RNG is teasing a returning player

[Derakon]

Here's my semi-rough ranking of resists/abilities from most worthless to least worthless:

Featherfall
Slow Digestion
Hold Life
Resist Fear
Permanent Light
Resist Nether
Resist Dark
Resist Light
Resist Shards
Resist Chaos
Resist Disenchantment
Resist Nexus
------------- The "Do I care?" line
Resist Sound
Regeneration
Resist Poison
Resist Acid
Resist Confusion
Resist Blindness
See Invisible
Resist Electricity
Resist Fire
Resist Cold
Telepathy
Free Action

Some notes:
* Nether has a pointless side effect and an unreliable resistance. Worthless!
* Experience drain is rare and easily made back up. It slows down your experience gain slightly, but by the time drainers are at all common you aren't paying all that much attention to level anyway. In any event, trivially blocked by carrying !LifeLevels
* Fear is trivially blocked by carrying !Heroism, assuming you care
* Regeneration makes a huge difference in your spellcasting rate (something like tripling your MP regen rate), as well as rendering cuts moot.
* Just avoid nexus breathers. There aren't enough to make the resist a priority.
* Acid damage is halved any time it hits your armor (even if the armor is acidproof), which is 100% of the time if you have all armor slots filled.
* I've never been asked to choose between telepathy and basic 4 resists, so that ranking is somewhat moot.

EDIT: moved Permanent Light and See Invisible up a bit.

[scud]

Gelugons breathe shard, not nether.

Heh yes, I cut the wrong bit of your line.

Thanks all.

I shall digest your words of wisdom and press on tonight. Having first unignored Rings of Damage.

Does my 100% saving throw make me immune to anything other than fear?

[Derakon]

Any spell that can be resisted will be resisted with a 100% saving throw. So spells that confuse or blind you will never affect you. However, there are non-resistable sources of those ailments so you still need the relevant protections.

Likewise, you should be immune to curse attack spells and mindblasting.

[scud]

Bloody hell, I'm going down to 5000' to kick the big fella in the nuts right now.

[fyonn]

I've currently got a HT paladin cruising level 74 with no blind or conf resist. I'm in my first randart game and I've just not found anything with those resists yet. I'm carrying a lot of CCW's and being careful.

dave

PS. as a first randart's game, I've found some nice gear such as:

The Golden Crown of Ulith [0,+26] (+4)
Found lying on the floor at 2350 feet (level 47).

+4 wisdom, infravision.
Provides immunity to fire.
Provides resistance to poison.
Cannot be harmed by acid, electricity, fire, cold.
Feather Falling. Grants telepathy.

The best priest headgear I've ever seen! big + to WIS, resPoi, ESP and ImFire to save one's spellbooks!

Bizarrely though, I've been beating my opponents to death with first one, and then another artifact shovel... not found any better weaponry..

[d_m]

The one thing to say is that rDark becomes relevant at the very end (I think) due to some huge darkness breathers, e.g. Shelob, Ungoliant, Carcharoth.

I guess you could say that about most of the resists but for whatever reason I end up trying to cover rLight and rDark at the very end while not worrying as much about e.g. rNether or rChaos.

[Derakon]

It occurred to me that it might be interesting to set up a webapp that asks players if they'd make various trades. E.g. "would you give up blindness resistance for telepathy?" "Would you give up slow digestion for see invisible?" You could use the results to tune the relative strength of various abilities. Obviously decisions can't be made in a void; resistance to light and darkness are more useful if you lack blindness resistance, for example. But I bet the data would still be useful.

d_m: resist dark can be useful at that point, sure, but the only big light breather I'm aware of is the Phoenix.

EDIT: okay, Huan also breathes light. Good to know, I guess.

[pampl]

I thought there was a deep light breather that wasn't unique but looking through monsters.txt the Ethereal Dragon (level 45) is as deep as it gets. Maybe there should be a Great Wyrm of Shadows or GWoL could breath light or something. Making every resist useful would be a good way to make the game more challenging IMO.

[Nomad]

It occurred to me that it might be interesting to set up a webapp that asks players if they'd make various trades. E.g. "would you give up blindness resistance for telepathy?" "Would you give up slow digestion for see invisible?" You could use the results to tune the relative strength of various abilities.

Maybe you could somehow harvest info from the character dumps? Compare the attributes of wielded items to ones stored in the home to see what abilities/resistances are consistently chosen above others. If somebody's wearing a nexus resist Elvenkind when they've got a disenchantment resist one at home, that's a useful datapoint...

I thought there was a deep light breather that wasn't unique but looking through monsters.txt the Ethereal Dragon (level 45) is as deep as it gets. Maybe there should be a Great Wyrm of Shadows or GWoL could breath light or something. Making every resist useful would be a good way to make the game more challenging IMO.

Great Wyrm of Brilliance?

[Derakon]

Celestial Wyrm, I'd say. Breathes light, darkness, and gravity.

As for datamining the ladder, that's trickier mostly because it's hard to isolate factors. You'd need something like two armors that are identical except for one resistance, with the player currently wielding one. I'm sure there's lots of useful data in the ladder, but you'd need to be a statistician to usefully mine it for this particular question.

[Timo Pietilä]

Here's my semi-rough ranking of resists/abilities from most worthless to least worthless:

Good list, however few notes:

There are few deep monsters with big damage darkness storms, and darkness resist IIRC cuts damage more than for example nether resist. It also allows with combination of light resist "poor mans blindness resist". If you don't have blindness resist it becomes a lot more important.

100% saving throw prevents you from being paralyzed, so with that FA goes to top of the list (least important). However by the time you get 100% saving throw you usually have multiple sources for FA which you just can't remove without making combination weaker.

100% saving throw also prevents fear, brain smash, non-melee blindness, slow etc attacks.

Nexus resist is also one of the things that move up and down on the list. 100% saving prevents level-teleports, and all stats maxed you are safe from stat-scrambling, but before that happens it is important.

I'd put acid lower in priority than poison. It has effective max damage of 800 because gear hit reduces damage to half, same with poison, and high-damage poison attacks are actually more common and more annoying. I think Great Wyrm of Many Colors get close to 800 point damage, Ancient MH does only around 350 points of unresisted acid damage (as long as you have all equipment slots covered, and they are not reduced to zero AC by acid already). However acid resistance is probably the easiest to get so it doesn't matter much.

Disenchantment is very annoying. Not dangerous, but it is extremely annoying to get your überweapon reduced to sharp stick with some bonuses. It is very high in my priorities too, but you can survive without it indefinitely if you don't care about losing few points from disenchantment breaths that you will suffer sooner or later (storms of unmagic are really hard to avoid). For that reason I usually prefer swaps unless I have disenchantment in my best gear. It is important to have, but not important to wear all times.

[EDIT] typo corrected

[Timo Pietilä]

Bloody hell, I'm going down to 5000' to kick the big fella in the nuts right now.

If you have the methods of healing and getting rid of too difficult summons, you definitely have gear to do that. Good luck.

[Timo Pietilä]

Celestial Wyrm, I'd say. Breathes light, darkness, and gravity.

I hope that would then be about same as Kavlax at most, otherwise that gravity breath is a killer to everybody.

[Pete Mack]

Celestial Wyrm, I'd say. Breathes light, darkness, and gravity.

To fill out the cosmic features, he should breathe Time and possibly Inertia too...

[Antoine]

Disenchantment is very annoying. Not dangerous, but it is extremely annoying to get your überweapon reduced to sharp stick with some bonuses.

Not anymore

A.