RNG is teasing a returning player

[PowerDiver]

I'd like to see AC acting as a saving throw for some of these side effects.

That doesn't help.

If you want to win, you have to worry about worst-case. You cannot go around taking 1/100 chances.

If AC does not change the worst-case scenario, it will have an extremely hard time being important enough to worry about. If the robe of resist fire keeps you from being instakilled 1 time in 100 [say from two fire breaths in a row from something at twice your speed], then even if plate mail reduces damage on average 75% compared to the robe, it still has little value to you if it does not prevent the instakill.

For now, the rule is to cover as many vital resists and protections as you can, and among comparable choices pick the one with the best combined AC and damage plusses, assuming that does not slow you. A saving throw less than 90% won't change that, and even 99% might not.

If you really want AC to matter, I think you have to change things so that a char can be expected to survive two unresisted breaths from monsters up to 10 levels out of depth. That would be a very different game.

[Derakon]

That doesn't help.

If you want to win, you have to worry about worst-case. You cannot go around taking 1/100 chances.

Sure you can. You just run the risk of losing. Taking those risks can be fun though, in the same way that gambling is fun.

If AC does not change the worst-case scenario, it will have an extremely hard time being important enough to worry about.

High AC can definitely enable you to take on fights that you couldn't otherwise handle. Let's say that by increasing your AC, you've made it so that a monster that used to hit you all the time now hits you half the time. Your melee output was such that previously, by the time you'd taken away all his health you'd be dead; thus you couldn't kill that monster without resorting to healing or ranged tactics. With the high AC though, his damage output can't keep up with yours any more.

Thus AC becomes an enabler which lets you take on bigger monsters for better rewards, thus speeding up the game. Is it going to block the big guns? No. But it improves your combat longevity anyway.

If the robe of resist fire keeps you from being instakilled 1 time in 100 [say from two fire breaths in a row from something at twice your speed], then even if plate mail reduces damage on average 75% compared to the robe, it still has little value to you if it does not prevent the instakill.

I do tend to think that there are too many gigantic damage sources in Angband, but realistically the tradeoff isn't between a robe of resist fire and bog-standard plate armor, but rather between armor that covers, say, nexus and shards resist but has a low AC, and armor that doesn't cover those resists but does.

For now, the rule is to cover as many vital resists and protections as you can, and among comparable choices pick the one with the best combined AC and damage plusses, assuming that does not slow you. A saving throw less than 90% won't change that, and even 99% might not.

Can't argue with this, but I still think you're being too unwilling to take random risks.

If you really want AC to matter, I think you have to change things so that a char can be expected to survive two unresisted breaths from monsters up to 10 levels out of depth. That would be a very different game.

Also can't really argue with this. If you look at big-budget roguelikes (c.f. Diablo 2, Torchlight), there are no instant-death attacks; you get killed through attrition or failing to notice and avoid a powerful attack that has a lot of windup. Angband completely lacks the concept of windup, and has a sufficiently powerful and resourceful player character that attrition becomes more or less impossible outside of the early game and the last two fights -- the player has a variety of effects they can activate to not die at the cost of not winning either (c.f. Destruction, Mass Banish, Teleport Level).

[PowerDiver]

Sure you can. You just run the risk of losing. Taking those risks can be fun though, in the same way that gambling is fun.

Thus AC becomes an enabler which lets you take on bigger monsters for better rewards, thus speeding up the game. Is it going to block the big guns? No. But it improves your combat longevity anyway.

I think we are arguing at cross purposes. Of course you take 1/100 risks when appropriate. But surely it is better to avoid them when you can achieve similar gains without taking risks. You shouldn't embark on a protracted fight where every round you have 1/100 chance of dying unless that one fight is the difference in clearing a greater vault.

AC is already valuable. I never said it is not. In fact, I said that increasing it is another step breaking balance towards making the game too easy. An item with substantially more AC is noticeably better than an otherwise comparable item with less AC. It's just that when you decide how to kit yourself, you don't look at AC until the end of the process. If you want people to use heavy armor without a resist in preference to light armor with a resist, you need to make fundamental changes to the overall structure of the game.

[TJS]

That doesn't help.

If you want to win, you have to worry about worst-case. You cannot go around taking 1/100 chances.

If AC does not change the worst-case scenario, it will have an extremely hard time being important enough to worry about. If the robe of resist fire keeps you from being instakilled 1 time in 100 [say from two fire breaths in a row from something at twice your speed], then even if plate mail reduces damage on average 75% compared to the robe, it still has little value to you if it does not prevent the instakill.

