Couple of questions about nether, nexus, and sustaining life force/attributes.

[Deof Movestofca]

I always thought that resistance to nether also sustained one's life force Or to put it another way, that it was nether "energy" that drained one's life force. Running into a bunch of Dreadmasters (IIRC) when I had r/nether but nothing that sustained life force, however, has caused me to suspect that such an assumption is incorrect. If someone could verify one way or the other, I would appreciate it.
Also, if all of one's attributes are sustained (e.g., Robe of Permanence), is it possible for nexus/chaos to scramble them?

[debo]

The only thing that resists nether damage + chaos or nexus scramble are the corresponding elemental resists, and nothing else.

The XP drain effect is resisted by 'hold life'. (This doesn't work for XP drain caused by time breath etc.)

Also, nexus stat scramble is literally the worst thing ever.

[Derakon]

There are a few "protections" in the game: from paralysis, stunning, confusion, blindness, and experience drain. These flags are "universal" in that they protect against anything that causes those effects, though you can still be "paralyzed" via starvation-derived fainting or being knocked out, and Hold Life is only 90% effective.

If you have an elemental resistance, then you are immune to the special effects of that element (except for inventory item destruction), but you get no additional generalized protection. It used to be the case that sound resistance also conferred protection from all sources of stunning, chaos resistance was strictly superior to confusion resistance, and shards resistance conferred protection from all sources of cuts. This is no longer the case.

EDIT: and stat sustain does not protect against nexus stat scramble, nor against the experience drain caused by Time elemental attacks.

[MattB]

To put it another way, if you resist nether you will take less damage from a nether attack, AND won't receive full XP drain from that attack (but there are other things that can still fully xp drain you). If you have no rNether, but do have holdlife, then you will take full damage from the nether attack but will only be XP drained by 10% of normal drain (in fact, only time - and nothing resists time - will fully drain you).

Holdlife is a weird resist so maybe Chaos is a better example.
If you are hit by a chaos attack four things happen:
a) you receive damage
b) you start halucinating
c) you suffer XP drain
d) you get confused

-If you have rChaos, you get a reduction in damage and none of the other three affect you.
-If you have rConf, you take full damage, hallucinate and get fully XP drained but not confused.
-If you have HoldLife you take full damage, only get 10% of the XP drain, get confused and hallucinate.
-(There is no rHallucinate)

Of course, saving throws may help you here as well.

With regards to stat scramble (which, despite what Debo may say, is a fantastic mechanic IMHO), rNexus will completely negate the possibility of it happening. If you don't have rNexus you still get a saving throw. Equally, if all your INTERNAL stats are maxed at 18/100 it doesn't matter anyway as swapping one 18/100 stat for another 18/100 stat makes no difference.

Hope that has clarified things a bit, but probably not...

[AnonymousHero]

With regards to stat scramble (which, despite what Debo may say, is a fantastic mechanic IMHO), rNexus will completely negate the possibility of it happening. If you don't have rNexus you still get a saving throw. Equally, if all your INTERNAL stats are maxed at 18/100 it doesn't matter anyway as swapping one 18/100 stat for another 18/100 stat makes no difference.

Sorry if this is derailing, but AFAICT Nexus stat swap functions almost exactly opposite to how it should wrt. level progression and danger level: It gets less dangerous to be missing rNexus the deeper you are (if we ignore hostile teleportation) since you'll usually be higher level the deeper you are -- and swap cannot hurt you nearly as much. At very low levels it's just a "well that ends that game" insta-quit mechanic which the player may not even have any way to defend against[1]. I contend that this is bizarre and wrong from a game design perspective.

[1] Granted, it's pretty rare, but the fact that a pack of Nexus hounds and/or Nexus Q can just outright ruin your game without any chance of defending is... not ideal, shall we say.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

... It gets less dangerous to be missing rNexus the deeper you are ....

Tell that to my Leon II, who got scrambled during the recent competition 169 , or to the mage I played that had maxed all stats except Wisdom, which was at 3, and got scrambled for Intelligence on DL 75. Wearing speed boots instead of stability and a very unlucky roll made for a wet day in Havenhurst for that mage, if you catch my drift. (Note: Leon II ultimately died, not because of the Nexus swap, but because he had to suicide by cop since he had started out in violation of the comp rules by rebirthing instead of a clean new download of the starting savefile. It wasn't until Leon V that I could get a @ into the winners circle.)

I don't necessarily agree that Nexus is unbalanced as it is. Just as there are things that can one-shot a @ early on that are less dangerous later, Nexus can make for a bad day, but can also be defended against eventually or even earlier with a lucky find. Actually, easily defended with stability boots, though as my mage discovered trade-offs can be tricky.

