Making the game harder, take three

[Krom]

Weaving together a set of resists and capabilities can take a fair bit of time, and often times the specific mix of powers can influence ones strategy. I often times find myself sitting in town weighing pros and cons of gear. Having finally chosen my active set and recalling back down, suddenly finding carefully thought-out approach to resists and defense suddenly has a gaping hole poked in it thanks to RNG strikes me as not fun.

[Magnate]

If you're going to buff monster disenchant attacks, I'd suggest going with the O approach of killing temporary effects - timed blessing, shield, resists, etc - rather than messing with objects. I tend to agree that having your stuff messed with is very annoying; some annoyance is good, but this might be a step too far.

Looks like that's the consensus - maybe I finally found a basis for my variant! Timo even gave me the name.

Thanks to buzzkill for reassuring me that I'm not totally mad.

[fyonn]

I kinda like the idea myself. I don't think that losing some of these abilities is instant quit time. I've had several guys wander round level 70+ without rPois, rConf, rBlind or ESP. sure, losing them will be an "oh crap" moment, potentially followed by bailing, but it just means you need to be damn careful and reassess your equipment. maybe returning to town to swap things round until you can restore your items etc.

but surely that makes it interesting?

[Antoine]

If you're going to buff monster disenchant attacks, I'd suggest going with the O approach of killing temporary effects - timed blessing, shield, resists, etc - rather than messing with objects.

+1 - I'd be very happy to see a "dispel magic" monster spell in V.

The other way to buff monster disenchantment attacks, of course, is to remove the "restore item" effect!!

A.

[Nomad]

If you're going to buff monster disenchant attacks, I'd suggest going with the O approach of killing temporary effects - timed blessing, shield, resists, etc - rather than messing with objects.

Plus, you know what's good about this approach? For once, it affects everybody else more than warriors!

Alternatively/additionally, how about disenchantment as a timed status effect itself? It doesn't remove the properties from your equipment, but while your character is disenchanted, abilities are temporarily blocked, so your ESP/see invisible/free action/etc. all stop working for a while. If it's cumulative with every breath, you could be vulnerable for a nasty length of time afterwards, and fighting disenchanters with other monsters around would be pretty chancy. (Especially if we introduced packs of Disenchanter Hounds.)

[Nick]

Looks like that's the consensus - maybe I finally found a basis for my variant! Timo even gave me the name.

Thanks to buzzkill for reassuring me that I'm not totally mad.

Just because this implementation hasn't found favour doesn't mean the idea of altering object flags is a dud, though. It opens up lots of possibilities - a class of objects with a flag that varies, for example. Or items that curse themselves

[TJS]

I think this is going the wrong way to make the game harder to be honest.

The game should be about interesting choices and weighing up risk and reward. Making disenchantment more harsh without making there any more reward to taking them on means that you're even less likely to try and fight a disenchanter without the resistance.

It doesn't really add any interesting tactics or challenge to the game, it just means that there's just more monsters to avoid until you get the right equipment to deal with it. I think Angband already has enough of that sort of gameplay to be getting on with.

I'd like to see the game made harder in other ways. Firstly monsters that can buff other monsters would be interesting. You've got shrieking mushroom patches and a few others that haste, but I'd also like to see monsters that can heal, increase defense and attack. Perhaps instead of having large groups of monsters exactly the same (like novice priests) you can have a smaller band of different monster types that complement each other. The player then has to choose which order to deal with the monsters to reduce risk which becomes interesting.

Secondly it's too easy to get good equipment and as a result the whole difficulty curve of the game is the wrong way around. The first part of the game is hard, it gets a bit harder until you've got some good equipment and then it becomes much easier. By around turn 500k I've generally got most of the resists and immunities, good detection and a reliable way of dealing damage so it just becomes a question of not making a mistake until you collect the necessary consumables and win.

Make equipment very rare so you only find say on average one piece of equipment per level if you manage to clear it. So instead of spending ages going through junk as you do currently, when you do find a new weapon or amulet it's an interesting event and there's a good chance that it is going to be better than what you already have. I think there is scope to expand mixed blessing items to cover what you need at a cost until you find better stuff. I thought rings of escaping were on the right lines to help you cope with no speed boosts in the mid-game.

I'm also probably one of the few people who find pits boring. Having pit types that are full of a particular colour of dragon and also have equipment available that makes you almost completely immune to them is broken in my opinion. With thorin a black dragon pit is basically a load of free artifacts to sift through. I also think pits are too big. Even when you can deal with the monsters easily it takes ages to get through them. Make them smaller and more difficult to deal with.

[Magnate]

Plus, you know what's good about this approach? For once, it affects everybody else more than warriors!

Alternatively/additionally, how about disenchantment as a timed status effect itself? It doesn't remove the properties from your equipment, but while your character is disenchanted, abilities are temporarily blocked, so your ESP/see invisible/free action/etc. all stop working for a while. If it's cumulative with every breath, you could be vulnerable for a nasty length of time afterwards, and fighting disenchanters with other monsters around would be pretty chancy. (Especially if we introduced packs of Disenchanter Hounds.)

