Things I don't like about current V (long-ish)

[MattB]

Resists: I wholly disagree with Derakon(+MattB) that the "solved" kit is important - I think it's a positively bad thing for the game. Optimisation ought to be endless and with diminishing returns and stacking resists align with this.

I am happy to disagree with you on this (), but I feel very strongly about it.
I found the FA system wholly unsatisfactory because there was no goal in sight. Current Vanilla has a nominally achievable goal, however personally speaking I have only achieved full resists maybe twice, so it is still an aspirational goal for me, and the situation you describe (i.e. 'ended' optimisation) rarely occurs. This is even more the case if you consider 'solved' to include 18/*** sustained on all stats (which I've never managed). I thus find the V system far more interesting than the FA system. Obviously, if the majority disagree with me then go for it, make the change and I'll grin and bear it (through gritted teeth).

[Nomad]

I am happy to disagree with you on this (), but I feel very strongly about it.
I found the FA system wholly unsatisfactory because there was no goal in sight. Current Vanilla has a nominally achievable goal, however personally speaking I have only achieved full resists maybe twice, so it is still an aspirational goal for me, and the situation you describe (i.e. 'ended' optimisation) rarely occurs. This is even more the case if you consider 'solved' to include 18/*** sustained on all stats (which I've never managed). I thus find the V system far more interesting than the FA system. Obviously, if the majority disagree with me then go for it, make the change and I'll grin and bear it (through gritted teeth).

I'm with MattB and Derakon on this. Covering as many resistances, abilities and immunities as possible with the highest possible stat boosts is a fun and satisfying optimisation puzzle, especially with randarts. But endless optimisation of stacking gear for diminishing returns lacks that "Ah-ha!" moment of triumph of having achieved something concrete with your new kit. If juggling gear after my latest find allows me to gain Nether resistance without losing anything else, I'm smugly triumphant. If it just gives me 20% more Nether resistance at the cost of losing 10% of my Chaos and 5% of my Sound resistance, well, I don't feel like I've achieved much and it's hard to even judge if my new kit is any better than the old one.

I think stacking with diminishing returns can work well for a relatively small pool of resistances like the base four, but not with the truckload of things you have to cover in Angband. (And I consider that sheer volume of different things to cover to be an important part of Angband's flavour and appeal, so count me in with the people who would be happy to have some monster attacks renamed for clarity, but wouldn't want to see any of them merged or removed.)

ETA some thoughts on spellcasting:

This is really quite a difficult problem:

• Randomness tends to make the monsters look stupid
• Monster mana leads to dull damage/mana races
• Cooldowns seem artificial

Maybe some combination would be best - or something else. More thought required.

How about randomness but with intelligent discarding of unsuitable options? e.g. If a caster has full health, they will discard healing or escape spells as options and choose randomly from among their other possible actions; if they're injured, healing and escape go back in the pool of possibilities, but there's still only a random chance that they'll choose one of those spells, rather than a guarantee that they'll spam cast healing any time you hurt them. Maybe summoning only goes in the choice pool after all previous summons are dead, or when the monster is scared, etc.

[clouded]

Not sure why people think stacking resistances changes anything about equipment choices and strategy, it is pretty much the exact same thing except temporary resistance sources are far less important. It's not as if items are suddenly going to start giving 10-15% of 6 or 7 resists and such.

[Derakon]

Regarding monster mana: I've played NPP a decent bit and I found uniques to be intensely frustrating in that game, because you almost literally cannot make progress in fighting them until they run out of mana, and there's no realistic way to hasten that process. In the meantime, you just have to eat their most powerful spells over and over again (necessitating a gigantic amount of healing) while dealing as much damage as possible (in the hopes that they spend their mana on self-heal spells instead of attack spells).

Fights in Vanilla aren't exactly tactical puzzles, but they are unpredictable, and that has value. Fights in NPP almost universally followed a two-phase pattern: in the first phase, the monster blows all their mana on hitting the player, who has to tank the attacks as best they can; in the second phase, the monster is out of mana and thus has no effective offense, so the player can beat on them with impunity.

