Boots of speed everywhere

[Timo Pietilä]

Is it just me imagining things or has the ratio of speed boots gone up in 3.5? I seem to find those more often than any other ego-boots. I think I haven't seen any boots of FA yet, but I have seen 10+ BoS (+7 is the best, three of those). All of this before 3000'.

[AnonymousHero]

How many different games/lives have you played? (What I'm hinting at is that it may just be a fluke.)

[Timo Pietilä]

How many different games/lives have you played? (What I'm hinting at is that it may just be a fluke.)

Maybe it is a fluke. That's why I'm asking. Like me finding Ringil in pretty much every game for about a year when I started playing angband.

"Why is everyone saying Ringil is rare? I find it in every game"
"You lucky bastard"

[Derakon]

I don't feel like they're any more common now than they used to be, for what it's worth. I've played a few games on 3.5 nightly builds...though, ironically, none after it actually got released.

[AnonymousHero]

Maybe it is a fluke. That's why I'm asking.

Of course. Being the "proprietor" of possibly one of the luckiest characters in Angband history I can certainly understand .

I just wanted to point out the (potential) fallacy of expanding one's own experience to everybody.

(Btw, doesn't the game collect stats these days?)

[debo]

I played 3 comp characters up to about DL50 / CL30 and didn't find a single anything of speed (The last two were very hard divers, though.)

[Thraalbee]

I have played two and a half comp characters and found more boots of stability than speed. And speed only quite late. Boots of FA least common of the three but that may be due to the quick descent before BoS become in depth

[Estie]

They are more common at deep levels. Fizzix changed that by making the better egos more common at depths (or the low egos less common which amounts to the same).
At levels 90+ ego boots will most likely be speed, ego helms telepathy and ego weapons HA or Gondolin etc.

Edit: before 3000 ? Thats a frequency spike.

[Timo Pietilä]

I played 3 comp characters up to about DL50 / CL30 and didn't find a single anything of speed (The last two were very hard divers, though.)

OK, balance has been restored

[Zane314]

On my current character I've found two Boots of Speed in shops - +3 and +6, and I just found a +8 in the dungeon (around 2600').

Definitely a lot of variance in availability.

[fizzix]

If I recall correctly boots of speed *are* more likely at *all* depths, however they now have an m_bonus rating, so that the value of the bonus is rated to the depth. (it used to be that it just chose a random value between 1 and 10 regardless of depth). So you certainly will find more BoS early, but they will likely be +3 or +4 or something (they *can* be +10 but then you rolled really well!). Later in the game your boots will either likely be speed or elvenkind, but you have a much higher chance of getting plain old magical boots than you used to.

Of course, there is very high variance on these things. Part of this came from discussions with Derakon where he insisted that there should always be the low chance of finding a crazy out of depth item early in the game. I agreed with this, so the way I get around it is by front loading the allocation tables.

For example, if you roll an ego boot at dungeon level 10 (let's assume that's the value rating of the item, all items can be created OoD). you have a 5/6 chance for slow descent and a 1/6 chance for Free action.

At level 20 you have ~40% chance of free action, ~40% chance of stealth and ~20% chance of stability, and a ~5% chance of speed. Free action has dropped off the allocation table entirely, which allows the more lucrative egos to be generated more frequently.

At dungeon level 70 you have a 55% chance of stealth, ~28% chance of stability, an ~8% chance of speed and an ~8% chance of elvenkind. Here, free action has dropped off which ups the probability of everything else. In addition, elvenkind now comes in depth, which essentially doubles the allocation level of speed.

If anyone has better ideas for how to allocate the various ego items, I'd love to hear them. I certainly expected to do more tweaking on the initial (stat-informed) guesses, but the feedback was mostly positive.

[Timo Pietilä]

Later in the game your boots will either likely be speed or elvenkind, but you have a much higher chance of getting plain old magical boots than you used to.

Boots of stability (nexus resist) should be relatively common there too. That's about only boot type I might swap BoS to in deep levels, in case I don't have Trickery. Not that that is particularly likely, it seems that you start to find Trickery quite early in game from vaults that seem to be more common in 3.5 than they were in 3.4.

That's another perhaps anomaly in my current game, I had found around five Trickery before I found any of the other "good" amulets, and since Trickery beats all other amulets into game I didn't find much use to those other amulets. I think Trickery needs to lose at least SPEED, if not more. Maybe rPoison too.

[fizzix]

Boots of stability (nexus resist) should be relatively common there too. That's about only boot type I might swap BoS to in deep levels, in case I don't have Trickery. Not that that is particularly likely, it seems that you start to find Trickery quite early in game from vaults that seem to be more common in 3.5 than they were in 3.4.

That's another perhaps anomaly in my current game, I had found around five Trickery before I found any of the other "good" amulets, and since Trickery beats all other amulets into game I didn't find much use to those other amulets. I think Trickery needs to lose at least SPEED, if not more. Maybe rPoison too.

If you look at the allocation levels I quoted above, you'll see that you can still find stability late in the game, at about 5 times higher allocation than speed.

Trickery, devotion, weaponmastery and magi all have the same allocation level, so unless there's a bug you should find each of those first equally often. All are native to dlevel 70 and deeper, so finding them early is definitely OoD. I'd prefer not to drop rpois from trickery. I'd be ok with dropping speed from it, and boosting devotion (pstun?), weaponmastery (higher bonuses?) and magi (speed boost from trickery goes here?) somehow.