"Best" versions of Vanilla Angband?

[PowerWyrm]

If you find 4.x too easy, try the same race/class in PWMAngband without enabling turn-based combat. If you win with that combo and still find that too easy, then we got a *serious* problem...

[PowerWyrm]

(ego items) What do you mean by this - the fact that they have a max depth at all, or the specific values?

(ego DSMs) My understanding is that these were introduced to try and make DSMs a bit more usable. Looking at them, I would say that Resistance, Elvenkind and Speed are the only ones that look as if they might be overpowered, and they are pretty rare. How much of a problem is this?

Ego items now have a "level range". In earlier versions, you would get a lot of junk (slay troll, boots of levitation) throughout the game, which meant a very low chance to get (for example) boots of speed. Now once the level cap is passed for those junk items, it will rain good egos (heh I've discarded once two pairs of +10 speed boots on a dungeon level because I already had a pair with better to-ac). The opposite problem may also appear: for example, in the last Angband competition, you had to play an ironman character without artifacts; in order to get enough CON, you'd go with a weapon of Westernesse; unfortunately, if you didn't plan that in advance or didn't have the space in your inventory, once past dlvl 70, you would have passed the level cap and get no chance to acquire another westie.

Concerning ego DSMs, I don't think they are overpowered, they just need to be restricted to specific ones. A Blue DSM of speed +5 is ok, a balance DSM of elvenkind or power DSM (dwarven) are plain stupid.

[Nick]

Ego items now have a "level range". In earlier versions, you would get a lot of junk (slay troll, boots of levitation) throughout the game, which meant a very low chance to get (for example) boots of speed. Now once the level cap is passed for those junk items, it will rain good egos (heh I've discarded once two pairs of +10 speed boots on a dungeon level because I already had a pair with better to-ac). The opposite problem may also appear: for example, in the last Angband competition, you had to play an ironman character without artifacts; in order to get enough CON, you'd go with a weapon of Westernesse; unfortunately, if you didn't plan that in advance or didn't have the space in your inventory, once past dlvl 70, you would have passed the level cap and get no chance to acquire another westie.

Right, thanks. That should be fixable, surely.

Concerning ego DSMs, I don't think they are overpowered, they just need to be restricted to specific ones. A Blue DSM of speed +5 is ok, a balance DSM of elvenkind or power DSM (dwarven) are plain stupid.

Balance DSM of Elvenkind is inferior to PDSM of Craftmanship, and probably rarer. A PDSM (Dwarven) is rarer still, and I think really the awesome thing about it is going to be all the resists, rather than the +1/2 STR/CON and FA that you probably already have from other stuff.

[Pete Mack]

@Nick-- DwarveN PDSM is noticeably better than the best artifact armor in the game. That is surely not desirable. A couple points of CON in the armor slot add significant flexibility.

[Sideways]

@Nick-- DwarveN PDSM is noticeably better than the best artifact armor in the game. That is surely not desirable.

This can be fixed easily by adding a new artifact Dwarven Elvenkind PDSM of Speed

[Derakon]

@Nick-- DwarveN PDSM is noticeably better than the best artifact armor in the game. That is surely not desirable. A couple points of CON in the armor slot add significant flexibility.

If Dwarven PDSM is noticeably more rare than the best artifact armor in the game, then I don't see a problem with it existing. It's when you can count on these awesome items showing up in some significant percentage of games that we start having a problem.

I mean, alternately we declare that ego-items are not allowed to outclass artifacts, in which case we have a number of other items to address -- most notably Trickery and Buckland.