I'm oversimplifying, but not by a whole lot.

It seems like our problem is that monster spells are very powerful, with the unintended consequence that intelligent spellcasters are horrifically dangerous. To me, that says we need to do one of three things:

1) Not have intelligent spellcasters (current Vanilla)
2) Not have very powerful monster spells (casting a spell is roughly as dangerous as any other action they could take)
3) Put hard limits on how frequently monster spells can be cast (i.e. cooldowns)

Monster mana does none of these things.

[LostTemplar]

Cooldowns seem artificial

Less artificial then mana. Basically it may be just a separate mana (ammo) bar for every spell with different regeneration rules.

There are two problems with monster mana (also apply to player's mana which is not so good in Angband also):
it is the same for all spells, and it does not really regenerate (in one fight).

So if it is really important to use mana insetad of cooldowns for roleplay reason, do something like 10 mana with 1 per turn regen and spells cost in 1--10 range, so it do really matter tactically, not just fight for 100 turns until It run out of healing, then kill (as in FA, O, NPP). Currently mana is just an extra HP for monsters, who heal really good, or just nothing (never run out) for others.

[Estie]

Regarding monster mana: I've played NPP a decent bit and I found uniques to be intensely frustrating in that game, because you almost literally cannot make progress in fighting them until they run out of mana, and there's no realistic way to hasten that process. In the meantime, you just have to eat their most powerful spells over and over again (necessitating a gigantic amount of healing) while dealing as much damage as possible (in the hopes that they spend their mana on self-heal spells instead of attack spells).

Fights in Vanilla aren't exactly tactical puzzles, but they are unpredictable, and that has value. Fights in NPP almost universally followed a two-phase pattern: in the first phase, the monster blows all their mana on hitting the player, who has to tank the attacks as best they can; in the second phase, the monster is out of mana and thus has no effective offense, so the player can beat on them with impunity.

I'm oversimplifying, but not by a whole lot.

It seems like our problem is that monster spells are very powerful, with the unintended consequence that intelligent spellcasters are horrifically dangerous. To me, that says we need to do one of three things:

1) Not have intelligent spellcasters (current Vanilla)
2) Not have very powerful monster spells (casting a spell is roughly as dangerous as any other action they could take)
3) Put hard limits on how frequently monster spells can be cast (i.e. cooldowns)

Monster mana does none of these things.

Hmmm I see. In vanilla, there is no burst mechanics on the player side that I can think of (unless you count a stack of good arrows a burst till they deplete), everything @ does he can do indefinitely provided the (ample) potions are at hand.
So if monsters get a burst phase that seriously endangers the @ (if it doesnt, its meaningless in the first place), the only option for the player is to wait out the burst defensively before killing the monster.

Changing mechanics to give bursts to all classes would be on a greater scope than anything suggested so far.

So if monster burst is somehow introduced (by mana or limited archery or otherwise), the only option for the player would be the defensive one that you find frustrating.

Would you still find it frustrating if the burst phase was short enough ?
Currently, if you survive a green D breath, you can kill green D, more or less easily depending on your offense. If you do not survive a breath, you have to run period.

Suppose the green D had only 3 breaths, and each would do 90% of your max hp of damage. Would that be better than current situation ?
You still have all the options a non-poison resistant char of current vanilla has, OR you can tackle it by eating its burst defensively and kill it afterwards.

(breath weapon is bad example according to my previous post, but nm that for the moment).

I _think_ making uniques more challenging this way would be good, provided the fight doesnt take too long. I never played NPP, but it sounds to me like the issue is too much monster mana rather than the concept itself.

[buzzkill]

What about cooldowns that aren't really cooldowns, not that I advocate anything but unlimited mana for V. In theory, Monster spells would use a lot of mana. Monster mana would regenerate very quickly. The projected result would be, after casting a high mana spell, the monster would be unable to spam the same spell (a functional cooldown) for a while, or several lesser spells could be cast in sucession. Adjust max-mana and regen rate till balanced.

