More significant AC

[AnonymousHero]

In old-school AD&D, this was made possible by the concepts of THACO and AC. Things that AFAIK are completely absent, or at the very least invisible, in Angabnd.

I think I agree with your overall sentiment, but I seem to recall legions of players being confused by THAC0, so it might not be the best example .

[Nick]

I think I agree with your overall sentiment, but I seem to recall legions of players being confused by THAC0, so it might not be the best example .

I agree with the sentiment and don't understand the example - perfect, right?

[Estie]

The issue isnt lack of transparency of how exactly AC reduces incoming physical damage. It is the (lack of) importance of reducing physical damage compared to elemental one. Making things more transparent is always a good thing, but the judgement the player has to make is between a robe of resistance and a magic full plate.

[Nick]

The issue isnt lack of transparency of how exactly AC reduces incoming physical damage. It is the (lack of) importance of reducing physical damage compared to elemental one. Making things more transparent is always a good thing, but the judgement the player has to make is between a robe of resistance and a magic full plate.

I think they're both issues, and the lack of transparency masks the actual AC issue.

[Jax]

I tend to agree with this sort of idea. Take another game, say, where the armour at 100 means 50% reduction, 200armour is 75% reduction, 300armour is 87.5% etc, you have good benchmarks and ideas for how much dmg is being reduced on the fly based on the value. "oh i have 150 armour? well thats like somewhere between 50 and 75% reduction. Oh i have 200? i have a full 75% reduction and i know adding more at this point has diminishing returns..." etc.

Im sure there must be similar milestones in the AC values but they are unknown to myself and im sure many others. i dont know if its linear, exponential, its own algorithm or what it is, all im aware of is that more is better (derp). somewhat crude but there you go.

going back to my previous post: everyone knows its important to some extent, but its really hard to tell when youre overdoing it or perhaps not investing enough. With elemental breaths its relatively easy, i reduce by half, or half again and the values for monsters is fairly regular (green dragon breathes X poison, i know that red dragon also breathe X in fire). AC as it is youre pretty much winging it as to say "ow that hit really hurt", or "that did almost nothing to me", but the relationship is completely unknown. (this is also partly a dmg thing where someone might hit for 4d10 say, the dmg might be 4 one turn, or 40 the next. coupled with an unknown dmg reduction relationship polarises the effectiveness of armour in my eyes into "oh its not noticable its hitting me" or "ow i cannot fight that" (apart from morgoth who hits like a truck no matter what armour youre packing)).

[mushroom patch]

@Estie: Okay, I agree that cheesing the Morgoth fight could radically improve my times and before reading your suggestion and researching it, I didn't realize quite how cheesy ranged v. morgoth can be. This could probably be done at an absurdly low level with complete garbage equipment. I'll give it a try when I get a chance.

[Derakon]

Depends on how you define "absurdly low"; no matter what you need at least 600 HP to survive Morgoth's manastorm. Even with max CON (which gives 12.5 HP per level on top of your hit die) you'll need a fairly large amount of levels to reach that threshold.

[mushroom patch]

From what I can tell from watching youtube videos, you can kill Morgoth without allowing him line of sight on his turn. In particular, you don't get hit by any manastorms. Seems like there's no real lower bound on the level at which you can make this happen. Of course, the fastest way to do it probably isn't the same as the least experience level way to do it.

I suspect this can be done in a ridiculously small number of turns, like 20 or 25k, if you birth scum at the beginning for deep descent scrolls in 7.

[Estie]

There is no reason to to bring in the moral judgement. Killing Morhoth with ranged attacks is no more cheesy than using hockeystick on any random monster. Asymetrical LoS has always been a feature of Angband.

While it is possible to kill him without ever getting LoS, it is risky and I find it harder to do than getting a sufficient amount of hitpoints and gear and eat the occasional attack by him. Also, with low level the to hit will be low and you neeed more ammunition. It is unlikely that you get enough without aslo getting better other gear.

[mushroom patch]

Yeah, I'm sure it takes some care to execute this kind of strategy safely. My main concern is that it looks like it takes a lot of turns to kill Morgoth this way, with all the teleport other going on. I suppose if you wanted to cut down on the number of standard turns, you could take off your speed rings while you wait for Morgoth to come back...