[AnonymousHero]

Tell that to my Leon II, who got scrambled during the recent competition 169 , or to the mage I played that had maxed all stats except Wisdom, which was at 3, and got scrambled for Intelligence on DL 75. Wearing speed boots instead of stability and a very unlucky roll made for a wet day in Havenhurst for that mage, if you catch my drift. (Note: Leon II ultimately died, not because of the Nexus swap, but because he had to suicide by cop since he had started out in violation of the comp rules by rebirthing instead of a clean new download of the starting savefile. It wasn't until Leon V that I could get a @ into the winners circle.)

I don't necessarily agree that Nexus is unbalanced as it is. Just as there are things that can one-shot a @ early on that are less dangerous later, Nexus can make for a bad day, but can also be defended against eventually or even earlier with a lucky find. Actually, easily defended with stability boots, though as my mage discovered trade-offs can be tricky.

I was assuming that level progression and "internal" stats roughly followed the dungeon level... Of course, there can be variations -- in particular if you're playing in the "diving" style. (That and the fact that rNexus tends to actually be more available the deeper you go. In fact, you actually had rNexus gear! A "shallower" character might not have come across such gear yet.) Would your mage have been better/worse off if he'd been scrambled earlier? In this case, I suspect it wouldn't have made much difference -- except it would perhaps have been easier to just suicide if it happened earlier.

In fact the very situation you describe is why my characters either a) always wear rNexus after getting it on any equipment unless forced out of rBase/rPois, or b) play a version where I've removed stat swap from Nexus. I much prefer the latter since I don't like unpreventable arbitrary "ruin-but-don't-kill-the-character" mechanics.

[mushroom patch]

I think unresisted nexus breath usually gives the player more of a sporting chance than, say, unresisted poison breath does.

The problem with nexus isn't this effect, it's that it's the tenth kind of fire. Since most resistances no longer do anything useful, as outlined above by Derakon, and current meta is about avoiding encounters with low value/high expense targets, e.g. anything that breathes chaos, the game design issue to tackle is that there are too many types of damage, the differences between which make no strategic difference. If you removed chaos, sound, shards (the other kind of poison), light (the other kind of darkness), and disenchantment (the other kind of acid), you'd have three weird, but reasonably differentiated, types of resistable damage, nether, nexus, and darkness, which would leave you with a much cleaner game that still has three more types of resistable damage than most games in the genre. Then just change the name of "nexus" (where did this name even come from?) to "chaos" and you're set. I realize disenchantment resistance actually has some strategic value, but if you want something that continues to screw up your equipment into the late game, make a stronger type of acid attack that requires acid immunity to protect equipment.

[MattB]

It gets less dangerous to be missing rNexus the deeper you are (if we ignore hostile teleportation) since you'll usually be higher level the deeper you are... I contend that this is bizarre and wrong from a game design perspective.

If all elements worked that way, I'd agree that it was wrong and bizarre from a game design perspective. However, given that most work the other way around, I think it's genius to have one element that works in the opposite direction.

[MattB]

I was assuming that level progression and "internal" stats roughly followed the dungeon level... Of course, there can be variations -- in particular if you're playing in the "diving" style. (That and the fact that rNexus tends to actually be more available the deeper you go. In fact, you actually had rNexus gear! A "shallower" character might not have come across such gear yet.) Would your mage have been better/worse off if he'd been scrambled earlier? In this case, I suspect it wouldn't have made much difference -- except it would perhaps have been easier to just suicide if it happened earlier.

In fact the very situation you describe is why my characters either a) always wear rNexus after getting it on any equipment unless forced out of rBase/rPois, or b) play a version where I've removed stat swap from Nexus. I much prefer the latter since I don't like unpreventable arbitrary "ruin-but-don't-kill-the-character" mechanics.

Some of my most enjoyable, and interesting, games (and, for that matter, satisfying games) have been chars that have suffered a stat scramble. Sometimes Angband can seem like repeating the sames steps over and over again, from game to game, and I find it interesting to occasionally play a weak warrior or a naive paladin etc. etc. In other words, characters that I would never have rolled at birth or, in most cases, could never have rolled.

[AnonymousHero]

Some of my most enjoyable, and interesting, games (and, for that matter, satisfying games) have been chars that have suffered a stat scramble. Sometimes Angband can seem like repeating the sames steps over and over again, from game to game, and I find it interesting to occasionally play a weak warrior or a naive paladin etc. etc. In other words, characters that I would never have rolled at birth or, in most cases, could never have rolled.

I actually kind of agree with that sentiment... for games that are about that random element[1] -- it's the totally arbitrariness and randomness of stat swap that really annoys me. (Personally, I prefer games that can be beaten in a deterministic fashion, if you choose to.)

[1] I don't think Vanilla Angband fits in here. It's pretty much beatable at-will if you have enough knowledge at tactical experience with it.

[wobbly]

I'd say having a low str on a warrior or a low int on a mage is less of a deal early game anyways. Troll mages can't cast so well but have the str/melee to biff things just fine after all. Besides you've got plenty of game ahead of you to change the situation & being weaker (or dumber) isn't going to be critical if your carrying teleport scrolls, healing potions & a scroll of recall.