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

[Derakon]

There's a lot to be said for wading into a color-themed dragon pit and wiping them out fairly easily, or standing before mighty fire-breathing balrogs without much worry, never losing your precious staff of the magi to some stupid little red dragon bat which surprised you, etc.

While this is true, immunities are borderline irrelevant for the final fights -- so to the extent that mushroom patch is looking at character dumps of winners, they probably shouldn't be optimizing their gear for immunities, or indeed resistances that aren't nether.

[Bogatyr]

My feel is that they're popular for the resistances and immunities they confer, which are generally overrated by players, imo.

There's a lot to be said for wading into a color-themed dragon pit and wiping them out fairly easily, or standing before mighty fire-breathing balrogs without much worry, never losing your precious staff of the magi to some stupid little red dragon bat which surprised you, etc.

[mushroom patch]

Yeah, on some level it doesn't make much difference, since once you've gotten to +20 speed and a reasonable weapon, the other details of your setup are not that important in vanilla. I guess if you consider peak combat performance (i.e. using haste and other buffs), you might come out ahead with damage ring over a +10 speed ring that gets you a bit over +30. The rings of power are more of a mixed bag, since they have slaying type bonuses, stat bonuses, and mediocre speed pluses. My feel is that they're popular for the resistances and immunities they confer, which are generally overrated by players, imo.

[LostTemplar]

30 speed to 40 speed is about a 10% improvement. That's about equivalent to going from 710 damage to 785.

Speed is 10% improvement to everything, not just damage. If e.g. you spend 25% of turns healig and 25% phase dooring, going from 30 to 40 speed would be equivalent to 20% more damage.

[kaypy]

30 speed to 40 speed is about a 10% improvement. That's about equivalent to going from 710 damage to 785.

By contrast, 20 -> 30 speed is a much more noticeable 25% improvement. Equivalent to 280 -> 355 damage, so you may well have a weapon that makes the speed the better option. The real reason for 20 -> 30 speed is preventing enemy double moves though.

Of course, if we were still discussing shooters then IIRC rings of damage wont help...

[Estie]

I dont know the exact diminishing formula for speed, but lets assume +30 speed, 5 attacks, damage D/round and 1 free ringslot; at which damage value D does +10 speed (for a total of +40) equal D + 75 (the damage with +15 damage ring) ?

This is only considering damage output, speed will be superior if resulting damage is the same. My simplified rule is to ignore speed over 30 pretty much and use damage ring.

[mushroom patch]

Hm, I seem to recall having done the numbers on this at some point and determined that damage rings compare unfavorably to a +10 speed ring until you get into huge pluses that don't exist in vanilla or speeds greater than 30 without the speed ring, but I have to admit I'm seeing a lot of rings of power in the ladder dumps. I think the use of rings of power is mostly in error, except for the one ring and crazy randarts. On the other hand, a lot of these dumps have ridiculous randarts on other slots, like cloaks with +9 speed, at which point it doesn't matter much what the rest of your equipment looks like.

[Estie]

The endgame setup IS rather boring, even with randarts: 10 speed from boots, teen-ish from a ring and the temp buff solve the speed 30 requirement in 2 slots and therefore are used most of the time. The second ringslot is free, to be utilized for stats/defense if the kit is low end or offense (damage ring) if the kit provides everything else needed otherwise. The "holy trio" is speed boots, speed ring and damage ring, no matter wether stand- or randarts are picked.

Two rings of speed should rarely be used; by the time you max con, you typically find a good one > 10, and if you rush for the early win, youll want a con ring since capping con is normally the last and longest of the procedures to get ready.

[Nomad]

Something as simple as rings of slaying or damage with substantially higher pluses than currently spawn would work.

My issue is that it's generally too hard to mentally weigh up the utility of a given ring of damage vs. a given ring of speed. Am I getting a higher average damage by doing more damage per hit at the slower speed, or less damage per hit at the faster speed? Outside of the most clear-cut cases I have no clue, and tend to just go with the received wisdom that more speed is always better.

[MattB]

Speed rings and speed boots are pretty crucial equipment, imo. It'd be worth checking what percentage of winners on the ladder have something other than double speed rings, for example. My guess is that the percentage is low, with a smattering going for a ring of power in place of one of the speed rings.

I don't know. I've only had maybe ten winners, but I'm pretty sure that I've NEVER worn twin RoSp's. Usually it's RoSp/RoCon or RoSp/RoDam or, as you say, RoSp/RoPower. On one occasion it was RoSp/RoPoison (randart game...).

Maybe that's just me?

[mushroom patch]

Speed rings and speed boots are pretty crucial equipment, imo. It'd be worth checking what percentage of winners on the ladder have something other than double speed rings, for example. My guess is that the percentage is low, with a smattering going for a ring of power in place of one of the speed rings.

The speed system isn't bad, but speed dominates other considerations at essentially all parts of the game, unless you're spending a lot of time in the endgame screwing around not winning. It would be worthwhile to introduce rings that compete with speed rings for utility in the endgame and tone down the spawn rate of speed rings to nudge players into using the others. (Speed rings are ridiculously easy to get once you've reached dlvl 72...) Maybe the better rings of power would qualify, but they've never seemed like a reasonable alternative in any game I've played. Something as simple as rings of slaying or damage with substantially higher pluses than currently spawn would work.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.