New items

[Derakon]

What, the different element types? Ask the original devs; they've been in Angband ever since it split from Moria.

[Timo Pietilä]

What I want to know is why aren't Magi/Weaponmastery/Devotion aren't considered really competitive with Trickery?

Speed/poison/nexus/DEX/infravision/stealth is just too strong combo. I think it is that poison resist that makes Trickery amulet above all other amulets. Speed is other thing that makes it amulet above other amulets. It would be good even with just Nexus/DEX/Infravision/stealth.

Weaponmastery and Magi aren't useless, Weaponmastery is good for preventing disenchantment and it has important sustains and important STR bonus as well as combat bonuses, Magi is good for INT/FA/SI and confusion/blindness (depending of version).

Devotion is pretty useless, if you are playing priest or paladin you prefer WIS +5/6. There isn't anything in Devotion that makes it useful to anyone after you have Arkenstone. If that would go up to +6 WIS then it would be useful.

[camlost]

* Controlled teleport is an amazingly powerful ability in Angband. Every variant that's implemented it that I've played, it's completely wrecked game balance. It might be made to be balanced by making it a short-range line-of-sight teleport though.

In S, there's a semi-controlled teleport. It never becomes completely accurate, and early on it's fairly random, and no longer range than phase door. I consider it good, but not breaking/defining/required. Or course, only mage-likes can use it multiple times in a row.

[dhegler]

What, the different element types? Ask the original devs; they've been in Angband ever since it split from Moria.

I mean the concept of those specific amulets... When I started playing in the pre-3.0 days, I don't even remember them. Maybe I was never good enough to get deep enough to find them though.

[Timo Pietilä]

I mean the concept of those specific amulets... When I started playing in the pre-3.0 days, I don't even remember them. Maybe I was never good enough to get deep enough to find them though.

They didn't exist before 3.0. You should ask JLE why he did what he did, I don't think anybody else has any idea.

My guess is that he just plain invented something out of his head to make amulets a bit more interesting.

[dhegler]

They didn't exist before 3.0. You should ask JLE why he did what he did, I don't think anybody else has any idea.

My guess is that he just plain invented something out of his head to make amulets a bit more interesting.

I should know what JLE stands for, but I don't...

[Magnate]

I should know what JLE stands for, but I don't...

JLE is a person called Jonathan Ellis, who contributed a huge set of monster and item changes to V about ten years ago. So big that they caused the then maintainer to bump the version number from 2.x to 3.x

Some of those changes were excellent, others less so. But because there was a maintainer who decided that they went in, they went in, for better or worse. There was a lot of debate afterwards (one particular individual hated the changes and argued against them pretty consistently for most of the last ten years) - but there wasn't much beforehand.

Now there's a devteam, who don't do that kind of thing any more - the debate now happens beforehand, and anything remotely significant like JLE's changes would go into v4 first.

[Djabanete]

Some of those changes were excellent, others less so. But because there was a maintainer who decided that they went in, they went in, for better or worse. There was a lot of debate afterwards (one particular individual hated the changes and argued against them pretty consistently for most of the last ten years) - but there wasn't much beforehand.

Wait, don't tell me, I can get this!

[Timo Pietilä]

Wait, don't tell me, I can get this!

I'm pretty sure that Magnate means me. For the record I wanted JLE patch to go into game, but with several edits. As it was it messed with too many things, in particular it introduced several too powerful items and it changed several things without much reasoning why (Eonwe for example was 4d4 before JLE, 5d4 after). It could have been much better with few changes here and there to make it less disruptive. Basically it made game much easier itemwise, and harder monsterwise, but because monsters do not actually count much in difficulty of playing angband change was too strong.

This was one of the last things Robert did and because everything before that had been very cautious I'm guessing he was already getting tired of being maintainer at that point.