store refills and speed

[quarague]

First a simple question, various town store items are now guaranteed to be available (in 3.5). Has the availability of other items been turned down in compensation?
I first played a rogue and although CLWs are always available it seems the amount of CCWs is smaller that I recall. No playing a HT paladin (who doesn't care to much about CCWs from the store ;-) and I have seen restore live level potions in store but not nearly as many as I would like to have.

Second on speed, I believe this has been discussed before but I believe speed is currently overpowered. The importance of more speed dwarfs any other equipment considerations and having or not having means to increase base speed can easily be game breaking. I think I suggested toning down speed effects (for both player and monsters) by a factor of 2, ie +10 speed is only 1.5 times normal speed, +20 is double base speed, etc. What do people think? Is speed something that should be changed/ fixed?

[Derakon]

There have been tons of arguments about speed in the past. It's powerful, certainly, but does that make it overpowered? Up until the late game, there are many monsters that are faster than the player is, and that creates a significant challenge that would not be there if the impact of speed were reduced. Meanwhile, the pressure to get as much speed as possible on your gear means that you end up having to make interesting tradeoffs. What's more important -- +5 CON or +8 speed?

[quarague]

I think the problem with speed as it is now is that the tradeoffs only start once you have secured a speed of at least +10 or more like +20. If you are at base speed even a lousy +5 speed ring is more powerful than any other item in the game that doesn't grant speed bonuses. A character with speed +20 has to make tricky decision whether to take +10 speed or +5 con or lots of other available things. A character at base speed has no tradeoffs, and if he is unlucky not to find any speed items the game will be quite hard, no matter what other items he finds.

[Timo Pietilä]

I think the problem with speed as it is now is that the tradeoffs only start once you have secured a speed of at least +10

So problem lies in linearity of speed. +10 is twice as fast as 0 so you absolutely need that, but +20 is only 50% higher than +10 and +30 is only ~33% higher than +20.

I had this same thinking in, oddly enough, Master of Orion. First couple additions to warp speed mean a lot because their effect on your speed increase is so high.

Unfortunately the solution I figured to that is pretty hard to translate to Angband (each advance to warp tech gives you fixed % of increase compared to previous tech level, with end result of getting 9x speed at level 9. Take advantage of exponential nature of % increases).

[fizzix]

There have been tons of arguments about speed in the past. It's powerful, certainly, but does that make it overpowered? Up until the late game, there are many monsters that are faster than the player is, and that creates a significant challenge that would not be there if the impact of speed were reduced. Meanwhile, the pressure to get as much speed as possible on your gear means that you end up having to make interesting tradeoffs. What's more important -- +5 CON or +8 speed?

See, I disagree with you here. In the early game a lot of the monsters are dangerous because they can catch up to you fast and do a lot of melee damage (cats, birds, even things like nightmares). If speed was just movement speed, then they could still be just as dangerous, you can't run from them, and their melee damage could be cranked up to compensate for the "lost" attacks.

There are some monsters that would behave differently. Giant dragonflies for example wouldn't be able to get 2-3 breaths off on you. Same with shimmering vortices. But that's a price I'm willing to pay. And nothing really stops us from having these specific monsters having halved action speed as well.

[krazyhades]

Crawl separates movement and action speed, and (movement) speed is still very important there. Nagas' greatest weakness is their Slow 2 whereas Spriggans get the very powerful Fast 3 to practically ensure early-game survival.