New nightly

[Magnate]

Yeah, not monsters casting when I'm blind. E.g. there's an air elemental down the corridor, but I can't see him; I hear him mumbling, and I see a blue bolt fly in and hit me, but I'm not told what I'm hit by.

Ah, got it. This is because we test for blindness, but not unseen-ness. Should be fixable.

EDIT: fixed in staging. Thanks for the catch.

[scud]

After just 2366 turns I can tell you that the Mac nightly of 14 April is undoubtedly the finest ever version of the game...

[scud]

*makes mistake of trying to tiptoe across a roomful of cave spiders*

Stupid game.

[buzzkill]

*makes mistake of trying to tiptoe across a roomful of cave spiders*

"By the power of Numbskull!"

[scud]

I HAVE THE POWaaaaaghhhh... *thud*

I have regained my respect for cave spiders. I'm sure they used to be much quicker and more poisony in 2.x but in recent times they've seemed comparatively rubbish.

[buzzkill]

Surely that sword, in the hands of just about anyone, would 1-hit cave spiders. So my question is, why tip-toe?

[scud]

Wasted one turn failing to Phase Door, wasted one turn panicking and trying to get back to a corridor, and by that time they were on 3-4 sides. It was horrible, it all happened so fast, etc.

Yeah, I probably shouldn't have got into such a position. I'm very gung-ho for the first 10-12 character levels.

[Derakon]

To my knowledge, cave spiders have never poisoned. However, they didn't use to have the "smart" pack AI, so they'd chase you into corridors; given their speed that could actually be more dangerous for young characters.

[scud]

To my knowledge, cave spiders have never poisoned.

Did they not? They've certainly got a nasty nibble on them.

It's a rubbish sword, but I feel rather bad that it never encountered a single slayable thing.

Live fast, die young, leave a charisma-enhanced corpse.

[Derakon]

Wood spiders poison, as do Mirkwood spiders. Cave spiders are simply the second monster that shows up in groups, and they're fast, have twice as many HP as Jackals, and deal about 2.5x more damage on average. That's more than enough.

[scud]

Ah, it's the early encounters with Mirkwood spiders that used to be so scary.

Nasty buggers, they were. And probably still are.

[Timo Pietilä]

Ah, it's the early encounters with Mirkwood spiders that used to be so scary.

Nasty buggers, they were. And probably still are.

To me it's cave spiders because you meet them so early. Poisonous spiders come into play so much later that you have some survival capability (if not much). Stepping into room full of cave spiders can be instant death to early char.

[fizzix]

* First off, it'd be nice if there were some way that manual notes stood out from automatic notes in the file, so they'd be more greppable.

Do you have something in mind? If it's as simple as entering "Player note:" or "<name> says:" before hand, that should be relatively straightforward to add.

[Derakon]

It doesn't even need to be that complicated; just something like putting "--" at the beginning would suffice. That'd even be preferable if there is a limit on the maximum line length for notes that this would infringe upon.

[Derakon]

Having won with the character I posted notes for earlier, here's the remainder of what I wrote down. This is all as of the April 9th nightly.

* Summon spells can still pull up nothing (e.g. Dwar trying to summon hounds). Dunno if this was supposed to have been fixed yet.

* With fire immunity, when I get breathed on I get the message "The Foo breathes fire. You resist the effect!" The resistance message is new; what exactly am I resisting here that I otherwise would be vulnerable to?

* I got two randarts that activate for polymorph. It'd be nice if randarts didn't get duplicate activations. The only duplications in the standarts are between the *thancs and the Paur* gauntlets, if I recall correctly.

* This is the second time I've seen an orc unique with an escort composed entirely of a single normally-solitary race (first time orc captains, second time orc shamen). Is this expected?

* Randarts seem to get off-weapon combat boosts a lot. Though I recall Magnate saying this is going to change.

* I detected a Quylthulg, after which it blinked. I saw it at its previous location, then saw it update to the new location (which was still not normally visible to me) after it blinked since my next turn hadn't come yet. Is this intended?

* I saw the message "gazes at you with mind blasting". I'm pretty sure that phrasing is new and it could be better. What's wrong with the old mind blasting message?

* When squelching ammo, the top setting is for all non-artifact [arrows|bolts|etc.]. Given the total lack of artifact ammo as it stands, this seems a bit odd. Then again, maybe there's plans to introduce artifact ammo in the future?

* Clearing a dragon pit is far, far more lucrative than clearing a vault. Which is rather sad.

* If an item is inscribed with !*, and it is in a pile of items on the floor, then when you try to pick it up you are prompted to confirm. If it is alone then you just pick it up. One of these two should hold in all cases.

* I can confirm that the earthquake bug is fixed.

* From my randarts, 9 weapons, 2 launchers, 2 pieces of armor (body and shield), and 2 rings provided protection from confusion. Compare that to the standart set, which has protection from confusion on 1 amulet (Ingwe), 4 pieces of body armor (Bladeturner, Rohirrim, Isildur, and Caspanion), 3 hats (including Gondor), 1 pair of boots (Dal-I-Thalion), and 1 weapon (Totila).

This is the fourth randart game in which protection from confusion has just not been available on anything useful -- though, this time right at the endgame I got an aggravating pike that had it. I generally consider getting blindness + confusion resistance to be an important turning point for my characters, since it allows them to ditch non-0% failure escapes. This turning point happens routinely for standart characters somewhere before 3000', if I recall correctly. Blindness and confusion are important protections, and while I don't expect every randart game to provide them, going 4 in a row without them tells me that something is wrong with protection distributions.

For what it's worth, pre-Morgoth dump, post-Morgoth dump, and artifact spoiler.

Also, I just want to say that the devs are doing a great job. Keep it up, guys!