Ego Dragon Scale Mails

[buzzkill]

In any event I'm not sure it matters -- since weight is obvious on pickup, it might as well be treated as a "rune" for purposes of ID.

Not necessarily. Differences in the material and manufacture allow for variation in the weight of even psuedo-identical types of armour. Furthermore, minor variations in weight might not be so obvious to someone without a scale. Can you tell 20# from 25# without having both on hand to weigh against one another. Don't think so, not reliably at least. Maybe weight shouldn't be obvious, if this is where it's going to lead.

[Magnate]

Ack. I make two posts fairly close together that are inconsistent. It is clear that I am muddled. Some day you need to figure out a clean systemic way to approach craftsmanship.

This has always niggled at me too. Most games distinguish craftsmanship from magic in item generation, properties, description and identification. Angband dates from before all of them - IIRC even AD&D 1E rules said something along the lines of "a +1 or +2 sword could simply be extremely sharp and well-made, whereas +4 or +5 requires powerful magic".

Personally I think it would be worth defining the separation properly in Angband. I can think of three ways - no, four - off the top of my head, though there are doubtless more:

1. We use base items to distinguish different levels of craftsmanship, so that ego templates are all entirely magical. Leads to many more base items, which means more junk/squelching - not good.

2. We divide egos into two types, one set magical and one set representing physical differences from the base item. Avoids the first problem but means we cannot have a non-artifact item which has enhanced physical and magical characteristics. Tolerable but disappointing.

3. We create a "craft" analogue of ego item types, so that the two types described above are entirely independent, and could be found on the same item. Solves all the problems but is an order of magnitude more work.

4. We replace the concept of "magical" items with craftsmanship. Magic items have only +hit/dam/ac at the mo, and are always dominated by egos. If we allowed these items to also be lighter, and have certain craft-related flags (IGNORE_FOO springs to mind, though admittedly not many others), they might in occasional cases be more useful than a low-end ego. Has a similar effect to #3 above but is far less work. EDIT: I can see a logical argument for things like +blows to be craft-related, but would not want to make these items overly powerful ...

[PowerDiver]

Ack. I make two posts fairly close together that are inconsistent. It is clear that I am muddled. Some day you need to figure out a clean systemic way to approach craftsmanship.

[Derakon]

But then you could argue for the need for a different base item for augmented dwarven armors as well. Are we going to have Dwarven Full Plate Armor (Dwarven) -- the first because it's bulkier than usual, the second for the ego bonuses? That seems redundant. I don't think it's out of the question that certain egos go hand-in-hand with certain modifications to the base stats of a given item type.

In any event I'm not sure it matters -- since weight is obvious on pickup, it might as well be treated as a "rune" for purposes of ID.

[PowerDiver]

And the Elvenkind armors could just be made with the fantasy equivalent of kevlar.

Don't we have the convention that different materials mean different base items? Iron helm vs steel helm, standard plate vs adamantite, and whether boots are iron-shod come to mind immediately and there must be others. Make something with kevlar equivalent and it should be a different base item, orthogonal to whether it is an ego.

[Derakon]

I could see that going both ways, though. If we plan to have a weightless ego type (as the "of Feathers" ego was suggested to be) then it's clearly going to be magical. In contrast, I could easily see the (Dwarven) ego having extra weight simply because the dwarves decided the armor needed to be thicker -- thus, mundanely extra heavy. And the Elvenkind armors could just be made with the fantasy equivalent of kevlar.

In either case the weight variance is going to be obvious on pickup.

[PowerDiver]

Adjusting weight should be fairly simple (I suspect the data is simply not used, though it may need to be added to the parser).

I think that this is a mistake. If you want to say that implementing the ego requires extra bracing with a heavy metal, go ahead and give the ego a weight. If the weight change is due to magic, then the model is that you need a flag with that property and add the flag to the list of flags for that ego. This distinction will be important if rune-based id is ever used.

[Magnate]

I took a stab at implementing some new DSM egos, and ran into trouble. Specifically:

* The "weight" entry in the W: line is ignored; it's 0 for all ego items. Setting it to a negative number (in an attempt to decrease the item's weight at least) has no effect. Thus it appears to be impossible to make a "weightless" ego-item without modifying the source code.
* It appears to be impossible to specify a negative pval. Here's my "of Razors" ego:

N:13:of Razors
X:25:0
C:3+M7:3+M7:0
W:0:4:0:8000
T:38:1:30
F:RES_FEAR
L:-d4:-1:INT
L:-d4:-1:WIS

The generated item had +255 to INT/WIS. I'd guess that the only time you get negative pvals on egos is when they're cursed. If I set the min pval to 0 instead of -1 then I get items with +0 to INT/WIS instead. Similarly, my "of Knowledge" ego had +2 INT, +3 WIS, and +255 STR...

