More significant AC

[Estie]

You start out as a strong troll or dextrous hobbit, and you end up the same featureless hero regardless. I wouldnt mind having different paths for different races with differnt choices being optimal not only early, but also lategame.

Having AC is better than having no AC; saying it is useless is an overstatement.
If I can get free AC, I gladly take it. However, its usually not free and a game of choices. When I cant get everything, I skip on the parts I think I can easiest do without, and here AC is very low on the list. I am not going to trade it for speed (early game) or resist base (midgame), or go without sustains into the Morgoth battle. Having low AC may require more potions, but having no sustains requires many, many more. When you say "AC matters", you need to specify how much, not in terms of additional damage taken, but in comparison to other equipment properties.

So what would you be willing to drop for 15-20% less melee damage taken ?

[fizzix]

So what would you be willing to drop for 15-20% less melee damage taken ?

In the Morgoth battle. AC is better than rshards, rchaos, rlight, rsound, and arguably rnether. It's more important than elemental immunity, and if you're super cautious about summons you can get by without elemental resists (although I wouldn't recommend it). I would trade it for anything above +20 base speed (assuming hasting to +30 was trivial).

There's definitely a point where it's more important than damage per round or to-hit, but that's crazy hard to calculate.

[Estie]

In the Morgoth battle. AC is better than rshards, rchaos, rlight, rsound, and arguably rnether. It's more important than elemental immunity, and if you're super cautious about summons you can get by without elemental resists (although I wouldn't recommend it). I would trade it for anything above +20 base speed (assuming hasting to +30 was trivial).

There's definitely a point where it's more important than damage per round or to-hit, but that's crazy hard to calculate.

I agree with that list; but of course, this is arguably the point in the game where AC is most valuable.
Here AC > luxury resists; but on the way to this battle, that is lategame, I would definitely prefer fire immunity or sound resistance over 100 AC.

Minute comparisions aside, I think there is agreement that in Angband resists > AC. Part of the reason is the availability of escapes, which makes commiting to melee combat a non-issue, and the absence of powerfull archers (physical ranged dam dealers).

Wouldnt it be a good idea to go back on the magicification and put the physical combat back to the core of the game ?

[Derakon]

Wouldnt it be a good idea to go back on the magicification and put the physical combat back to the core of the game ?

I don't know that there's much of a "back" here unless you go way back to Moria. So far as I'm aware the first release of Angband had plenty of monsters hitting the damage cap with elemental attacks.

But yes, we could make physical damage more dangerous, in the hopes that this would encourage people to load up more on AC. I suspect the actual result would be that people would avoid melee even more than they do now, though.

[mushroom patch]

@Estie:
I would have to disagree re: fire immunity and sound resistance (???). I admit fire immunity is nice in that it lets you clear red D pits, but it is not important to winning (of course, if the devs were to introduce rockets into vanilla and gave them to Morgoth, as in certain variants, that would be different). I would not want to trade down from 250 AC to 150 AC for either one. On the other hand, I don't think it's a very realistic trade off anyway.

I think the disconnect between my thinking about the game and what you're saying here is that you seem to be coming from a place where the player has limited control over what kind of hits he's taking. For example, you talk about breath weapons and ranged attacks. Why would you allow yourself to take damage at range like this in an endgame scenario?

To my mind, the dominant issues in the endgame are melee damage per round, hp, speed (assuming you're already over 20), and AC in that order. Regarding resistances, base, dark, poison, and disenchant matter, the rest mostly don't. (This seems to be a significant change vs. the historical situation.) Certain sustains are important, particularly constitution and whatever your SP stat is.

Regarding different paths etc., this is a common criticism of angband. I'm not sure I can really agree though. The game is what it is. There are other roguelike games and even angband variants that have the kind of variability in terms of evolution toward the endgame you seem to advocate. In angband, you basically have the warrior/rogue melee character, the priest/paladin healing/melee character, the ranger, and the mage. These are pretty different endgames. It's not like crawl or tome, but it's vanilla, ya know.

