probing is absolutely not ideal, but it's all we have, if we don't have ancestral memory on the character or simply memory from earlier games or reading the code. I wish that probing gave full damage info immediately, rather than waiting to take damage from the monster first before it's revealed. As it stands I generally assume the worst (1000-1600?) about breath weapons unless I know for certain it's less.
melee hit probability
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Do you, however, have to randomise the monsters into flavours?
(Also, I don't want to have to ID by use any time monsters)Comment
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There's also the "vent" monsters I proposed awhile back that are basically stationary turrets for the various exotic elements -- poison vent, chaos vent, plasma vent, time vent, water vent, etc. They were explicitly intended to teach players what the various elements do without doing much direct damage, so they'd breathe fairly often but have next to no HP.Comment
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We do have the monster memory system, which if you turn on full info provides a lot of data. If you add in the max damage of each attack, breath, etc on the description, and maybe highlight in bright colors ones that are higher than your max (or current) HP, the player should be able to assess the danger of any monster they can see. Provide all this info up front, mention inspecting monsters you aren't familiar with, and everyone should be fairly well informed on their current danger level.
Rods of probing require you to spend a turn in LOS of monsters and thus risk instakill if they can one-shot you; they are OK in the earlier levels but are not useful deeper in the dungeon, which is exactly when you need to know that info. They are a bad solution for learning who is dangerous and who is not.Comment
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We do have the monster memory system, which if you turn on full info provides a lot of data. If you add in the max damage of each attack, breath, etc on the description, and maybe highlight in bright colors ones that are higher than your max (or current) HP, the player should be able to assess the danger of any monster they can see. Provide all this info up front, mention inspecting monsters you aren't familiar with, and everyone should be fairly well informed on their current danger level.
Rods of probing require you to spend a turn in LOS of monsters and thus risk instakill if they can one-shot you; they are OK in the earlier levels but are not useful deeper in the dungeon, which is exactly when you need to know that info. They are a bad solution for learning who is dangerous and who is not.Comment
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I wouldn't be remotely surprised if there wasn't any real guiding principle behind a lot of the design "decisions" in Angband. However, the system does, for the most part, work well as it is implemented. It's opaque and mechanically kind of silly (hulking warriors using the tiniest daggers they can find with the biggest possible enchantments, for example), but it's pretty well-balanced and has a fairly smooth curve.
The jump is even greater for castor types who find an enchanted weapon with large dice (from 2.5 -> 15ish)
AC values are massive, so it is hard to visualise what 1 point is worth and it makes enchanting armour a complete waste of time.
By the way I remember reading that AC values were doubled a while back, but I wonder if the bonus from bless and heroism was doubled at the same time. If not then their bonus was basically halved.Comment
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Rods of probing require you to spend a turn in LOS of monsters and thus risk instakill if they can one-shot you; they are OK in the earlier levels but are not useful deeper in the dungeon, which is exactly when you need to know that info. They are a bad solution for learning who is dangerous and who is not.Comment
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I'm not sure about the fairly smooth curve bit, when you start as a warrior with an unenchanted dagger you can do around 12 damage, but when you find a reasonably well enchanted light weapon you can do more than double the damage immediately.
The jump is even greater for castor types who find an enchanted weapon with large dice (from 2.5 -> 15ish)
AC values are massive, so it is hard to visualise what 1 point is worth and it makes enchanting armour a complete waste of time.
By the way I remember reading that AC values were doubled a while back, but I wonder if the bonus from bless and heroism was doubled at the same time. If not then their bonus was basically halved.Comment
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(Full monster memory automatic)
Why on earth would that be better? I personally like having new monsters that I don't know everything about every now and then. It's more fun that way.
In fact, if we add that "rune-based ID" for monsters as well, I vote for resetting monster memories for every char.Comment
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On probing and breath damage IIRC we currently also have an issue with knowing game mechanics. Probing does tell you the monsters current hitpoints and it does tell you which elements it can breathe. If you know the game mechanic that a breath is always 1/3 of current hitpoint in raw damage you do know exactly for how much damage the monster can breathe. But that game mechanic is never explained anywhere in game, you only learn about it by reading it in the forums. If you don't know the game mechanic the inspect screen will only add in the breath damage once the monster has used a breath attack.Comment
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On probing and breath damage IIRC we currently also have an issue with knowing game mechanics. Probing does tell you the monsters current hitpoints and it does tell you which elements it can breathe. If you know the game mechanic that a breath is always 1/3 of current hitpoint in raw damage you do know exactly for how much damage the monster can breathe. But that game mechanic is never explained anywhere in game, you only learn about it by reading it in the forums.
Probing does tell you how much (max) damage monster does with the breath, so you only need to learn that that damage does go down when monster HP drops (and then learn in hard way that the really big ones need to be hurt a lot before that actually happens).Comment
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(Full monster memory automatic)
Why on earth would that be better? I personally like having new monsters that I don't know everything about every now and then. It's more fun that way.
In fact, if we add that "rune-based ID" for monsters as well, I vote for resetting monster memories for every char.
If you don't want to learn about a monster, don't (R)ecall their abilities. Monster memory is something you don't have to use if you don't want to.Comment
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