As far as difficulty, for my money it'd be a hell of a lot easier just getting a big melee weapon, maxing out your hp, going toe to toe. But that takes a lot of turns.

[Estie]

Well if the only concern is to kill him asap, the opportune thing to do is to use what you have. If the game gives you a good launcher and lots of ammo, use that, if a good melee weapon and many heal potions, go toe to toe, but most of the time a mix is the fastest way. You might have only 1 stack of good ammo and a small amount of heals, but by using both be able to down him. The estimation wether whatever you happen to have at the moment will be enough before you run out of consumables is what I called the checklist.

Defensive properties like resists and amount of health obviously figure into this estimation. With 800 maxhealth you need to drink way more often than with 1200, getting stat drained makes the fight last longer etc.

[Derakon]

Incidentally, the cheesiest *ngband win I ever had was with a ZAngband mindcrafter. They have a targeted teleport and a spell that does damage to all monsters in LOS. I found a long horizontal corridor, and used the targeted teleport to adjust the Serpent (ZAngband's Morgoth equivalent) until it was adjacent to the corridor:

############J
@............    J = Serpent
#############

Then spam the LOS attack spell until the Serpent gets close, teleport him away, and repeat.

Something similar might be possible in Vanilla, though it would be trickier to set up; you'd need to really master the speed system and monster pathing rules to pull it off without targeted teleport. Of course, instead of a LOS spell, you can use ball spells, or just abuse missile pathing to hit Morgoth around corners.

[mushroom patch]

Here's a video of what I have in mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Ed3-BSOmE&list=UU50QJ41G1va478IrnmIlwXg

It seems like it would work at a pretty low level. With careful execution, you take no damage.

I didn't realize LoS is so broken until I saw this video. I thought the artifacts were relatively subtle and hard to exploit. Shows what I know.

Melee has issues from a speed perspective because you need a combination of reasonable experience level, equipment, and consumables, none of which seem crucial in view of this tactic. Getting to Morgoth with an okay missile weapon and arrows should be considerably more quickly repeatable, hence better for speed running.

[Estie]

In that video, P has LoS a couple times. Also notice that he nonchalantly kills a wyrm to clear the area. This is standard P technique, but if you plan to have below 600 hit points, you need a stroke of good luck to survive without a more refined approach.

I am not sure how turncount is affected by this as I dont play the turn minimizing game, but if you plan to attempt him at low level, there are a few things to consider:

Assuming you wait for him out of LoS, use some ranged attack and teleport him away before he acquires LoS, youll have a ~5% chance to fail that teleport other unless you are a mage or priest.

Mage and priest have 0% spell fail, but dont deal much spell damage at low levels. Their to hit with launchers is abysmal, so I guess the best option is wands. However, finding enough of those might take too long.

You can consider reading teleport scroll for guaranteed getting out of LoS, but to do that safely, you need to clear level 99 first. That alone will yield a couple levels, so why not do it before facing P in relative safety and be better prepared ?

I am pretty sure there are some shapes of perma walls (vaults) that can be abused to set up safe cycles; getting the desired shape on 99* and setting up the board is likely to take more time/turns than just preparing normally.

Finally, how many of the nastier uniques do you plan to kill ? If it is "many", you need a decent rig/level for that alone; if it is "few", chances are high that one of the more unpleasent ones joins the elaborately set up fight and ruins your day.

If I were to attempt to kill P at the lowest possible character level, my first instinct would be to look at the mage for that purpose. Black market scumming will be extremely helpful, so it isnt a very interesting challenge without further restrictions.

*Edit: 100

[Derakon]

Scumming the Black Market takes a lot of turns, though, so it's not great for a low-turncount game. I guess you can obsessively return to town every 10k game turns in-between your normal adventuring, but even then that's not a whole lot of opportunities for needed items.

I suspect that the best bet would be to go with a ranger for their extra shots -- you'll get at least one from being over level 20, which is a huge boost to your damage rate. You'll just have to hope that you don't fail Teleport Other when you need it.