High element reform

[Derakon]

Well let's do some math. Currently drolems breathe unresisted around 600 and resisted around 200. Let's cut it by 6 and make it delayed damage. That means a drolem breath unresisted does 100, and if untreated will do 5050 points of additional damage (death without a lot of healing or a neutralize poison). If you resist poison, the breath only does 50 damage, and 1275 over time if you fail your saving through (but maybe that should be reduced so that anyone that resists poison gets a more significant reduction.)

So, yeah. Poison will still be deadly and carrying neutralize poison would be a necessity.

Do you really think it's a good idea to make the player carry another consumable? Why not just make the C*W potions reduce the poison counter by some amount such that you'd need to drink several of them to clear something like a drolem breath? You're already having to spend a turn healing instead of continuing the fight, during which turn the monsters will continue to attack you.

Say CCW reduced the timer by 20; you'd need to drink 5 to clear an unresisted drolem breath. Neutralize Poison would of course remove the poison entirely, and some players might find it worth dedicating a slot to that potion for that reason. But I don't think we should make the C*W potions completely useless against poison.

[fizzix]

Do you really think it's a good idea to make the player carry another consumable? Why not just make the C*W potions reduce the poison counter by some amount such that you'd need to drink several of them to clear something like a drolem breath? You're already having to spend a turn healing instead of continuing the fight, during which turn the monsters will continue to attack you.

Say CCW reduced the timer by 20; you'd need to drink 5 to clear an unresisted drolem breath. Neutralize Poison would of course remove the poison entirely, and some players might find it worth dedicating a slot to that potion for that reason. But I don't think we should make the C*W potions completely useless against poison.

Ideally only one or two classes would need to carry the pots. These classes would be mage and rogue. Paladins Rangers and Priests can cure it, so no worries there. (The assumption being that warriors should be able to tank it, which isn't currently the case with this math, so it needs tweaking.)

But yes, I'd rather increase inventory slots and require carrying the healing than keep C*W as the cure-all it currently is, leaving the neutralize/slow poison to be completely useless.

[Bowman]

But yes, I'd rather increase inventory slots and require carrying the healing than keep C*W as the cure-all it currently is, leaving the neutralize/slow poison to be completely useless.

Kind of getting OT, but increasing inventory slots to be able to play a consumable-based version of "have it or die" gear checks sounds like a bad idea.

To me, the main problem with poison as it is now is that the DOT effect is too easy to ignore after the very early stages. Maybe try just removing the neutralize poison effect on the higher C*W spells/potions first? That would give a better picture of whether the real problem is the DOT being too easy to heal or just being too weak. The same could be done for cuts, since it's rather cheap to heal a "mortal wound" with CCW (in this case, though, cuts basically just becomes a poison without a neutralizing potion ).

Though, that also starts getting to the point where poison/shards has the same issue as light/dark, which is why I'd like to have a different effect on shards (cause mortal wounds is exempt because it's resisted by a save instead of a gear property).

[Raccoon]

(cause mortal wounds is exempt because it's resisted by a save instead of a gear property).

Aren't wounds reduced and healed faster by having regeneration?

[Bowman]

It's news to me, if that is the case, and if that is the case, I'd suggest to get rid of that because wounds need all the help they can get to be an actual threat

[Derakon]

Aren't wounds reduced and healed faster by having regeneration?

They are, yes. Your wound timer ticks down noticeably faster if you have regeneration, to the point that it takes maybe a turn or two to go from "mortal wound" to "severe gash", and similarly to the other less extreme levels.

[fizzix]

Kind of getting OT, but increasing inventory slots to be able to play a consumable-based version of "have it or die" gear checks sounds like a bad idea.

The game is already full of those. Better have Free action or your going to die. Better have resist poison or that AMHD is going to get you. Of course, you can avoid the monsters you can't handle, but that's no difference in this case either.

Surely there's a middle ground between current poison which is negligible (outside of the very very early game, like clevel 1-3) and a killer. That middle ground is probably interesting. We should at least explore it.

[Nick]

Nick, you think poison and shards are fine? The effects are indistinguishable and don't do anything. You could remove the poison and cut counter altogether and the game wouldn't differ at all.

I see your point, although I do think that poison is still a danger early on - from being mobbed by Wood Spiders, for example. There are some other considerations, though:

• Effects don't necessarily have to have a big impact individually - they can add up to difficulties in combination, if the character is under immediate threat and needs to choose between fight, heal and escape
• Particular effects may be less dangerous because of insufficient use of them in the monster list, rather than their own deficiencies
• Not all players are as experienced or level-headed as you - a sudden drop in HP combined with "Deep Gash" at the bottom of the screen can incline some people to panic, turn-based or not

I'm also not necessarily saying that these effects can't be tweaked (in O/FA, for example, cut damage is on average twice what it is in V for the same damage attack).

Also, there needs to be some variability in the attack types. In the end, the player is going to be asking "Do I need this resistance?", and you mostly want the answer to vary depending on stage of game and type of character, but I don't see a big problem with some resistances being seen as generally less important than others.

[Bowman]

The game is already full of those. Better have Free action or your going to die. Better have resist poison or that AMHD is going to get you. Of course, you can avoid the monsters you can't handle, but that's no difference in this case either.

Surely there's a middle ground between current poison which is negligible (outside of the very very early game, like clevel 1-3) and a killer. That middle ground is probably interesting. We should at least explore it.

