to-hit or damage of shooter more important in final fight?

[PowerWyrm]

You're right about the mathematics: DracoLisk + no nexus resist + puny mage HP = instadeath, so that D better darn well stay asleep. Stealth wins here IMO.

Only because your equipment is poorly set up. You have rNexus from a weapon, and =Con stored at home. And if you don't want to fight a dracolisk, you can TO it away. Dive to 4900ft, scum for vaults, get Keleks... and all problems are solved

[Bogatyr]

The equipment on this character is a complete nonsense for a mage...

You should be using at once:
- Long Sword of Elwendor (4 resists: poison, dark, nexus, chaos)
- Ring of Constitution <+4> (more hps)
- Ring of Speed <+8> (obvious)
- Robe of Permanence (resist base + sustains)
- Pair of Steel Shod Boots 'Lirnor' (+7 INT/speed as a mage and it's not equipped???)

By the way, stealth is completely pointless when you have TO + ESP.

And about the original question... none of them are important as mage, you kill Morgoth with spells. Get the shooter that gives the most stats, speed and resists.

haha thanks for the constructive criticism. Jeez, doesn't anybody here ever *swap* equipment to match it to the situation? I don't get tired of doing that, I like it, it's part of the game, adapting to the situation. I wear the Lirnor boots *all the time*, especially when fighting.

OK, ok, I will see what it is like with the emphasis on con and speed and see how it goes. So you see, I was smart to keep all that great equipment, I knew I'd need it eventually.

[Bogatyr]

Only because your equipment is poorly set up. You have rNexus from a weapon, and =Con stored at home. And if you don't want to fight a dracolisk, you can TO it away. Dive to 4900ft, scum for vaults, get Keleks... and all problems are solved

I understand that high resists are very unreliable -- even with nexus resist a fully healthy DracoLisk can probably kill a mage even with rNexus. I'd rather not find out the hard way.

But I'm trying the recommended kit to see how it feels.

[mushroom patch]

You don't swap for speed. Speed is unambiguously the most important stat for an angband character. All rates, including rates at which you wake up monsters, scale with speed. More moves, more item uses, more spells cast, lower probability of waking monsters given the same sequence of moves. You maximize your speed until you get into the high 20s where the marginal plus starts to make less difference.

+6 stealth is already a lot of stealth. Dragons will essentially never wake up with that kind of stealth. And they don't get to move on the turn they wake up, so what could possibly be the problem?

[quarague]

Ok, I feel it's very important to come in on Bogatyr's side in this discussion. Simple argument:
a) in all discussions about new features it is stressed, that there is no correct way to play angband and people should make their own choices, multiple approaches are and should be valid
b) Bogatyr is successful with his style of play and seems to enjoy it quite a lot
That should be enough to convince everyone to rephrase all the 'you have to's into 'I would recommend's.
I think it is a nice sign of the flexibility of angband that a rogue mage can be made to work although a lot of people seem to believe it to be inferior to a high speed mage.

[AnonymousHero]

haha thanks for the constructive criticism. Jeez, doesn't anybody here ever *swap* equipment to match it to the situation? I don't get tired of doing that, I like it, it's part of the game, adapting to the situation.

If I can avoid it, no, I don't ever swap when in the dungeon. The reasoning is the same as before: You might make a mistake when swapping -- you might fumble a swap at a crucial moment (keyboard-wise), or you might not be paying 100% attention to exactly what resists and protections you have covered. Forgetting to cover FA and dying to some pathetic melee-paralyzer is a classic instance of the latter.

OK, ok, I will see what it is like with the emphasis on con and speed and see how it goes. So you see, I was smart to keep all that great equipment, I knew I'd need it eventually.

The key is getting CON (and obviuosly character level) high enough to get above 600ish HP. Beware that the CON bonus scales non-linearly! If you do that and have rBase + rPoison there's basically no single monster that can one-shot you.

You should also be using Create Doors whenever you enter a new level (as long as nothing is blocking the door spaces -- if there is, either Mass Banishment or Destruction is the way to go.)

Of course you should definitely play the way you like -- perhaps you'll discover a wholly new way to win reliably, though I doubt it . What people have recommended is basically "this is the way to win reliably", not necessarily "this will be fun for you". Unfortunately, Angband does limit winning tactics somewhat.

