Armors "of speed"?

[jens]

Might it just be that by the depth were DSMs are common, there is a much higher probability of generating 'great' drops, thus giving the impression that any drop of a DSM has a high probability of being an ego? If this is the case, and no bug is invloved I see two solutions:

1) Decrease the commonality of DSM.

2) Rebalance the ego types for DSM so the powerful ones only show up rarely.

3) hmm, thought of a quick-fix: Create a new ego type that only applies to DSM, has no bonuses, "" as name, and has rarity 1. Or maybe a bit better, a not too useful ego type, but serving the same purposes... I have worked quite a lot with making ego types, one I made that would fit here is 'of Craftmanship' that removes the to-hit penalty, ignores acid, gives a small boost in AC, and sets a minimum for AC. In the case of DSMs this would just mean a small boost of AC.

[Magnate]

Might it just be that by the depth were DSMs are common, there is a much higher probability of generating 'great' drops, thus giving the impression that any drop of a DSM has a high probability of being an ego? If this is the case, and no bug is invloved I see two solutions:

1) Decrease the commonality of DSM.

2) Rebalance the ego types for DSM so the powerful ones only show up rarely.

3) hmm, thought of a quick-fix: Create a new ego type that only applies to DSM, has no bonuses, "" as name, and has rarity 1. Or maybe a bit better, a not too useful ego type, but serving the same purposes... I have worked quite a lot with making ego types, one I made that would fit here is 'of Craftmanship' that removes the to-hit penalty, ignores acid, gives a small boost in AC, and sets a minimum for AC. In the case of DSMs this would just mean a small boost of AC.

This last is a nice idea - do you have a version of ego_item.txt anywhere which has this new ego in it? As you say, this would allow a quick fix for toning down the number of powerful ego DSMs without needing to mess with actual ego generation. Also fits thematically as anyone bothering to make armour out of dragon scales ought to be pretty good at it ...

[Timo Pietilä]

I guess I'm not as careful as you are... Every time I've decided to leave resistance holes I've eventually died from it.

That's probably because you have learned to trust to them. Besides basic4 and poison it is the side-effects that kill you, not the actual damage from element. For example nether does 550 max unresisted and 471 max resisted. You can't afford trusting that resistance saves you when the difference is that small.

Try not to gather all the resistances and just avoid heavy resistance hole breathers and you get a lot better a lot faster in the game. This isn't very difficult game to win when you have learned the right things, it just takes time to unlearn the wrong things.

[Antoine]

This last is a nice idea - do you have a version of ego_item.txt anywhere which has this new ego in it? As you say, this would allow a quick fix for toning down the number of powerful ego DSMs without needing to mess with actual ego generation. Also fits thematically as anyone bothering to make armour out of dragon scales ought to be pretty good at it ...

Not sure about Craftmanship.

How about calling it "of the Serpent" or similar, and giving it some minor features like Slow Digestion and the Dwarven detect-nearby-treasure racial ability?

Then you could add another one, "of Flight", for a small Dex bonus and Feather Fall.

A.

[jens]

This last is a nice idea - do you have a version of ego_item.txt anywhere which has this new ego in it? As you say, this would allow a quick fix for toning down the number of powerful ego DSMs without needing to mess with actual ego generation. Also fits thematically as anyone bothering to make armour out of dragon scales ought to be pretty good at it ...

I have a version of 'ego_item.txt' with it in, but I have added some more ego items, and tweaked just about every rarity, so I prefer to just give you the entry itself :-)

The idea with my 'of Craftmanship' items is that I found most of the 'resist xxx' to be quite boring, so the main idea is that these should be used early. I also like the idea of several different object kinds having the same ego type, and you can include 3 'T:' flags so I use that. They are also ment to be useful early, but not show up too much later in the game, so in these original versions I mostly include the earlier armor sorts. About the numbering: I have used up just about all the empty slots in the ego file, these just fit best at Nr 1 and 2 :-)

# 1 (unused)
# Boot/Glove/Helm
N:1:of Craftmanship
X:7:0
W:0:3:0:500
C:0:0:1d4M4:0
M:0:0:4:0
T:30:1:4
T:31:1:2
T:32:2:6
F:IGNORE_ACID

# 2 (unused)
# Shield/Armor
N:2:of Craftmanship
X:7:0
W:0:3:0:500
C:0:0:1d6M6:0
M:0:0:6:0
T:34:1:5
T:36:0:99
T:37:1:4
F:IGNORE_ACID

Some comments:
The 'M:' flag is a very nice flag, that is used way to little (only 2 launchers have it). What it does is set minimum values for tohit, todam, ac, and pval. I guess that the main reason for it's scarcity is that adding it too early in the file introduces a bug so that no ego armor gets negative tohit. But now in the nightlies that bug is invoked all the time, so there's no problem in using it anymore ;-)

To add DSM to the list of items just add something like:
T:38:0:99
and remove one of the other lines, or if you don't want it on other items, all of them... or add a third version, with adjusted rarity and a bit more boost to ac:

# 3 (unused)
# Dragon Scale Armor
N:3:of Craftmanship
X:7:0
W:0:1:0:500
C:0:0:1d8M8:0
M:0:0:8:0
T:38:0:99
F:IGNORE_ACID

And I guess the Ignore_acid is unneccesary here...

[SSK]

Resists are overvalued. Basically what you need is basic4 + poison and swaps to cover rest of the important ones (confusion and blindness basically). And poison is arguable once you have over 800 HP. Even basic4 is questionable, for example I don't think there are any significant fire breathers left that don't show up in ESP, if you have resist fire as spell or swap to cover that you only need to play carefully to avoid death. Acid is halved by armor, so 800 is its max too.
...