@Derakon: I'm pretty baffled by this whole idea that melee isn't the core of the game. The way I remember old timey angband, you couldn't get away with spotty resistances because in order to get anywhere you had to deal with packs of hounds. I seem to recall that non-base+poison resistances had a bigger impact on damage taken too, but I might be mistaken there. My feeling on current vanilla is that it's ridiculously easy to put together endgame gear, except for the melee weapon. It could be made more difficult by making resistances play a bigger role in endgame fights.

[Derakon]

@Estie:I think the disconnect between my thinking about the game and what you're saying here is that you seem to be coming from a place where the player has limited control over what kind of hits he's taking. For example, you talk about breath weapons and ranged attacks. Why would you allow yourself to take damage at range like this in an endgame scenario?

Remember that being at range doesn't increase the likelihood that a monster will use a breath or spell on you; it just replaces their melee attacks with them moving closer to you. You always take less damage at range than in melee. (You may already be aware of this, but your statement was ambiguous so I felt it bore emphasizing)

To my mind, the dominant issues in the endgame are melee damage per round, hp, speed (assuming you're already over 20), and AC in that order. Regarding resistances, base, dark, poison, and disenchant matter, the rest mostly don't. (This seems to be a significant change vs. the historical situation.) Certain sustains are important, particularly constitution and whatever your SP stat is.

If you plan on meleeing Morgoth, then you'll want STR/DEX/CON sustained at least. However, in my experience sustains have usually not been a huge issue for my melee characters. If nothing else, Crowns of Might and Shields of Preservation both exist and are reasonably common in the late game.

Older versions of the game may have had more emphasis on resists -- certainly as you say, hounds used to be markedly more common. However, the groupthink has also changed substantially since the old days. Back in the late 90's, most players played as carefully as possible, tried to remove any chance of an instadeath, and did silly things like grind at 1650' for max stats, and then grind at 1950' for poison resistance because they were terrified of a drolem showing up at 2000' and nuking them -- never mind that Rings of Poison Resistance were native to something like 4000', and drolems weren't native to 2000' anyway.

Eventually Eddie came along and basically said "Look, this is dumb, you can hang out deep in the dungeon and be surrounded by things that could reduce you to a thin smear, and as long as you play smart you'll usually be fine." And then we discovered that all those resistances that we thought were absolutely vital, well, weren't. This made far more of a difference to how the game was played than any changes to balance did.

[Estie]

Not trying to reduce Eddies role here, but for me this insight came earlier when playing ToME2 lost soul. At the time I wasnt paying much attention to vanilla, but when the matter of "diving" came up, I recognized the patterns of survival from ToME.

For me, the great insight isnt so much surviving at low power level, but rather the risk/reward assessment towards taking more risks.

Im pretty sure that, if competition changed format to "use this character till it dies and post your result", everyone would try to get poison resistance before going to drolem depths.

[Estie]

@Estie:

To my mind, the dominant issues in the endgame are melee damage per round, hp, speed (assuming you're already over 20), and AC in that order.

Well that pretty much delegates AC to secondary importance. I would also want res base and poison first, even in the last fight but certainly for the endgame.

As for fire immunity, I value it very highly while collecting gear for the final fight. Cold immunity is next, to preserve those *heal* potions.

What do i need AC for ? The Titan uniques ignore it for the most part(this has been refuted, I use this information from old threads), and Faegwath and Tarrasque, I couldnt care less about my AC. Get double resist/immunity and speed to kill these things.

Dont forget that im not completly abandoning AC; every endgame item has a serious amounts of it anyway.
But lets assume the choice is between a robe of fire immunity (20 AC) and an admantite plate mail of (something covered already), 100 AC ? I ll pick the robe, thank you, before the M fight. If I plan to fight M in melee, I will switch.

[Mark]

Well I see I stirred something up.

Agree or disagree with the argument that AC matters a lot when selecting "gear to use vs Morgoth"; I think despite being the final boss, the majority of "what gear should I wear" decisions are NOT being made with Morgoth in mind.

I would like to see what difference my AC makes, or is failing to make. I think if we were going to take any action on the issue of AC, making that transparent would be the first logical step, then we could review.

Could it be as simple as

"The orc hits you (10% absorbed)"
"The dragon hits you (15% absorbed)"

type messages? Toggleable as an option initially?