For now, the rule is to cover as many vital resists and protections as you can, and among comparable choices pick the one with the best combined AC and damage plusses, assuming that does not slow you. A saving throw less than 90% won't change that, and even 99% might not.

If you really want AC to matter, I think you have to change things so that a char can be expected to survive two unresisted breaths from monsters up to 10 levels out of depth. That would be a very different game.

If you're fighting a monster that doesn't have a high damage breath attack then you aren't taking a 1/100 risk.

Higher AC might mean you can take on higher exp monsters earlier which means earlier leveling up and higher HP. It will mean gaining better equipment from drops and more money earlier as well. The better equipment, better escapes (from extra drops and buying with that extra cash) and higher HP may mean that you survive a later breath attack that you wouldn't have otherwise done.

For example early on you might avoid wearing a robe of rFire for a high AC armour with no resist that allows you to melee more monsters (with a saving throw against confusion and exp drain you might decide to melee a Nightmare stopping occasionally to drink !CCW), which means by the time you encounter a dracolisk on level 55 you've now got rBase covered from a monster drop and enough HP from leveling to survive that single nexus breath. If you'd stuck with the robe then you may not have got either of those.

In other words there is an opportunity cost to choosing not to have higher AC earlier on that may cost you survival later.

It also makes that early choice between rFire and high AC something of a choice rather than no choice at all.

[bulian]

Just thought I'd chime in with my thoughts on the AC vs resists discussion. As the game progresses, the value of AC becomes lower and the value of resists becomes higher due to the way that damage output scales. Below is a summary of how it scales, but I think the best way to increase the value of AC on body armor is to reduce AC from other sources (e.g. helm, boots, cloaks, etc.).

Consider data from the 3.1.2 spoiler page concerning red dragons:

Baby -> young -> mature -> Ancient -> Hell wyrm -> GWoMC
Max Melee: 11, 40, 80, 135, 264, 316
Breath: 29, 88, 146, 293, 1114, 1466
Ratio of breath to melee: ~3, ~2.5, ~1.8, 2.2, 4.2, 4.6

The biggest jump comes between ancient and hell wyrms where an unresisted breath will instakill and a single resisted breath sitll does more damage than the maximum amount of melee damage.

Magnate stated AC is linear damage reduction maxed at 60% reduction with an AC of 250, or about 0.24% reduction per point of AC. So, lets compare adamantite plate mail, AC ~100, vs. a robe of resist fire, ~10, neglecting all other gear. The adamantite plate mail results in 24% damage reduction to melee, whereas the robe results in 2.4% melee reduction.

Reduction of damage outputs:

Adamantite:
Baby -> young -> mature -> Ancient -> Hell wyrm -> GWoMC
Melee: 3, 10, 20, 32, 63, 76
Breath: 0

RoRF:
Melee: 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 8
Breath: 19, 59, 98, 196, 746, 982

The RoRF wins, even discounting that the melee damage would be further reduced since part of it is flame based. While Derakon pointed out that this is an extreme example, it does show the value of resists compared to AC.

[NotMorgoth]

I wonder if maybe you could have an 'element' (shards might make a good example) for which there is no magical resistance but the damage can be reduced by physical armour (AC).

Give it a high damage cap like 1600, but have it reduced by up to 90% by AC; this would make AC relevant against instakill breath attacks, and would probably also have the (desirable?) effect of making the game harder.

Of course this idea probably has all kinds of flaws I haven't thought about and would of course cause its own balance issues...

[Derakon]

That sounds more or less equivalent to introducing percentage-based resists and having all armor include resistance to a particular element that is equal to its AC bonus. Not saying that discounts it as an idea, but if we're going to do percentage resists anyway we might as well go whole-hog.

[Philip]

Interesting idea from NotMorgoth, and I just want to chip in that shards is pretty much the hardest resist to obtain, rivalled by nether(used to be nearly impossible, but artifact changes stopped that) and that this would probably in this instant make the game easier.

[d_m]

Acid kind of has this--if your armor is damaged you take 50% damage.

[Derakon]

Nnnn...that has nothing to do with your actual AC, though. It's just a matter of covering everything. You'd be equally protected from acid in a scuba-diving suit as you would be in full plate armor, according to current rules.

[Timo Pietilä]

Acid kind of has this--if your armor is damaged you take 50% damage.

More precise, if it tries to damage your armor and it has positive AC then you take only 50% of damage. It doesn't need to be successful in damaging the armor, that is why items with ignore acid do the same thing.