How about randomness but with intelligent discarding of unsuitable options? e.g. If a caster has full health, they will discard healing or escape spells as options and choose randomly from among their other possible actions; if they're injured, healing and escape go back in the pool of possibilities, but there's still only a random chance that they'll choose one of those spells, rather than a guarantee that they'll spam cast healing any time you hurt them. Maybe summoning only goes in the choice pool after all previous summons are dead, or when the monster is scared, etc.

This bit from Nomad is golden and probably suitable for V.

[nppangband]

Regarding monster mana: I've played NPP a decent bit and I found uniques to be intensely frustrating in that game, because you almost literally cannot make progress in fighting them until they run out of mana, and there's no realistic way to hasten that process. In the meantime, you just have to eat their most powerful spells over and over again (necessitating a gigantic amount of healing) while dealing as much damage as possible (in the hopes that they spend their mana on self-heal spells instead of attack spells).

Fights in Vanilla aren't exactly tactical puzzles, but they are unpredictable, and that has value. Fights in NPP almost universally followed a two-phase pattern: in the first phase, the monster blows all their mana on hitting the player, who has to tank the attacks as best they can; in the second phase, the monster is out of mana and thus has no effective offense, so the player can beat on them with impunity.

IMHO the 4GAI monster mana in NPP is slightly better than the Vanilla AI (in that they are smarter about running away, or realizing that a spell is ineffective, and not casting it any more), but I definitely agree there is much room for improvement. I like the idea of each monster spell just preventing the monster for casting for X number of turns. The more powerful the spell, the longer they have to wait to cast again. The other thing I was pondering is each spell in the monsters' spellset having a likelihood of being cast, and that likelihood is decreased each time they cast it. That way, Sauron can't teleport away forever, Morgoth can't bombard the player with mana storm indefinitely, etc.

I have found the key in NPP 4gai is being slightly faster than the monster. It seems that in the battles either the player or monster is healing while the other one is attacking. Being faster makes it so much easier to force the monster to be defensive while the player attacks.

[Therem Harth]

Everything boiling down to speed is the status quo, though, and IMO a boring status quo at that...

[Grotug]

Curse the RNG to high heaven. I go for hours having few potions being destroyed from cold damage. Then I start to wonder about it. Then I forget about it. Then I suddenly lose potions like I didn't posses an iota of cold protection, despite having rCold armor and temporary cold resist. Woosh! there go all your hard earned potions! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr



But more on topic: the number one thing I'd like to see changed is the severity of "roll your progress backward" attacks in all their forms especially if you have multiple resistances *cough* (see above image). Why do I bother with an amulet of resist acid if I'm still going to have my gear rendered useless from dragonflies and little lower case v's anyway?

Disenchantment is the worst, and even on dl27 Mim the traitor destroyed my sling of extra might: he brought it from (+11, +17) down to (+1, +8) because I might as well try to defeat him since I can't run from him, but then he heals himself and pummels me until I'm out of speed potions, phase doors and iron shots, and so have to quit the fight anyway . Many hours later I'm still slinging my sling of extra might because I haven't found anything better. I'm running around with [2, -2] helmet but I have to keep it because it has some special quality that I need (like pBlindness). I'm actually not so upset about this, since I have a plan for defeating him when I see him again (I have encountered him like 4 times, and each time there has been some reason why I couldn't fight him). But next time our paths cross he is dying.

Anyway, many hours of grinding the 20s (hardly grinding if I'm constantly brought to danger hp and running out of health potions) and I'm making very slow, if any, progress. The risks far outweigh the rewards of lower, more dangerous dungeon levels.

Oh, regarding the Paladin's spell book, it is mystifying to me why cure serious, critical and mortal wounds are so expensive and cure light wounds and healing are not (relative to how much they heal). Why can't these be better balanced so it's cost effective to use the other healings instead of just cure light wounds and 'healing'?

