Balance and pacing (long)

[Will]

Well now that I am diving so fast, I don't have that luxury and I have no attachment to the levels as I did before. It's much more exciting and doesn't feel as punishing if something goes bad since it's a shorter game.

Welcome to the world of power diving

[Grotug]

Welcome to the world of power diving

I have bad experiences using ?Deep Descents but 3 dungeon levels is a bit more manageable.

[fizzix]

The finished character that prompted the post is here.

The endgame is very much broken. There are vaults on nearly every level, and you are pretty much guaranteed to get over the top gear from them. Consumables were harder to get, especially !CCW, but when you're packing three immunities and can just banish anything you don't want to deal with, it's not too much of a problem.

I found 3 PDSM in this game. In all my previous games of angband I have only found 1. This is broken. I found all three top tier artifact rings, in all other games I have never done this (although tbh I mostly play randarts and those rings are rarer.) I found deathwreaker, which I've only done once before. I found nearly every artifact armor outside of the super rare DSM ones. I didn't find feanor, but there were lots of boots of speed +10 to choose from in the bottom of the dungeon.

I plan to start running stats soon, but if I wasn't insanely lucky, then I can already recommend a severe reduction to artifact and ego-item generation, as well as an order of magnitude (at least) reduction to greater vault generation.

[Grotug]

Welcome to the world of power diving

I went from ~60-90 damage to 164-197 damage in about 4000 turns. Still on DL39. Scary to go to DL42 without rPois.

EDIT: Wormtongue just dropped me a weapon that rPois; but i just found Nimloth and +3 speed and +3 stealth are nice! HMMM.

[Pete Mack]

This is where branded ammo kicks in. Kill him from a distance, fast. Dodge around a corner and !CCW if he nether bolts you.

I'm on DL39 and 22,500 turns. Still alive, but this death knight will give me problems. I had a chance to TO him, but I only have 4 charges left. Trying to think of some way I can kill him. I suppose I could use a potion of speed. I could also take those up stairs that are a few tiles away from me..

[PowerDiver]

I wrote about staves of destruction littering the dungeon ...

These are definitely not common now. You're unlikely to get one by dlevel 60 with average gameplay.

That's my 3.0 bias getting in the way. I will continue to make errors of this sort.

[Grotug]

I'm about to go back down to DL45 (fell through a trap door on DL42). I'm CL30 and I have 0 gold. This is... definitely a first. And I just realize that I have only one WoR. HMMM. What to do? 39/3 is only 13. I think I'll take the stairs....

[fizzix]

That's my 3.0 bias getting in the way. I will continue to make errors of this sort.

I know.

But I don't think having free and plentiful access to literally the most powerful effect in the game (especially in the 3.0.x where artifacts were spared from destruction) is really a good idea.

[Pete Mack]

It takes almost no time to gather gold at DL45. With no_sell on it comes in tranches of 500GP or more. It won't take long to be able to afford a stack of ?Recall at the very least.

[bio_hazard]

I'm jumping back to something from the first page, but I think there are other tweaks to monsters besides hp/damage ratios.

How about a Q that heals all monsters on sight?
How about tougher breeders?
How about a monster that prevents teleportation?

Monsters with extra abilities set up tactical choices that make the game more interesting. Do you take out the shambling mound that can haste/wake everything or the ranger chieftan that can summon? It kind of seems like these types of challenges become less important in the late game when you need to be so worried about LOS by everything.

[Nick]

The endgame is very much broken. There are vaults on nearly every level, and you are pretty much guaranteed to get over the top gear from them.

OK, good to know. Any sense of how many of the vaults were new ones?

I've filed this as a bug

[fizzix]

OK, good to know. Any sense of how many of the vaults were new ones?

I've filed this as a bug

Most were old, I hit the divisi vault (I think that's what it's called) 3 times, and the hourglass vault twice.

[Grotug]

It takes almost no time to gather gold at DL45. With no_sell on it comes in tranches of 500GP or more. It won't take long to be able to afford a stack of ?Recall at the very least.

Yeah, I quickly raked up 17k gold. I'll continue my ramblings about my game in the thread I made about secret rooms and traps so as to not derail this thread.

[PowerDiver]

But I don't think having free and plentiful access to literally the most powerful effect in the game (especially in the 3.0.x where artifacts were spared from destruction) is really a good idea.

Sparing artifacts from destruction was obviously stupid. Items under banished monsters should disappear as well. Those were among the first bugfixes I made when I went back to 3.0.

If you want to nerf destruction a little more, better to give it a somewhat random radius so you can't easily pick off a single unique a step or two from a high-value item.

But, like everything else, the real way to approach play balance is to make slots more precious. The main time I typically use a staff of destruction is when I find one on a level where I can find a use for it. Otherwise it is a luxury usually not worth a slot when I go down the stairs.

Checking my last game, I carried one down the stairs at DL 61-65 and 68, and I don't remember using any of them.

[Will]

I'm jumping back to something from the first page, but I think there are other tweaks to monsters besides hp/damage ratios.

Actually even before going into that we could already try to fix the existing by making the obvious, regular "abuse" work a lot less, such as introducing resistance (and immunity) to TO (the #1 spell on my list of stuff that makes the game "too easy") or a higher chance to break RoP.

Also change behaviour of monsters re: RoP for example: instead of trying to break it, they just take a step back and revert to range/breath attacks. Or maybe breaths able to break RoP, etc.

Also !ccw is the all-mighty item right now that makes a lot of other items redundant (most curing items actually).

This being said I like the idea of introducing more variety of monsters in the dlvl 50-80 range.