"Have it or die" game with gear is fine. The game already has that with rPoison. What you're suggesting is that I need to have rPoison AND have a way of healing poison as well. If that were the case, I'd probably just ignore rPoison because it's too unreliable and the first poison hit isn't going to kill me anyway. If the enemy breathes poison, I respond by curing it (with !neutralize at high health or !healing at low health), and it's a wash because both of us wasted a turn (assuming, of course, that you have speed equality and are only fighting one thing at a time, because those are pretty basic survival methods already).

I'm in favor of having poison be something other than a damage number with a side effect that does nothing, but not in a way that makes it as pointless to have rPoison as it is currently to have rNether.

[Estie]

The issue with XP drain is that it is far too common. Its only purpose seems to be to make @ shy away from otherwise harmless melee. Which brings me back to the bigger point, why do we have dangerous ranged attacks, but harmless melee attacks ? 1600 fire damage from various monsters, but only a few meleers can do 500 a round.
Whatever you are going to replace XP drain with, handling melee threat with special effects only is going to feel wrong.

[Estie]

I have been wondering what would happen if high elements would be brought in line, damage wise, with basic elements. That is, you die if you get hit without having the resistance, and the resistance reduces the damage in a similar way as rbase does.

This would mean you couldnt get to 1-shot proof state that easily anymore, in fact barely anyone would. Youd have to watch out for high breathers all the time, which is what you do before maxed con when you still have 300 hp.

It would definitely make the game harder, which is what people want, no ?
Special effects could remain, so basically all high elements would behave like poison does now.

Not at all sure if I like the idea, but there you go.

[luneya]

I have been wondering what would happen if high elements would be brought in line, damage wise, with basic elements. That is, you die if you get hit without having the resistance, and the resistance reduces the damage in a similar way as rbase does.

This would mean you couldnt get to 1-shot proof state that easily anymore, in fact barely anyone would. Youd have to watch out for high breathers all the time, which is what you do before maxed con when you still have 300 hp.

It would definitely make the game harder, which is what people want, no ?
Special effects could remain, so basically all high elements would behave like poison does now.

Not at all sure if I like the idea, but there you go.

The problem with this idea is that high-element resists are much rarer than the basic ones, and there's no alternative to having them on equipment slots. If for some reason you have to walk around without intrinsic fire resist, you could just carry potions of resist fire (or cast the spell, for non-warriors). For the high elements, it's rare to have all the resists available intrinsically at once, and again, there's no alternative method to mitigate the damage.

What we're looking for is to replace annoyances with reasonable challenges, not to make the game sadistically difficult. Increasing the frequency of "It breathes. You die." is definitely not a desired outcome.

[Estie]

The problem with this idea is that high-element resists are much rarer than the basic ones, and there's no alternative to having them on equipment slots. If for some reason you have to walk around without intrinsic fire resist, you could just carry potions of resist fire (or cast the spell, for non-warriors). For the high elements, it's rare to have all the resists available intrinsically at once, and again, there's no alternative method to mitigate the damage.

What we're looking for is to replace annoyances with reasonable challenges, not to make the game sadistically difficult. Increasing the frequency of "It breathes. You die." is definitely not a desired outcome.

It wouldnt be as hard as you seem to imagine. People have grown accustomed to spending time around 1-hit monsters. The only reason we farm con potions is because Morgoth can do unresistable 700 or so damage.
There is no need to kill anything except the 2 last bosses, but of course, it should be possible - arguably easier - to kill all the uniques. This could be done by swapping in the relevant high resists if your kit doesnt include them anyway.
Just as, when you battle the Tarrasque, you want to get double resist to fire and cold if at all possible because the damage is so outrageous, you could use some swap item with nether resist to battle Osse, and be at danger of death if you let him target you without it, even with maxed constitution.

[Bowman]

The main objection that I could see to that is it might be too possible for "summon uniques" to bring in a mixture that you can't survive long enough to separate. That's why I'd suggested having the reliable high resists provide much less damage reduction than the basic resists. Nether hitting for 500 after reliable resistance cuts it to 75% means its base damage was 666 (totally accidental ). That 166 difference is meant to be enough to feel significant (probably around 15-20% of your final max health!) without taking it so far that it becomes likely to lead to cheap deaths.

Of course, where to draw the line of "enough is enough" is subjective. Personally, I would tend to favor incremental tweaks to how it works now because I think that makes it clearer to tell how each individual change affected the game. However, fizzix's idea for poison is something that sounds like an interesting concept to me. I think it would need to be adjusted to still have a chunk of initial damage to keep the actual hit significant, and I think the DOT damage would need to be adjusted to avoid a situation where players are almost forced to sacrifice an inventory slot for !neutralize, but the core idea of turning poison into a "scary DOT" element (which Angband doesn't really have right now) is interesting.

[Derakon]

I'm not really convinced we want to be moving towards a greater density of "it breathes, you die" monsters. Especially when we still haven't figured out a good way to warn the player about them. Telling them to cheat monster memory and then expecting them to carefully read the monster memory for every new monster is not a solution, just a patch job. I bet that if my first half-dozen characters to make it to 3000' had all gotten one-shotted, each by a different kind of monster, the lesson I would have learned is "Angband is stupid, with way too many powerful monsters, I quit", not "I need to avoid these monsters until I have the gear that lets me fight them."