[mushroom patch]

@Estie: Yeah, in my opinion you shouldn't fight the Tarrasque or Feagwath. They're a waste of turns and resources.

I don't understand the argument about drolems. How do you accidentally get in a fight with a drolem? I don't think I've even fought a drolem in my last four winning games. Detection is cheap and available. Just spam it constantly and you never run into surprises.

Not that it matters when you've made it to the endgame, but more important than any resistance in the early to mid game is reasonable stealth. You can walk right up to a drolem and do circles around it if you have decent stealth. And if it wakes up, you still get a move before they do anything, which is perhaps the most baffling thing about drolemphobia.

You seem to suggest that the diving playstyle is a type of "metastrategy" not intended to produce a high win rate, along the lines of "dig for victory" or the "protection racket" strategies of nethack. I can assure you this is not the case at all. What is traditionally thought of as "careful play" is probably more dangerous than diving because there is far more contact with monsters.

[edit: also, re: AC is secondary -- sure, but irrelevant and secondary are hugely different things. Arguably, AC should be secondary, because it's just a number and not a very exciting one. DPS as a primary issue is much more compelling, for example.]

@Derakon: Yeah, I'm aware that you take less damage at range, but you also cause less damage at range (unless you're a ranger or a mage, I guess). At least in the way I play the game, there's no reason to have monsters taking potshots at you when you can't hit them back.

I agree sustain str/dex are nice to have against Morgoth, but not essential if you have a handful of life potions. Those things are crazy.

[debo]

I don't understand the argument about drolems. How do you accidentally get in a fight with a drolem?

They're mindless, so they're not detected by telepathy. Detection is not cheap and available for all classes at Drolem depth, and once most people get telepathy I seriously doubt they're spamming monster detection anymore because it's super tedious and you're already probably spamming a half-dozen other things at that point.

[mushroom patch]

I suppose it's not detected by detect evil, so it's not easy for some characters to detect. On the other hand, the drolem scenarios people talk about involve waking one up without seeing it and getting breathed on for max out of the darkness. Kind of unusual in my experience. It's the kind of thing someone who doesn't know what they're doing gets pissed off and complains on forums about, not something that happens a lot in reasonable play.

[Derakon]

Yeah, drolems are:

* Rare. They hardly ever get generated even when they're in depth. I think the average number of drolems I see across an entire game is slightly less than 1.
* Pretty deep. I think they used to be native to 2200' or 2400', but one of the monster shuffling changes moved them deeper.
* Hard to wake up (like all dragons, really). Unless you're aggravating or playing a half-troll or dwarf, you're incredibly unlikely to wake one up without having physically seen it first. Which mitigates...
* Hard to detect. Only Detection and Detect Monsters will show them, which leaves warriors, paladins, and priests out in the cold for awhile. But again, the odds of one showing up before you get the relevant detection tech are pretty low.

[fizzix]

Yeah, drolems are:

* Rare. They hardly ever get generated even when they're in depth. I think the average number of drolems I see across an entire game is slightly less than 1.
* Pretty deep. I think they used to be native to 2200' or 2400', but one of the monster shuffling changes moved them deeper.
* Hard to wake up (like all dragons, really). Unless you're aggravating or playing a half-troll or dwarf, you're incredibly unlikely to wake one up without having physically seen it first. Which mitigates...
* Hard to detect. Only Detection and Detect Monsters will show them, which leaves warriors, paladins, and priests out in the cold for awhile. But again, the odds of one showing up before you get the relevant detection tech are pretty low.

I don't think they've been moved deeper. If so it wasn't by me (and I think I did the most extensive futzing with the monster list). I've wanted to move them deeper, along with dracolisks and dracolichs, but that's always run into serious opposition.

Priests and paladins have terrible stealth. They're also the classes that can't detect (along with warriors). These classes are all very likely to wake up drolems. It's not surprising that my 3 deaths to drolems have all come with these two classes.

[mushroom patch]

Indeed. Then there's the fact that with poison resistance, the breath is not likely to kill you. My feeling is drolemphobia is a hold over from old ideas about how to play the game and legitimate fear from certain variants, e.g. tomenet where drolems really are dangerous to mid/low-level characters. I don't think it makes sense in current vanilla meta.