Trolls and regen

[ZenDragon]

I don't know if this has been covered before, I couldn't find it anywhere.

Does Regen stack if playing a half-troll and wearing an "regen

[Derakon]

No. Regeneration is either on or off; there are no degrees of strength for it.

[Magnate]

No. Regeneration is either on or off; there are no degrees of strength for it.

Yet.











(filler spoils effect)

[Derakon]

Oooh, can we split it into mana and HP regen too?

[Magnate]

Oooh, can we split it into mana and HP regen too?

http://trac.rephial.org/ticket/1182

[Derakon]

Well, here's a rough patch to split regen into HP and mana regen. There's three main problems I see with it:

* I had to push "impair mana regen" off of the character screen to make room for the new flag. No idea what the proper action is here, since there's quite literally no room for more flags. Add a second page with just one flag?
* It breaks savefile compatibility since the flags have been shuffled around (I used up TR2_XXX5 and TR2_XXX6 and created TR2_XXX1)
* object.txt, ego_item.txt, artifact.txt, and p_race.txt are all broken now because the REGEN flag is invalid, replaced by REGEN_HP and REGEN_MANA.

I've only done very rudimentary testing -- I switched all REGEN to REGEN_HP to fix the object file incompatibility, created a new amulet of "mental regeneration", rolled up a high-elven ranger, punted him to level 50, and generated both regen amulets. With bodily regeneration he gets ~4HP/round and 1SP/round, with mental regeneration he gets ~2HP/round and 2SP/round. A half-troll warrior gets ~5HP/round; a half-troll priest gets ~5HP/round and ~.66SP/round. I think half-troll priests just got a lot less viable.

The patch is based off of the downloadable 3.1.2v2 source from oook, not the nightly. Sorry. I should've thought about that before starting work...

[Pete Mack]

I have to say, but I hate the idea of two different regenerations.

What you are really doing is making warriors and Half-Trolls relatively weaker, apparently just to be mean. (Just what we need, another flag that half-trolls need to be other than useless for spell-casting, and is utterly useless for warriors, even though it increases the valuation of randarts.)

Edit:
To paraphrase somebody or other. I'll keep my single regen flag. You can keep the change.

[TJS]

I have to say, but I hate the idea of two different regenerations.

What you are really doing is making warriors and Half-Trolls relatively weaker, apparently just to be mean. (Just what we need, another flag that half-trolls need to be other than useless for spell-casting, and is utterly useless for warriors, even though it increases the valuation of randarts.)

Edit:
To paraphrase somebody or other. I'll keep my single regen flag. You can keep the change.

Who is to say that half-trolls won't be given regen for both types?

I like the change and think it will make equipment/class/race choices even more interesting which has to be a good thing.

[Derakon]

I have to say, but I hate the idea of two different regenerations.

What you are really doing is making warriors and Half-Trolls relatively weaker, apparently just to be mean.

Yes, this does mean that there's a chance for warriors to get items with a useless-to-them SP regen ability. Making a challenge class harder does not bug me very much, especially since the change makes for interesting decisions for every single other class. Though I still think that warriors could use a boost in other ways.

As for half-trolls, well, it always struck me as absurd that they have incredible mental restoration abilities. Hitpoint regeneration is quite powerful enough on its own. They won't be bad priests now, but they will be reliant on their physical abilities for longer.

Personally, what I suspect will happen is that SP regen will be rather more rare than HP regen. Then give inherent SP regen to gnomes and they suddenly become much more interesting as casters.

[d_m]

Yes, this does mean that there's a chance for warriors to get items with a useless-to-them SP regen ability. Making a challenge class harder does not bug me very much, especially since the change makes for interesting decisions for every single other class. Though I still think that warriors could use a boost in other ways.

I don't think Warriors should be a "challenge" class. I think that even though all other classes get spells, warriors should be considered the "default". Some classes (ranger) are a lot easier than warrior and some (mage) are probably a bit harder. But I think that changes which make the game significantly worse for warriors should be avoided, even if it benefits casters.

Warrior is a good introduction to the game for new players who won't understand the magic system, spells, etc as well. Warrior also has a (potentially) more straightforward play style than a priest or mage. Finally, warriors don't have any significant kinds of abilities which other classes can't get (unlike spells) so gameplay which is interesting for warriors benefits all classes (unlike adding a priest spell which benefits 1-2 classes only, or adding a mage spell which benefits 1-3 classes).

I actually kind of want to remove the "Satisfy Hunger" spell for this reason. Right now food is basically just a penalty for playing a Warrior (or being low level). Either it's an interesting problem (and everyone should do it) or it's tedious (in which case warriors shouldn't need to be the only ones annoyed by it).

There are already a bunch of items out there that are useless to warriors (!mana, mushrooms of debility, _magi) so I'm not sure if this change is as bad as Pete says. It means that 50% of the current regeneration items a warrior finds now won't be useful, and the other half will be the same. But it also means that each regeneration item casters find is only 50% as good as it was previously. So it sort of nerfs regen across the board.

But I disagree that non-spell casters are an outlier which can be dismissed or ignored.

EDIT: fixed some grammar mistakes.

[PowerDiver]

I actually kind of want to remove the "Satisfy Hunger" spell for this reason. Right now food is basically just a penalty for playing a Warrior (or being low level). Either it's an interesting problem (and everyone should do it) or it's tedious (in which case warriors shouldn't need to be the only ones annoyed by it).

I agree 100%, except that I would word it differently. Scrolls of satisfy hunger are not a problem. The problem is that the spell is in books that spellcasters always carry. The spell does not need to be removed from the game, just removed from the books.

I have been playing for a few months with the restriction of never casting satisfy hunger from a book. Unfortunately, I believe my play style means that my experience with this is of dubious value generalizing to others.

Food was originally, i.e. in the very first roguelike, introduced to force diving over level clearing. Limited amount of food per game means you cannot afford long fight-a-bit-then-rest-and-repeat tactics. Since the intent has been removed, I think the mechanic should be removed as well.

[PowerDiver]

Who is to say that half-trolls won't be given regen for both types?

Care to place a wager? It sounds to me as if the reason this was introduced is that someone didn't think trolls should regen mana.

After all, 2 half-trolls listed in the top 50 mages on the angband ladder is far too many. Such a travesty needs to be addressed.

We should also give high-elf mages an extra boost to make sure the proportion never gets this close again.

[nullfame]

I actually kind of want to remove the "Satisfy Hunger" spell for this reason. Right now food is basically just a penalty for playing a Warrior (or being low level). Either it's an interesting problem (and everyone should do it) or it's tedious (in which case warriors shouldn't need to be the only ones annoyed by it).

For me food wasn't a substantial penalty playing a warrior. By the time I can recall at will I could just gorge in the town, fuel lantern to 15000, and carry neither food nor oil. In practice I carried a ration and dropped it in the dungeon, or gorged again when safe. I found I wanted to sell/stash in the town more often than I got hungry.

I don't mean to speak a heresy, but why not just eliminate food/hunger? In the early game food is cheap and you don't need the slot, soon most classes have ready access to the spell, the rest can follow the mechanic I prescribe.

[Pete Mack]

@Eddie--
nobody is going quite so far as that. The only proposal of the sort I saw here was to nerf H-T casters a bit more and to give an extra bump to gnome mages. Giving the bump to High-Elf Mage really is a step too far.

[bron]

why not just eliminate food/hunger?

The suggestion has been made before. Food is only really an issue in an Ironman game, and even then mostly just for Warriors. I support the idea: unlike the original Rogue (where dying of starvation was a very real possibility), food is just an annoyance in Angband.