How do people feel about lingering malus effects in general? There have been a bunch of threads about making things like poison and chaos produce a greater variety of longer-lasting effects, instead of just straight damage (or poison or hallucination). I can't say I find it wildly exciting, but it's certainly a possibility - instead of damaging equipment, make more attacks have more effects on the player's state. It would reinvent the healing minigame too: instead of generic one-slot-fits-all healing potions, you could have a plethora of potions and 'shrooms which cured various sets of ailments.

IMO there are basically only four ways to make the game harder:

1. Make good stuff harder to find. I don't think there's much debate about this. I don't like going backwards, but this is one area where I agree that we do need to, a little bit. We're still overdue a scaling back of off-weapon +dam, for example.

2. Make monsters harder to kill (faster, more ac/hp, more awake, more friends etc. etc.). Not many people seem interested in this, and it can lead to an "arms race" - but see NPP for where it's been done successfully.

3. Make monsters (and traps etc.) do more damage to the player (including things like reducing the absorption by armour, or by resists, but also things like giving monsters TELE_SELF_TO etc.).

4. Make more dangerous non-damage things happen more often (equipment damage/destruction, loss of stats/bonuses/temp boosts, as well as the usual blindness/conf/etc.).

Most of the threads seem to be about #4, and it seems clear that people would be happier with more bad stuff happening to @ directly than to his/her equipment. There are some interesting possibilities here: effects that lower @'s saving throw, cause partial paralysis, random very short range blinking, penalties to-hit or to spell failure, etc.

Is that a better direction in which to be thinking?

[takkaria]

If you're going to buff monster disenchant attacks, I'd suggest going with the O approach of killing temporary effects - timed blessing, shield, resists, etc - rather than messing with objects. I tend to agree that having your stuff messed with is very annoying; some annoyance is good, but this might be a step too far.

I like removing temporary buffs, that's a nice idea. Just making equipment worse is, I think, high on increase in annoyance with an equally-sized decrease in fun.

[takkaria]

I'd like to see the game made harder in other ways. Firstly monsters that can buff other monsters would be interesting. You've got shrieking mushroom patches and a few others that haste, but I'd also like to see monsters that can heal, increase defense and attack. Perhaps instead of having large groups of monsters exactly the same (like novice priests) you can have a smaller band of different monster types that complement each other. The player then has to choose which order to deal with the monsters to reduce risk which becomes interesting.

This. If anyone wants to implement this, patches will be gratefully accepted!

[Timo Pietilä]

I like removing temporary buffs, that's a nice idea. Just making equipment worse is, I think, high on increase in annoyance with an equally-sized decrease in fun.

One thing disenchantment ball-spells should do is remove runes. Manastorm should do that same. Fighting M standing on rune is almost one-sided combat.

I also would like to see rune removed from everyone else spells than priest and mage. Keep scrolls.

[Tregonsee]

If you lost too much, save a scroll of restore item or two at home. They even show up in the alchemist from time to time, not that hard to keep on hand.

I am playing 3.2.0, on level 70, generally explore all of the level and kill most of the monsters and have yet to find such a scroll. Where are these scrolls of restore item?

[Derakon]

One thing disenchantment ball-spells should do is remove runes. Manastorm should do that same. Fighting M standing on rune is almost one-sided combat.

Good idea.

I'm not opposed to the idea of having disenchantment create a static field that surrounds the player for awhile. Should it nullify all abilities on gear? That I'm not so sure on... Nullifying temporary magical effects definitely makes sense, and I could get behind it nullifying stat boosts, but then we get into the question of whether or not it should nullify your speed bonuses -- suddenly getting dropped to +0 speed could be too much. But eh, give it a shot in the nightlies and see how it plays out.

It could also just naturally increase the failure rate on spells; you're basically surrounded by an anti-magic field.

[PowerDiver]

I am playing 3.2.0, on level 70, generally explore all of the level and kill most of the monsters and have yet to find such a scroll. Where are these scrolls of restore item?

In the nightlies.

There were horribly unbalanced when introduced, in part because of the way they interacted with the mixed blessing rings. I don't know if they have been changed yet.

[Wellan]

How do people feel about lingering malus effects in general? [...] It would reinvent the healing minigame too: instead of generic one-slot-fits-all healing potions, you could have a plethora of potions and 'shrooms which cured various sets of ailments.

I quite like like the idea of powering up the various "status effects", since it's a good way to add danger to the game without just having monsters pump out enough damage to 1-shot the @. In particular, I've always thought it was a bit silly that poison just constantly dealt 1 damage for up to a gazillion turns. It doesn't necessarily need to blind, paralyze, or confuse to be dangerous, it would just need to deal damage quickly enough (for serious poisoning) that you can't keep up with it just by restoring your HP forever. Then if items of cure [severity] wounds stopped curing poison, the currently underused potions of slow/cure poison and rods/staves of curing would suddenly be much more valuable.

Though I did like the idea of disenchantment powering down wieldables, I suppose it might be best to have it just remove temporary buffs. It would certainly be interesting as a "magebane" effect that doesn't do as much to a warrior. On the other hand, I don't think that a lasting disenchantment status effect is a good idea - if it were to nullify guaranteed to nullify your FA, speed, or other essential properties disenchantment resistance would just become essential itself (plus, you'd lose the "effective against mages" bit). And reducing spell success rate already falls under stunning. I wouldn't have it kill protection runes, either - yes, monsters should have some way to do that, but teleporting/blinking the player seems to fit the bill much better, and we don't want disenchantment doing too much.