Acid

[Issunrai]

Hey there. I'm new to Angband. After like 3 fail runs where I had no idea what I was doing, I made my way to CL25 as a Half-Troll Warrior. He was doing really well up until now except for when I was grinding around DL20 and I encountered water hounds, which then proceeded to drop my AC from 93 to 79. I was wondering if there was some way to restore equipment that was damaged by acid? And also, I was wearing an amulet of resist acid, so why didn't that protect me? Or does "resist" only partially resist damage...

[d_m]

Yes, resist helps but doesn't totally prevent the damage.

In general equipment that is damaged can't be repaired. There are enchantment scrolls that can boost the magical bonuses, but they are rare and it's usually not worth the trouble.

Better equipment becomes immune to damage from acid, so your best bet is to power through and find better stuff!

[debo]

It also might be useful to know that AC doesn't do a heck of a lot in Angband... it's certainly better to have more of it than not, but -15AC at that stage of the game isn't a dealbreaker. As d_m said, it's easy enough just to power through it and find better stuff.

There are a few pieces of equipment that give immunity to acid, which AFAIK also makes you immune to equipment damage from acid. Although, by the time you get one of those, AC reduction is probably the least of your worries

tl;dr It does suck when gear with good side-benefits (resistances or buffs) gets chewed up, but it's probably the gentlest of the other "penalizing" effects (e.g. disenchantment, stat-drain, life drain, off the top of my head.)

[Derakon]

Acid resistance does absolutely nothing to protect your armor from being damaged. However, whenever a piece of armor is hit by acid (and one will be by every acid attack, assuming you've filled all equipment slots and each piece of armor still provides some AC), the damage you yourself take by the attack is halved. Thus, a full set of armor is effectively a form of acid resistance. We do an absolutely terrible job of messaging this though.

As d_m and debo said, there's acid immunity which completely protects you. Additionally, most late-game armor is itself immune to acid (without necessarily providing Acid Resistance) -- acid will splash on it, halving the HP damage you take, but your AC will not be reduced.

[Issunrai]

Thanks a lot guys, learned a lot from that.
Also, got any tips for me, considering my character and dungeon level? :3

[guanlongwucaii]

Hounds are generally not worth fighting. The lesser ones can do inventory damage and the deeper ones are plain dangerous (time, plasma, aether etc). All of them are annoying and even dangerous to fight, but they do not drop anything. Same goes for beholders, who drain charges and are quite powerful but drop literally nothing.

Of course, if you have the appropriate elemental immunity, feel free to kill them, though I still find that they take too much time to kill (their breathing attacks make it highly draggy to fight them) and don't really give good EXP for how annoying they are.

I wouldn't worry about AC; plain melee attacks are not that threatening, especially to a high-CON character like a HT Warrior. It's resistances that you will want to look for in your armour, but of course we can't tell what you need if you haven't posted a character dump! I am really new to the game and I never dive, so I can't really offer much gameplay advice. IIRC around thistime you should be farming stat gain potions.

Also, you should post a character dump next time so that other posters can offer equipment advice

[quarague]

Hounds are generally not worth fighting.

I tend to disagree, they seem to have very few hitpoints and still give decent xp. So if you can fight them around a corner so that only one of them has LoS on you they give nice xp for relativly little risk.

[guanlongwucaii]

I tend to disagree, they seem to have very few hitpoints and still give decent xp. So if you can fight them around a corner so that only one of them has LoS on you they give nice xp for relativly little risk.

Yes, the shallower hounds are not much of a threat. They only pose an annoyance through inventory damage. If you bother to get them into a corner where you can fight them one at a time, that does work (I'm just too lazy -- they don't have drops, so I don't bother fighting them). Another reason why I don't bother with them is because it is simply very tedious to fight them. Having multiple monsters breathe = more keystrokes.

But the later hounds are just not worth fighting; the stunning hounds are very dangerous if you lack stun resistance (an unlucky step into a plasma/gravity hound-filled room can mean instant death).

Time hounds are well-known for being horribly dangerous monsters that are not worth fighting at all; time has no resists. Ethereal and Chaos hounds are dangerous if you lack the appropriate resistance, as they also breathe for fairly high damage (ethereal hounds also have passwall, and chaos breath confuses/hallucinates)... Aether hounds are nasty. They can breathe pretty much everything including time.

[PowerWyrm]

Acid resistance does absolutely nothing to protect your armor from being damaged.

In fact it does. Acid resistance will lower the damage you take from acid attacks, and since the chance of inventory damage is directly proportional to the damage you take, having acid resistance will lower the chance of you armor being damaged.

[Derakon]

Aether hounds are nasty. They can breathe pretty much everything including time.

But in practice, because they have so many breath weapons, they're unlikely to use the really nasty ones. Here's their spell entry from monster.txt:

S:1_IN_5
S:BR_ACID | BR_CHAO | BR_COLD | BR_DARK | BR_DISE
S:BR_ELEC | BR_FIRE | BR_GRAV | BR_INER | BR_LIGHT | BR_NETH
S:BR_NEXU | BR_PLAS | BR_POIS | BR_SHAR | BR_SOUN | BR_TIME
S:BR_WALL

If we consider acid, cold, dark, electricity, fire, light, nether, nexus (because at this point you should have maxed stats), plasma, poison, shards, and sound to be not-very-nasty elements, then 12 out of 18 of their possible breath weapons are not dangerous. Plasma and sound would be dangerous in a group, but an occasional mild stun is not going to kill you.

In fact it does. Acid resistance will lower the damage you take from acid attacks, and since the chance of inventory damage is directly proportional to the damage you take, having acid resistance will lower the chance of you armor being damaged.

Firstly, this does nothing about the damage your armor takes from acid attacks. Secondly, from my reading of inven_damage (the function that destroys items), it takes as a parameter "cperc", which is the chance of damage occuring, multiplied by 100. It doesn't care about damage. And all of the calls to inven_damage...ah, okay, so I misread earlier. They set cperc to be the minimum of 300 or 5 * the damage dealt by the attack.

Okay, never mind. I'd thought the calls all set it to be 300 regardless of damage dealt. My mistake. And what I said earlier in another thread where someone was complaining about inventory damage rates was thus similarly misguided.

[Narvius]

Having multiple monsters breathe = more keystrokes.

If you have a large enough screen simply open up a term window with messages and enable auto-more. It's how I play, and it seriously makes the game better. Especially once you start tossing Meteor Storms into dragon pits.

[Timo Pietilä]

However, whenever a piece of armor is hit by acid (and one will be by every acid attack, assuming you've filled all equipment slots and each piece of armor still provides some AC), the damage you yourself take by the attack is halved. Thus, a full set of armor is effectively a form of acid resistance.

That is assuming it actually inflicts damage to that gear or would have inflicted if it didn't have ignore_acid flag. A metal shield [5,-5] does not reduce acid damage (and it will not get damaged any further either. You wont get [5, -6] as result of acid damage).

[Derakon]

That is assuming it actually inflicts damage to that gear or would have inflicted if it didn't have ignore_acid flag. A metal shield [5,-5] does not reduce acid damage (and it will not get damaged any further either. You wont get [5, -6] as result of acid damage).

That's why I said the armor must still provide some AC. Alchemist's Gloves [0, +0] also won't take any acid damage and won't halve your HP damage, oddly enough.