I needed to vent since I can't get beyond dl30 without being killed (force quit before it actually happens) or nearly killed regularly and I've been playing for many, many hours, trolling the dl20s.

[Derakon]

I've just gotten used to getting armor damaged by acid and having potions get blown up by cold attacks, so it stopped bothering me ages ago...but it's clearly a big deal for other players. Do we want to rethink acid damage somehow? Currently every acid attack will damage something (assuming you have acid-vulnerable armor in every slot). And this is in addition to destroying a wide range of inventory items. We could nerf this:

* Only have a chance of damaging armor at all (say, 50%, or 75% without resistance, 25% with, or whatever)
* Only ever destroy inventory items or armor, but not both

Or something else?

As for disenchantment, I'm afraid this is Working As Intended. Monsters that disenchant gear are rare, and you're usually best-served by avoiding them. You said you couldn't run away; why not? Because he's faster than you? That's why you should be carrying a Staff of Teleportation (or casting Portal, but as a paladin you're probably not very good at that). Angband is always going to have monsters that are not worth fighting at your current power level, and Mim is definitely one of those. Come back later when you have one of resistance to disenchantment, a speed advantage, or strong ranged attacks.

And look at it this way: at least he (presumably) didn't badly drain your melee weapon!

As for holy spells, there's rather a lot of redundancy in them and the paladin spell difficulties and costs haven't been seriously examined in awhile. That said, holy spells are far and away better than arcane spells; they're only missing Haste Self, Resistance, and a high-DPS attack spell (Orb is great but a bit slow). If you're going to make more holy spells viable, then you'll need to take away something else to compensate. There've been plenty of discussions on ways to better-differentiate the different spell types and the different caster classes.

[Nick]

How about randomness but with intelligent discarding of unsuitable options? e.g. If a caster has full health, they will discard healing or escape spells as options and choose randomly from among their other possible actions

This already does happen for intelligent spellcasters in Vanilla. What the 4GAI variants then do is rate the desirability of each of the spells and choose the most desirable.

It seems like our problem is that monster spells are very powerful, with the unintended consequence that intelligent spellcasters are horrifically dangerous. To me, that says we need to do one of three things:

1) Not have intelligent spellcasters (current Vanilla)
2) Not have very powerful monster spells (casting a spell is roughly as dangerous as any other action they could take)
3) Put hard limits on how frequently monster spells can be cast (i.e. cooldowns)

This is a good summary, but I think this may not be an exhaustive list, and there's also the possibility for having some combination.

After a lot of thought ("What would I do if I was a monster?", etc) I find myself somewhat surprisingly leaning towards randomness. So here's a possible model:

• Monsters assess the value of their spell choices; how well they do this depends on how smart they are
• Each spell then gets a score
• Chance of spell is then (spell score)/(total score)

In fact, the current model is this, with only intelligent spellcasters assessing at all, and the scores they assign then being other 0 (reject this spell) or 1. One of the virtues of this model is that granularity can be increased easily, and in a number of different ways (introduce variable smartness, introduce greater range of scores, allow for different scoring methods in different monsters, and so on).

Resistances: There will be a thread. You have been warned.

[Magnate]

Regarding monster mana: I've played NPP a decent bit and I found uniques to be intensely frustrating in that game, because you almost literally cannot make progress in fighting them until they run out of mana, and there's no realistic way to hasten that process. In the meantime, you just have to eat their most powerful spells over and over again (necessitating a gigantic amount of healing) while dealing as much damage as possible (in the hopes that they spend their mana on self-heal spells instead of attack spells).

Fights in Vanilla aren't exactly tactical puzzles, but they are unpredictable, and that has value. Fights in NPP almost universally followed a two-phase pattern: in the first phase, the monster blows all their mana on hitting the player, who has to tank the attacks as best they can; in the second phase, the monster is out of mana and thus has no effective offense, so the player can beat on them with impunity.

I'm oversimplifying, but not by a whole lot.

