Angband 3.5.0 released!

[Derakon]

Maybe the maximum breath damage should be included into the monster info?
Afer all, damage done by spells and other attacks are listed with their numbers.

It is included, but you need to know that the monster can breathe first. Come to think, you need to have killed the monster to know what its max HP are too. Oh well.

[Mondkalb]

Maybe the maximum breath damage should be included into the monster info?
Afer all, damage done by spells and other attacks are listed with their numbers.

[Derakon]

The thing that is absolutely not optional about mages is knowing which monsters can kill you in one hit before they wake up and definitely before they get into LOS. If you don't have the monster memory memorized including the damage that spells do, turn on the cheat to know all monster memory if you want to play a mage. It's basically impossible to play one without risking instadeath at multiple points -- or rather, playing one such that that doesn't happen requires you to tediously grind for a long, long time at shallow depths.

A good rule of thumb is to take a monster's HP, and divide it by 3. If that's greater than your max HP, then unless you know for a fact that it has no breath weapons, you should avoid it. Reason for this is that monster breath weapons (at least for the basic elements and poison) deal damage equal to their current HP / 3.

[fizzix]

Yeah high elf mages are actually a pretty hard class. You might want to try dwarf priest. You can play them mage-y style in the midgame after you learn orb of destruction. But they have a lot of durability, so there's a good chance you'll have enough HP to survive that nasty mid-game breath.

[slinberg]

That's not really diving too fast, that's not detecting monsters in a paranoid enough manner.

Actually, I'm super-paranoid about detecting... Never step into unknown spaces, and probe every monster. Probing doesn't tell you how much damage a breath attack does, I guess... And I didn't realize or remember. I had good weapons and attack speed and thought I could handle it, but it it shredded me before I could even get the sword out when I was right next to it. Full health to "you die" in one blast of crystalline fury.

[Timo Pietilä]

Wait what? Guess I don't even bother reading sigs these days...

I found his .sig quite amusing. It clearly was a joke, like "I have a gun, I'll kill myself with it if <something, don't remember what> does as I wish" implicating a threat that no-one would care. Maybe a mention "child" in it was too much to Antoine. I can understand how having any amount of even imaginary child porn would be disgusting though.

[Philip]

That's not really diving too fast, that's not detecting monsters in a paranoid enough manner. You can probably afford to dive faster, which would give you dungeon books, which would allow you to dive faster all the way down to the 90's. There you kill small fry enemies and identify the stuff they drop.

[slinberg]

Wait, what? Mages haven't been easy to win with since they took away Globe of Invulnerability. All of the changes to mages since then that I can think of have been making mages easier, and they're still the hardest class in the game.

Jesus I'm glad to hear that. Maybe that's why I've never won in 20 years. I pretty much play only high-elf mages. Had a promising lvl 33 just get insta-killed at full health by a Great Crystal Drake at 1900'. Dived too fast again, I guess :/

[ekolis]

Wait what? Guess I don't even bother reading sigs these days...

[Antoine]

Problem solved, let's return to discussing Angband

A.

[gglibertine]

People have raised the issue with gglibertine previously and he declined to change.

My ideal would be for all the relevanr posts to be removed, includibg this one, and then they wont derail your thread.

A.

Bullshit. No one's ever mentioned it to me before. Now that I see somebody does object, it's gone. Of course, now everybody knows you're a liar and a coward.

Try asking nicely the next time.

[Antoine]

People have raised the issue with gglibertine previously and he declined to change.

My ideal would be for all the relevanr posts to be removed, includibg this one, and then they wont derail your thread.

A.

[Nick]

I wish someone could convince gglibertine to stop using that sig about ch*ld p*rn. I don't like it and I don't want to visit a forum where people talk about that. If he wants to post about ch*ld p*rn he should go to a ch*ld p*rn forum not do it here.

A.

I wish Antoine would address people directly if she had a problem with their posting

[Antoine]

I wish someone could convince gglibertine to stop using that sig about ch*ld p*rn. I don't like it and I don't want to visit a forum where people talk about that. If he wants to post about ch*ld p*rn he should go to a ch*ld p*rn forum not do it here.

A.

[gglibertine]

However "easy" and "fast" are not synonyms. Fastest to win are probably rogue or ranger, mage being a bit faster than warrior and priest and paladin going last, but especially priest is easiest to win with even that it probably is slowest of them all. Priests just wont die, they allow you to make a lot of mistakes that are not immediately fatal, because it just takes one spell to restore your heath back to full (and myriads of ways to get rid of the thing threatening you, and detection which detects everything).

However both paladin and priest lack unlimited haste, which makes their progress a lot slower than magic-types. Thumb-rule: "if it is faster than you, it can kill you" makes them avoid a lot of monsters that mage & co can fight.

Well, I have been playing Angband for just about 20 years (with another ten years of very silly nethack variants my best friend and I thought up before that[1]), but it hadn't been quite *that* long I just remember the guy who taught me the game saying it was easiest to win with a mage, hardest with a warrior. (Strangely enough, I've never actually met anyone else in RL who played Angband. Or even knew what it was.) Obviously the warrior will be easier at the beginning and the mage harder, but stuff changes later on. Since I kind of suck at games anyway, I've never even made it past L35 or so, so all I know about winning is that someday I'm going to have to stop getting so excited about melee that I forget to watch my HP.

It's a testament to just how complex a game Angband is that there are so many tradeoffs you can make, and how they affect gameplay.

[1] My friend and I added three ridiculous classes and a variety of silly monsters to Nethack, but I won't waste space in this thread describing them -- though I am highly tempted to hack something similar into Angband at some point for my own amusement. If anyone actually cares, send me a message and I'll post about it in a more suitable forum.