[mushroom patch]

Ok, I feel it's very important to come in on Bogatyr's side in this discussion. Simple argument:
a) in all discussions about new features it is stressed, that there is no correct way to play angband and people should make their own choices, multiple approaches are and should be valid
b) Bogatyr is successful with his style of play and seems to enjoy it quite a lot
That should be enough to convince everyone to rephrase all the 'you have to's into 'I would recommend's.
I think it is a nice sign of the flexibility of angband that a rogue mage can be made to work although a lot of people seem to believe it to be inferior to a high speed mage.

idk, a mage at dungeon level 62, xp level 39 deathly afraid of encounters with dracolisks doesn't sound like it's working. I mean, sure, you can play any way you like, but if you go on a forum arguing that it makes sense to forgo +21 speed in favor of +11 stealth, (when you would have +6 stealth without the +11) you can expect some spirited pushback.

[Bogatyr]

idk, a mage at dungeon level 62, xp level 39 deathly afraid of encounters with dracolisks doesn't sound like it's working. I mean, sure, you can play any way you like, but if you go on a forum arguing that it makes sense to forgo +21 speed in favor of +11 stealth, (when you would have +6 stealth without the +11) you can expect some spirited pushback.

Well I do enjoy the "rogue mage" style, so there :P. But I must admit embracing higher speed and teleport other as the "choose your fights" method (in addition to diving aggressively) has accelerated my progress quite a bit:

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=17078

[Nick]

That should be enough to convince everyone to rephrase all the 'you have to's into 'I would recommend's.
I think it is a nice sign of the flexibility of angband that a rogue mage can be made to work although a lot of people seem to believe it to be inferior to a high speed mage.

Well said. My take on this is

• It's nice to see different playstyles
• It's just possible that a different method might actually be viable
• If no different method *is* viable, we should think whether that's a problem

[LostTemplar]

Speed is too easy to get and too powerfull in Angband, completely scrapping anything else. However it is possible and fun to play with low speed character for a while. In the last fight at least 20 peramanent speed is needed for comfortable win.

[Bogatyr]

Well said. My take on this is

• It's nice to see different playstyles
• It's just possible that a different method might actually be viable
• If no different method *is* viable, we should think whether that's a problem

I really like and prefer my method until ESP, 0% teleport other, and enough speed is achieved so that nothing can get a double move on you (so that the teleport other is "safe" -- it's still nervous if it's a big baddy though).

[AnonymousHero]

Well said. My take on this is

• It's nice to see different playstyles
• It's just possible that a different method might actually be viable
• If no different method *is* viable, we should think whether that's a problem

No other method is almost guaranteed to get a win (post clvl-35-or-so)[*], so I think it might be a problem. A Post-restructure one, of course.


[*] ... or so says the collective. It might be wrong, but given how much Angband has been run, I doubt there are many other viable options.

[Derakon]

The big difficulty with "alternate playstyles" is that you need to kill things to win. Even the Sniper challenge has to kill Sauron and Morgoth. So while we could have multiple paths for the player to follow en route to those last two fights, ultimately it's most straightforward for players to do what they'll be doing to Sauron and Morgoth, viz. kill things. Especially since by far the most readily-accessible source of experience is from killing things.

I'm not saying these are unsolvable problems, but they are problems in the current design that keep alternate approaches from being as viable as the current groupthink.

[Nick]

No other method is almost guaranteed to get a win (post clvl-35-or-so), so I think it might be a problem. A Post-restructure, one of course.

Note that I'm not saying there is a problem

It's interesting to think about how one might shift emphasis, though. The way HP and SP scale with stats is one obvious one to think about. The speed system is IMHO rather good; I'd suggest that any change that de-emphasised speed would be best done via the monster list, so would probably happen gradually.

[AnonymousHero]

Note that I'm not saying there is a problem

It's interesting to think about how one might shift emphasis, though. The way HP and SP scale with stats is one obvious one to think about. The speed system is IMHO rather good; I'd suggest that any change that de-emphasised speed would be best done via the monster list, so would probably happen gradually.

Nono, I didn't just take your last bullet-point and repeat it

I agree about stat scaling, I think, and I'm usually playing with fizzix's "smoothed out" HP curve as a consequence. Increasing returns usually works best for attack spells (to encourage specialization rather than being a jack-of-all-trades who is effectively as good as a specialist), but it doesn't work nearly as well as a defensive trait in current Angband. (If we're talking specialization in defense then that could be made to work, but it would need something above "can reliably avoid death" since all decent characters can do that in the current conception of Angband). I think this was established pretty well by the game-that-must-not-be-mentioned. (Alright, it was D2, for me at least.)

One really interesting speed-related experiment I'd love to see is a little bit of energy randomization in the style of Entroband. It was a great breath of fresh air -- contrary to randomizing the speed of individual monsters (deterministically, per monster) it meant that there were quite a few situations where you couldn't really be sure, but on average you could prevail/flee/whatever.

EDIT: D2 post 1.12 or whenever it was that they introduced monster immunities as a "penalty" for over-specialization.