Whatever happened to 'restore artifact'?

[Gram]

In a new game I'd gone a long time without getting any armor improvements, stuck holding onto a suboptimal defender weapon to try to deal with it, when finally a vault gave me several decent items and the shield of Celegorm. I was very pleased and relieved. But very shortly afterwards I bumped into a low-level caster (gnome mage, I think) who managed to summon a disenchanter bat. Poof, -2 on my new artifact shield, impossible to do anything about before or repair or replace afterwards.

That stinks. That's not "a challenge" or anything, that's just stupid.

Looking around I found others complaining about artifact disenchantment and found that at one point someone acted on others' suggestions and added a scroll of 'restore artifact'. I guess that never got pulled into trunk? Why not?

[Bimbul]

I have been able to re-enchant artefacts after they got disenchanted with scrolls of enchant armour/weapon

Chance is low but it can happen.

[Timo Pietilä]

I have been able to re-enchant artefacts after they got disenchanted with scrolls of enchant armour/weapon

Chance is low but it can happen.

Only up to +15. After that it wont happen and it starts to get a lot harder after around +10.

[Bimbul]

Sure but +10. +10 isn't desperately bad.

This is just the game for me. Horrible stuff happens. You're descending into the pits of Angband not Wookey Hole. Find another shield

[Derakon]

There was a brief period in which there were scrolls that would undo disenchantment damage. They got removed shortly thereafter because they make disenchantment completely toothless. Angband is a game in which your gear gets damaged; this sounds mean but you really should just learn to cope. If a disenchanter bat gets summoned, stay away from it and kill it from a distance.

[Estie]

The thing is that it is a bad kind of tooth. Early on, it is completely harmless (basically just avoid meleeing the Mim clan), but once I have a piece of endgame gear, I raise the "disenchant matters now" flag and really run from every bat. Bat becomes more dangerous than Mim, betrayer of Turin.

But instead of a new "restore srtifact scroll", I would rather see the chance of successfully enchanting be based on the initial value of the artifact, not the (+0,+0) state. So if Ringil gets disenchanted from +25 to +24, you read enchant weapon to damage with the same chance of success as currently Ringil +14 -> +15.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

The thing is that it is a bad kind of tooth. Early on, it is completely harmless (basically just avoid meleeing the Mim clan), but once I have a piece of endgame gear, I raise the "disenchant matters now" flag and really run from every bat. Bat becomes more dangerous than Mim, betrayer of Turin.

But instead of a new "restore srtifact scroll", I would rather see the chance of successfully enchanting be based on the initial value of the artifact, not the (+0,+0) state. So if Ringil gets disenchanted from +25 to +24, you read enchant weapon to damage with the same chance of success as currently Ringil +14 -> +15.

I like this idea a whole lot!!!

[krugar]

The thing is that it is a bad kind of tooth. Early on, it is completely harmless (basically just avoid meleeing the Mim clan), but once I have a piece of endgame gear, I raise the "disenchant matters now" flag and really run from every bat. Bat becomes more dangerous than Mim, betrayer of Turin.

Which, in the face of it, they are.

It's not that disenchant isn't a bummer. It's a royal pain. But the mechanism is perfect as yet another means for tactical thinking in the late game. Late Game = I better shape up, or die in many and inventive ways; including that of a bum pushing his trolley of junk.

Disenchant becomes just yet another dimension to the late game we should be aware of. And if I allow my ringil to go all the way from an awesome piece of hardware to something that makes me ashamed of, I should blame my playstyle, not the game. We have seen many, many, examples of endgames where the equipment was well taken care of.

But instead of a new "restore srtifact scroll", I would rather see the chance of successfully enchanting be based on the initial value of the artifact, not the (+0,+0) state. So if Ringil gets disenchanted from +25 to +24, you read enchant weapon to damage with the same chance of success as currently Ringil +14 -> +15.

Let the grinding begin. Seriously, make no mistake, no matter how strong willed we are, if the enchant opportunity is given back to us, most of us won't just stand the idea of dropping a ringil for something less valuable and keep on with the game as intended. We will just keep on searching for that thing that in one shot will put it back to what it was when we first found it.

But without that opportunity, the game is telling us:

1. Loosing equipment is a part of it.
2. We should learn to avoid it.
3. We should maintain our replacements.
4. No store visit is a really *HARD* game mode. As it should.
5. Last but not least, not always you will find a ringil and you just lost yours. That is ok. The game isn't over. You've manage before with less.

[Gram]

Disenchanter bat got summoned into the square adjacent to me. Nothing I could do about it.

Sure, disenchantment isn't meant to be just a minor inconvenience. I am ok with feeling like I should either unequip stuff I care about or not melee disenchanting uniques. But giving disenchantment to weak, common monsters, having those be summoned by completely pathetically weak everyday monsters, and having the disenchantment be totally irreversible isn't part of an interesting challenge. It's just pissing on the player.

Artifacts are one of the reasons Angband is enjoyable enough to bother with at all. Rather than "oh hey, generic monster dropped a Generic Weapon of +0.5% Better Than Your Previous Weapon! Yeah, Progress Quest!" you have distinctive items (with a backstory) which can be game-changing. Totally irreversible damage to worthy items just drains the game of interest.

With fabulous non-artifact gear, no matter how wonderful and rare, there's a chance you'll find a replacement for your damaged stuff. Not so for artifacts.

Derakon, my first link was a game you had as a hobbit with most all your stuff (including Celegorm) getting disenchanted, where after pouring in well over a million turns you found that this was taking any fun out of the game and making it too boring to continue. I don't think that is a worthwhile challenge or good game design.

