Nightlies embark on long journey towards 3.3

[d_m]

Unrelatedly, nightlies should now provide more information on the birth screen.

At this point all the "useful" information about a race/class should be displayed. Feel free to chime in if you think important information is missing, with the caveat that there isn't very much space, and that detailed explanations should probably go in help files (internal or external).

[Derakon]

Magnate: aww, I'm not flawless in your eyes any more?

Triiva note: artifacts didn't used to have implicit immunity to degradation from acid attacks. That was only granted to items that provided acid resistance. Thus the acid resistance on many armors that don't otherwise give basic 4 resists. Oddly enough, despite this acid resistance is the second-rarest of the basic 4 in artifact.txt (32/38/43/48 electricity/acid/cold/fire).

[bulian]

I thought the idea was to make 3.3 harder. If you really want these scrolls, remove rDisenchant from the player and make it item specific, so e.g. the AC on gil-galad can't be reduced. I personally thought the acid damage to artifacts bug from that one pre 3.2 nightly made the game more interesting.

[Magnate]

Okay, what's the problem with disenchanters that we're trying to solve? The only one I can think of is that they're unfairly penalizing players who haven't memorized who all the disenchanters are. This gets back to the whole monster memory thing. So here's my proposal: when the player is hit by a disenchantment attack, they get a message "A cloud of static builds up around you!" and nothing else happens. This sets a timer to 100 normal-speed turns or so. If the player is hit by another disenchantment attack before the timer expires, then the disenchantment goes through (and the timer goes back to 100 turns).

In other words, this gives the player a one-attack warning that the monster can disenchant. The big problem I see with it is that it effectively nerfs the rare breathers, since they're unlikely to breathe more than once before dying.

Leaving aside the metagaming issue, the problem is that people's gaming experience is spoiled by having their lovely hard-won artifact (or gloves of power, or whatever) disenchanted. Enabling them to repair that with a (very rare) scroll was the idea behind introducing the item.

I'm still not really sure what I think about this. The above solution seems unnecessarily complicated (I think it's the first time I've ever read an idea of Derakon's and not immediately thought "yes!") ... I think I like Eddie's idea of artifacts ignoring disen, leaving it as permanent damage for ego items. If we go that route I vote it should affect ego jewelry as well - and pvals ...

[PowerDiver]

I'm with Eddie here, repair is bad thing. Disenchantment is not broken, no need to nerf it.

If it is not broken, don't fix it.

I actually see the point of nerfing disenchantment. I'm in favor 1 day in 5 when I wonder how the artifacts ever survived to the current day without having been ruined by some clueless adventurer in the past.

However, if disenchanting artifacts is ever decided to be truly broken, just fix it cleanly. All these complications with repair_item are completely bogus. If you don't want disen to ruin artifacts, then give them IGNORE_DISEN the same way they ignore all of the base elements.

[Derakon]

Okay, what's the problem with disenchanters that we're trying to solve? The only one I can think of is that they're unfairly penalizing players who haven't memorized who all the disenchanters are. This gets back to the whole monster memory thing. So here's my proposal: when the player is hit by a disenchantment attack, they get a message "A cloud of static builds up around you!" and nothing else happens. This sets a timer to 100 normal-speed turns or so. If the player is hit by another disenchantment attack before the timer expires, then the disenchantment goes through (and the timer goes back to 100 turns).

In other words, this gives the player a one-attack warning that the monster can disenchant. The big problem I see with it is that it effectively nerfs the rare breathers, since they're unlikely to breathe more than once before dying.

[fizzix]

My suggestion would be to have:

1 no enchanting scrolls in town
2 repair item is removed but instead enchanting scrolls are very often successful at enchanting to the original bonuses.
3 Enchant to-hit and to-dam can be used on armor but only work if the current value is below the original value. Same for enchant-armor
4 disenchant has a chance of destroying a wand/staff/rod

However, I don't see "repair item" making a huge difference in the game. There are so few disenchanters that it's easy to avoid them. The only ones that are difficult to avoid are Mim and his sons before you have the ability to teleport. But, I often don't have any good gear at that point anyway.

[Timo Pietilä]

I would definitely agree that if Repair Item is going to be remotely commonplace then disenchantment needs to be able to touch pvals and drop enchantments precipitously. If disenchantment stays at its current power level then Repair Item must be at most as common as Acquirement.

If you make disenchantment scary during combat then people just avoid all disenchanters until you get resist disenchantment. If you don't, then disenchantment is not scary with repair.

I'm with Eddie here, repair is bad thing. Disenchantment is not broken, no need to nerf it.

If it is not broken, don't fix it.

[Derakon]

I would definitely agree that if Repair Item is going to be remotely commonplace then disenchantment needs to be able to touch pvals and drop enchantments precipitously. If disenchantment stays at its current power level then Repair Item must be at most as common as Acquirement.

[PowerDiver]

I don't think it nerfs disen altogether.

The thing that makes disen scary is that equipment you want to keep is damaged irreversibly. If it is reversible, it is not scary.

[Nick]

* 8x13 font is wacky (Windows)

Yes. As far as I can understand, Windows (since at least Vista) has its own 8x13 font that it insists on using. Since that font doesn't have the wall block character or any of the Latin-1 characters, hilarity ensues.

This is why the Windows port now uses 8x12 as default. The 8x13 font is only in for people playing the SDL port in Linux. There is some opinion to the effect that we would be better using the SDL port in Windows too, but I'm yet to see a compiled-for-Windows SDL port.

[pampl]

If disen is being made temporary, why not make it much more pronounced, draining multiple points of bonus at once or being more likely to drain pval?

[Magnate]

I am taking this back, now that I understand fractional blows a bit more. (I was thinking that the numbers should be for +1 STR or +1 DEX, if there's any change in fractional blows. But that can be a very small effect indeed.)

It could be null, while we are still using blows_table, as there are still breakpoints (albeit less cliff-edged). One day we will move to a continuous formula, and then you'll be right: we'll need to show the effect of +1 STR and +1 DEX (that will simplify the code a lot!).

This totally nerfs disenchantment for no good reason that I can see. Disenchantment used to be something to avoid at all costs. Now, it's just another minor side effect. Also, for ego cursed ego objects, it removes the huge negatives, despite their being part of the ego definition.

Well, I think #1319 is takkaria's intention to make ?restore_item do nothing other than restore an ego or artifact to its original state, not to improve it at all.

I think it is too common at the moment, but I don't think it nerfs disen altogether. We could give it a chance to fail ...

[PowerDiver]

If Restore Item were as rare as Acquirement, would this still be an issue? Assuming that it were tweaked to only affect artifacts, anyway.

Acquirement is pretty common. I see several a game, even when diving like mad. My current char has seen 2 already before DL47. How many of the roughly 9 artifacts you finally use at the very end get disenchanted in a game?

If you want to nerf disenchantment, just make artifacts resist 100% of the time. Don't try to effect the change under the counter by adding a scroll.

[Pete Mack]

If Restore Item were as rare as Acquirement, would this still be an issue? Assuming that it were tweaked to only affect artifacts, anyway.

I never thought disenchantment was broken in the first place. If you end up with Cambeleg (+5,+3), it's your own fault anyway.
Having Restore Item available in the stores to clean up acid damage makes a degree of sense, although I would have done this simply by removing enchant weapon (to_dam) from the stores.