It seems like our problem is that monster spells are very powerful, with the unintended consequence that intelligent spellcasters are horrifically dangerous. To me, that says we need to do one of three things:

1) Not have intelligent spellcasters (current Vanilla)
2) Not have very powerful monster spells (casting a spell is roughly as dangerous as any other action they could take)
3) Put hard limits on how frequently monster spells can be cast (i.e. cooldowns)

Monster mana does none of these things.

It does do the third if the costs are high enough (buzzkill's suggestion). I think the key part of your post is "there's no realistic way to hasten that process". If we do bring in monster mana, we also need to bring in ways to drain it (for all classes).

But I also like your take that monster spells are unnecessarily powerful. Changing this would be a very long job with huge amounts of rebalancing, but ultimately for the better.

I like Nick's suggestion for intelligence with retained randomness.

[Magnate]

I'm with MattB and Derakon on this. Covering as many resistances, abilities and immunities as possible with the highest possible stat boosts is a fun and satisfying optimisation puzzle, especially with randarts. But endless optimisation of stacking gear for diminishing returns lacks that "Ah-ha!" moment of triumph of having achieved something concrete with your new kit. If juggling gear after my latest find allows me to gain Nether resistance without losing anything else, I'm smugly triumphant. If it just gives me 20% more Nether resistance at the cost of losing 10% of my Chaos and 5% of my Sound resistance, well, I don't feel like I've achieved much and it's hard to even judge if my new kit is any better than the old one.

Your thoughts on spellcasting captured the subsequent discussion, but I thought it worth offering up why I differ on this. I don't disagree that the satisfaction of ticking a new resist after a kit swap (without giving up anything else) is greater than the compromise you describe, but I don't think you're comparing like with like. If I got 20% more nether resistance without giving up anything else (consistent with your first scenario), that would feel good too. So I don't think that stacking resists make any difference to individual kit swaps.

I think they would make a difference to the everyone-has-the-same-endgame-kit problem. (We are of course talking about standarts here - I need no convincing that this isn't a problem with randarts!) This is what I thought Derakon meant by "solved" - I didn't think he was referring to mid-game kit.

Once upon a time I nerfed Thorin during one of my iterations over V's standarts - I took away one of the high resists (chaos or sound, I forget which). Thorin is one of - if not the single - most common piece(s) of endgame kit, and I wanted to make those decisions more difficult. A significant minority of old school players howled in protest precisely for this reason - they didn't want those decisions made harder! They wanted to be able to find Thorin easily and tick off one of the endgame kit boxes.

I accept that this problem is addressed more directly by randarts, but I think that stacking resists would also add subtlety, even in standarts, to what the optimal endgame kit is.

[Nomad]

I think they would make a difference to the everyone-has-the-same-endgame-kit problem. (We are of course talking about standarts here - I need no convincing that this isn't a problem with randarts!) This is what I thought Derakon meant by "solved" - I didn't think he was referring to mid-game kit.

I guess that's why we're coming from different angles - I stopped playing standart games years ago because I find having similar kit every game intolerably boring, even/especially in the very early stages. Adding stacking resistances to make the standart endgame kit less rigid would ruin randart games for me, because there the complexity of building a kit out of random elements is already sufficiently difficult that most of the satisfaction comes out finding a new arrangement that closes one more resistance gap than you had before, rather than the one in a thousand chance of assembling a genuinely 'solved' kit that covers everything. Make that equipment puzzle even more complicated, with fuzzier measures of having achieved something, and it stops being satisfyingly difficult and becomes too frustrating to even bother trying to optimise.

Basically, as you say, you're solving a problem that's only an issue in the standart game, and I think your fix for it would unbalance the difficulty of the randart equipment puzzle to the point where it would stop being fun. (While still not making me want to play with standarts, because it's the fact that artefacts stay the same from game to game that I find boring. So my favoured solution would be adding more randomness to standart games, whether by a mix of fixed and random artefacts, random artifact properties like you get with higher resistances on egos, a greater range of high-level egos that could potentially compete with artefacts, etc.)