I had written something quite similar to what Estie beat me to the punch in saying:

If you don't think there should be an additional item- and I'd agree - then change the way enchant scrolls work. Say, for instance, that for artifacts that are below their default bonus, the chance of success were based on current bonus - max(0, artifact's default bonus - 10) rather than on current bonus. Then using enchant on an artifact that had been -1 disenchanted would have a 2.5% chance of success, on one that was -2 disenchanted you'd have a 15% chance of success, and so on, with a 100% chance of enchanting an artifact that'd been -10 or more disenchanted.

Estie's idea is the same thing with artifact's default bonus -15 rather than -10. I do think keeping people from enchanting >=+15 artifacts beyond their starting values is worth doing to maintain balance. But I don't like the idea of giving only a 1 in 2000 chance of regaining that last point of disenchantment, which is just tedium that invites people to play with macros or whatever; something worth doing that's easily repeatable should have a meaningful chance of success or none whatsoever. I guess that's already a problem with the current enchant scroll setup.

[Estie]

Which, in the face of it, they are.

It's not that disenchant isn't a bummer. It's a royal pain. But the mechanism is perfect as yet another means for tactical thinking in the late game. Late Game = I better shape up, or die in many and inventive ways; including that of a bum pushing his trolley of junk.

Disenchant becomes just yet another dimension to the late game we should be aware of. And if I allow my ringil to go all the way from an awesome piece of hardware to something that makes me ashamed of, I should blame my playstyle, not the game. We have seen many, many, examples of endgames where the equipment was well taken care of.



Let the grinding begin. Seriously, make no mistake, no matter how strong willed we are, if the enchant opportunity is given back to us, most of us won't just stand the idea of dropping a ringil for something less valuable and keep on with the game as intended. We will just keep on searching for that thing that in one shot will put it back to what it was when we first found it.

But without that opportunity, the game is telling us:

1. Loosing equipment is a part of it.
2. We should learn to avoid it.
3. We should maintain our replacements.
4. No store visit is a really *HARD* game mode. As it should.
5. Last but not least, not always you will find a ringil and you just lost yours. That is ok. The game isn't over. You've manage before with less.

If bats are more dangerous than Mim, they should give more XP than Mim.
Grinding for enchant weapon scrolls is faster than grinding for a Ringil replacement.

[Gram]

Krugar, my disenchantment bat situation wasn't about deep tactics. Not every single character of every line in Angband's source is some flawlessly perfect deep game of strategy for people who are just too brilliant to bother playing Chess or Go against puny grandmasters, even though sometimes it seems some people who have played Angband forever write as though that's how they felt about the game and about their ability.

There are plenty of artifacts that aren't +15 or more. They generally have additional abilities that can't be disenchanted to make up for it. These artifacts can already be restored to their original enchantment. Would the game be different if this were true for other artifacts too? Sure. But it wouldn't be unbalancing in the slightest. And contrary to how you seem to feel, it wouldn't turn the game from "A Glorious Challenge Intended For Geniuses" into "A Game Easy Enough For Any Imbecile To Win Without Effort." It'd just be less stupid.

[Egavactip]

Here is the deal. You can get XP restored, damage restored, stats restored. You can even recharge magic items (with a risk).

The game certainly ought to have ways to be able to restore damage to artifacts, of all things, even if said way is expensive or hard to find.

I don't find the responses here, which essentially boil down to "deal with it," to be valid responses. I think the people arguing for some way to combat disenchantment have a point.

I also think that some artifacts ought to have an ability that could be activated to restore damage to that artifact.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

What has always puzzled me, is who was it that could enchant things up to such levels (beyond +15) anyway? For instance, by the end a @ mage is powerful enough to banish everything around, teleport uniques away with zero failure, even take on one of the Valar. Even Feanor couldn't defeat Morgoth, but @ can. But enchant something past +15, no, not happening.

[jrodman]

I think we already have a pretty good proposal from Estie, of normalizing the enchant-weapon-to-X difficulty based on the artifact's default enchantment.

I wonder whether this would even make sense to make it *more* difficult to enchant low-default-enchanted artifacts (I'd be fine either way).

Not sure if that will end up wanting a little fine tuning somewhere. Currently Priests seem capable of restoring all disenchantment with that system, given the right dungeon spellbook and a bit of time. I'm sort of okay with that but it seems curious to go from disenchantment being scary to ho-hum as a mid-late game priest.

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What has always puzzled me, is who was it that could enchant things up to such levels (beyond +15) anyway?

I always assumed this was "just how they turned out". Think of Thor's hammer (mjolnir?) which has a kind of stubby shape due to trouble in the creation process. I just presumed some artifacts turned out strangely more powerful than anyone would have been able to set about making them by intention. Not that I ever thought that much about it, but it didn't strike me as odd, personally.

[Derakon]

Derakon, my first link was a game you had as a hobbit with most all your stuff (including Celegorm) getting disenchanted, where after pouring in well over a million turns you found that this was taking any fun out of the game and making it too boring to continue. I don't think that is a worthwhile challenge or good game design.

Haha, I'd forgotten about that rant. If I recall correctly, that was basically my first game after a fairly long hiatus. I was not playing well -- going too slowly, trying to kill everything, trying to melee almost everything (including liches and beholders), et cetera. But that was also six years ago, and I don't care to be held to my opinions from that far back.

In any event, regarding enchantment: the player at the end of the game is a once-in-an-era hero. They are not a once-in-an-era craftsman. The two require totally different skills. If you take your grand masterpiece weapon that was some legendary smith's life's work, and you go and get it banged up, you'll need to go back to that legendary smith, or someone of similar skill, to get it fixed.