I have fought Morgoth with resistance holes in basic4. All you need to do to survive is remember which holes you have, and what monsters use those attacks.

Interesting you noticed this too. I used to spend lots of time figuring how to cover everything, but still have my stats maxed and some abilities I like--like ESP and boss damage boost.

In my last game, I just started to realize as I went deeper that having all resistances was fine, but that Sauron and Morgy don't require all these--what's needed there is speed and massive melee damage (for warrior and Paladin at least), and of course escapes, heals, and banishes. So for the final fight I just went with Celeborn over Gold DSM of permanence in favor of the extra banish activation and higher AC, figuring I could do without resist light, shards, and something else (I think it was sound) and only MOST sustains--I think I had everything covered except charisma--BFD. >+40 speed after hasting and all my damage bonus eqpt was the right choice.

[SSK]

If it makes you feel any better, the only people who argue that resistances are overrated are very very experienced and very very skilled players. It may be true for them, but the rest of us tend to have similar experiences to yours.

That doesn't mean that DSM of Speed will survive though. I'd like to just make it ultra-rare, but I'll need the statistics to convince people of that ...

Actually thinking more on this--there are inherent issues with DSM:

I think the plain elemental ones: non-ego white, black, blue, and red (which I think is rarer yet) are far too deep to be useful at all--these need to be shallower items as they're just not that great--I'm thinking maybe level 32.

Green, gold, and pseudo are about right the way it is.

Permanence and speed flags are too powerful to be as common as they are BUT ONLY when combined with higher flavors like Balance or Power for sure, but probably also law, gold, and pseudo (not sure about chaos). This is really what needs some nerfing. I think they are actually NOT that overbalancing on basic 4 elemental DSMs

So the issue is really kinda complicated and really will only be successfully addressed when rarity can be decoupled from base item: I am assuming "DSM" is a base item that then gets a flavor, yes? I have the idea that as the code currently stands, it would be difficult to make speed and permanence flags less common specifically on the higher DSMs?

Of course conceptually if one were to imagine these to be hard to craft, I as a master smith wouldn't bother spending a lot of time crafting white DSM of permanence, knowing it really isn't that useful relative to say Power DSM of +9 speed LOL.

[PowerDiver]

Permanence and speed flags are too powerful to be as common as they are BUT ONLY when combined with higher flavors like Balance or Power for sure, but probably also law, gold, and pseudo (not sure about chaos). This is really what needs some nerfing. I think they are actually NOT that overbalancing on basic 4 elemental DSMs

Permanence is so powerful that it is not even allowed on standard armor. ONLY on robes. That's not about cumulative power, but about rarity. It is overpowering even when added to the basic 4 DSMs because it becomes too common.

If you care about balance, and you want to put permanence on some subset of DSMs, you need to make it sufficiently rare and also make it a lot rarer on robes, so that the cumulative likelihood of permanence from all sources is not much above the previous likelihood of generating robes of permanence.

[Magnate]

Permanence is so powerful that it is not even allowed on standard armor. ONLY on robes. That's not about cumulative power, but about rarity. It is overpowering even when added to the basic 4 DSMs because it becomes too common.

If you care about balance, and you want to put permanence on some subset of DSMs, you need to make it sufficiently rare and also make it a lot rarer on robes, so that the cumulative likelihood of permanence from all sources is not much above the previous likelihood of generating robes of permanence.

Well, the next dev build (which should be soon, but might be delayed if we bring in the UTF8 refactor) will have some changes to DSM egos:

- Permanence is gone, no longer available
- Speed is 1-in-100 and only d5 not d10
- Resistance, Stealth and Dwarven are all rarer
- Elvenkind is added, also very rare (3-in-100)
- Craftsmanship is added, only for DSMs, just gives a small AC boost and removes the to-hit malus, no other attributes. This should be about 50% of all ego DSMs.

This is not a comprehensive permanent solution, but if it passes muster in testing we may use it for 3.3 while more development is done on the stats module (currently we can collect tons of stats, but can't interrogate them easily). More difficult balancing, such as described above for Permanence, will come for 3.4 or later. As will more of the previously suggested new ego types.

[PowerDiver]

This is not a comprehensive permanent solution, but if it passes muster in testing we may use it for 3.3 while more development is done on the stats module

It sounds like a big improvement over the current situation. I don't like it, but I don't hate it. IMO Thalkettoth should be special because it is the only armor with a speed bonus, and +3 should be enough. I guess I just have to fork a variant if I want what I perceive as balance.

You'll know you are getting close to resolving the situation if you can get Timo on board. I'll be interested to see if he thinks your new set of egos is an improvement over not having any DSM egos.

[Netbrian]

How hard would it be to add another ego that converts the bolt abilities from DSM to ball abilities? That sounds like a useful ability that wouldn't unbalance things too much (you still can't stack it with anything.)

[Derakon]

Er, don't DSMs already activate for ball spells?

In any event, changing the activations while keeping the elemental affiliations would not be trivial since you'd need to have a mapping of old activation to new activation.

[Zababa]

Er, don't DSMs already activate for ball spells?

I think they do. I've found a Blue Dragon Scale Mail (BDSM ) yesterday and it could be activated for a frost (bolt/ball?) spell.

[Derakon]

Blue should be lightning, white should be frost. If that's not the case then the elemental affinities got screwed up.

[Zababa]

Blue should be lightning, white should be frost.

You are right. I looked it up in my current savegame and it's indeed lightning (for 100 damage).