

it's rare for a ranged weapon to do more than 300 damage on endgame (assuming you still got empty inventory slots for holding ammo), while melee will do 450 and over.

I mean .. nothing that you described is "wrong". Wands are weak, but they are disposable. Ranged often is something supplementary to your main attack, even Mages with Chaos Blast will often run out of mana before they have killed a high unique, but can finish them off with a stack of good ammo. It's all part of the many tools of the game.

oh and Bard shot down a dragon with an arrow. there's that.

[PowerDiver]

Tweaking the blows calculation makes very little difference in the end game. Melee vs ranged after stat gain is an entirely different discussion. I am aware no one wants me to argue about that.

I felt it necessary to make the changes to blows, for my personal enjoyment, because even if I screwed my mid-game by putting all initial stat points into Str and Dex at the cost of Con, choosing always to equip items just for melee at the cost of protections and/or resists, I might have significant stretches of the game where fighting an adjacent monster 1-on-1, it was better to use my sling than to use the best melee weapon I had found.

[ewert]

Hmm. I sort of agree with some points:

Melee is a bit lackluster before stat gain unless you find a really good light weapon artifact. Whereas a single sling of power is enough and if you find shots of ego damage type, man it is nuts, and it's not as rare as a good light weapon. I am thinking maybe increasing str based damage bonuses earlier, reducing the range of negative armor from the reckless attack rings (would have to check the damage range). Maybe make +damage stat also boost chance of crits for heavy weapons on top of the weight bonus to crits? Something to change the ratio of attacks to damage with heavier weapons. Making ?enchant weapons more plentiful crossed my mind, but unfortunately would make the ranged option even easier I think...

After stat gain finding that decent weapon is more likely, but it is again more needed for damage than it is with ranged options. By that point a spellcaster is practically unlimited "ammo", no fail chance to speak of, consistent damage. You will struggle with spells with some classes due to damage types until you find good dungeon books, but I think that is a fair limitation. Also spells never get into the same thing I can do with melee where I just -tunnel a anti LOS zigzag and melee a whole bunch of dragons/whatevs with minimal time used.

I feel that if you use armor stacking, confusion, stun, protection from evil and slows as long as you have that decent weapon melee is good from quite early. However for spells/bows you need none of that, just ?Phase, and it's mostly fine even with a basic ego launcher and 0/0 ammo. So the requirement criteria is lopsided.

I see the point of making tele other a touch spell/wand/rod. Would actually make me wanna carry banishment scrolls before end game fights. Heck, I didn't even use any in my latest winner (pure melee warrior pretty much, only extremely rarely used ranged for things like small Q stuff annoyances). I agree it invalidates the need for most of the other non-destructive forms of CC.

[Sky]

Angband does have the problem that medium-weight weapons are useless early on, at least for warriors (priests and mages still only get 1 blow so using a maul is an advantage over a dagger). But a ring of STR +3 and a ring of damage +8 should be easy to find by DL25, and maybe a couple of potions of Brawn, just to go over 18/0. You'll need that also if you want to dig stone, which you'll want .. before that, you're carrying a ring of Digging as a swap, yet another slot taken.

Stat gain is a fundamental step towards the endgame. Any reasonable player will stay on DL35 until they have gone over 18/0 in their primary stats. If that's what we're talking about, then a longbow of power isn't that much better when your hit chance is that low, and you only have basic arrows. It's certainly nice to have one, but it's not that much better than a rapier with cold brand.

.. i mean .. potions of Mana cost just a measly 1000g from the black market. a mage with 2 rings of escaping, a stack of scrolls of phase, and magic missile, can do much more damage than a warrior with a longbow +13 and two stacks of store arrows.