Thank you - that was time well spent. I didn't know about either of those restrictions. Adjusting weight should be fairly simple (I suspect the data is simply not used, though it may need to be added to the parser). The negative pvals might be a little more work - but I'm sure the parser code can handle negatives (because some artifacts have negative pvals), so it shouldn't be much.

I created #1394 and #1395 for these issues.

[Derakon]

I took a stab at implementing some new DSM egos, and ran into trouble. Specifically:

* The "weight" entry in the W: line is ignored; it's 0 for all ego items. Setting it to a negative number (in an attempt to decrease the item's weight at least) has no effect. Thus it appears to be impossible to make a "weightless" ego-item without modifying the source code.
* It appears to be impossible to specify a negative pval. Here's my "of Razors" ego:

N:13:of Razors
X:25:0
C:3+M7:3+M7:0
W:0:4:0:8000
T:38:1:30
F:RES_FEAR
L:-d4:-1:INT
L:-d4:-1:WIS

The generated item had +255 to INT/WIS. I'd guess that the only time you get negative pvals on egos is when they're cursed. If I set the min pval to 0 instead of -1 then I get items with +0 to INT/WIS instead. Similarly, my "of Knowledge" ego had +2 INT, +3 WIS, and +255 STR...

[TJS]

How's about making them double resistance as standard instead of needing an activation? Perhaps immunity could then be an activation.

You could also shorten the activation time and/or increase the activation damage even more. One 200 odd damage breath every level or so really isn't worth the equipment slot. I'd make it 1000 damage or even more considering some ranged weapons can more than that every turn.

I wouldn't make the egos too underpowered since DSMs would go back to being as boring as they were beforehand (I never used one before the current egos came in).

[NotMorgoth]

Another idea for a DSM-only ego type:

Of Carnage (or think of a better name...) - has a (much?) shorter recharge time so allows you to use the breathing ability more often.

[Starhawk]

Aha. I haven't been successful enough at the game to see the top end of that armor range on DSM, then. In most cases, when I'm deep enough to start seeing DSM, I'm wearing armor that roughly doubles the DSM's base AC, rendering it pretty much worthless unless it has a great ego or covers a resist hole. So, yeah, I agree that adding a double-resist activation would make lower DSMs more attractive.

And I may be misguided in valuing the base armor so highly; I'm not familiar with the code or combat algorithms. It just seems easier to wade through a troll pit if I'm loaded up with lots of AC.

[Magnate]

Is there any plan to raise the base AC on dragon scale mail?

I'm playing warriors this month, and find that when I survive into the midgame, I'm skipping DSM in favor of armor that offers 35-45 points of base defense. Generally by the time I start finding DSM, it is already worse than whatever Augmented Chain Mail or Partial Plate I've scrounged up.

The exception of course is a strong ego DSM, or something that fills an egregious resistance hole.

That said, I like the idea of DSM giving some sort of extended elemental resistance (even on activation like the branding rings). Some sort of strong defensive ability is needed to keep DSM relevant.

It's very interesting that you rate the AC so highly. I'd be interested to hear if other people feel the same way. When I extended the AC range I wanted to make DSM *less* of a no-brainer compared with non-DSM armours of the same type (i.e. non-ego or same ego). So heavy armours got more AC than the weaker DSMs, but those had a resist and a breath weapon.

If you are ignoring weak DSMs in favour of heavy armour with more AC, this has at least been partially successful.

The AC range on DSMs has been stretched carefully from 12 (equivalent of studded leather) to 60 (equivalent of mithril plate). If the weaker ones need a boost, I'd go with the temporary resistance added to the activation, rather than reduce the AC range.

[Starhawk]

Is there any plan to raise the base AC on dragon scale mail?

I'm playing warriors this month, and find that when I survive into the midgame, I'm skipping DSM in favor of armor that offers 35-45 points of base defense. Generally by the time I start finding DSM, it is already worse than whatever Augmented Chain Mail or Partial Plate I've scrounged up.

The exception of course is a strong ego DSM, or something that fills an egregious resistance hole.

That said, I like the idea of DSM giving some sort of extended elemental resistance (even on activation like the branding rings). Some sort of strong defensive ability is needed to keep DSM relevant.

[Derakon]

If Ferocity/Razors gives -INT/WIS instead of -CON, then I suspect it will be a no-brainer for warriors and less magically-inclined hybrids. I guess it depends on how much of a combat boost we're talking about here.