High resists

[wobbly]

But I'm willing to give Nick the benefit of the doubt; he seems to have made basically sound decisions up to this point, for the most part.

You sure, he did accept become maintainer...

[Pete Mack]

Yes, we need to differentiate between "the game will take longer" and "the game requires more grinding". Grinding is performing repetitive but "rewarding" (in terms of gear, experience, etc.) tasks, particularly ones that are largely safe. Ideally it would not be possible at all, but with a game with as large a power curve as Angband has that doesn't seem likely to be achievable without rules like forced-descent.

Making monsters more powerful can potentially result in grinding, if players (are able to) refuse to go anywhere near those monsters without having the relevant resists. If the player must engage with those monsters anyway, even if only by sneaking past them, then I'd say we aren't dealing with an increase in grinding.

It still might not be the kind of playstyle we want, of course. I'm not convinced that we ought to be making more monsters capable of one-shotting the player, for example. But I'm willing to give Nick the benefit of the doubt; he seems to have made basically sound decisions up to this point, for the most part.

@Derakon--
In this case, I expect it to mean more stat gain (and armor pickup) before dl 60, where high breathers start to get significantly more HP. This will make a whole lot of single-shot monsters, especially if the monster HP divisor is increased to 3 as it is for poison.

[Derakon]

@Derakon--
In this case, I expect it to mean more stat gain (and armor pickup) before dl 60, where high breathers start to get significantly more HP. This will make a whole lot of single-shot monsters, especially if the monster HP divisor is increased to 3 as it is for poison.

That may be the case, or it may not. Our players are inventive folk.

More importantly, I would not expect this change to be made in isolation. We can scale up the potential damage from breaths and then adjust the actual damage done by specific monsters until the balance is where we want it to be. This could include changing the multiplier system, for example, or tweaking monster HP.

[fizzix]

One of the issues of late game diving where one-shotting monsters abound is that it takes away decision making. When a given monster has a 1 in N chance of breathing something that will kill you, then the choice of engaging the monster is removed. You avoid the monster at all costs. The game gives ample tools of avoiding monsters, including teleport other and destruction.

If you remove those options from the player, then you run into situations where you force the player to be able to handle the monsters (leading to the grinding for equipment problem).

Personally I think that non-unique monsters that can do 600 damage a turn are a problem for us, and they really limit what challenges we can realistically throw at the player. Realistically this means that you either need the resist to handle the monster (assuming you get a 2/3 resistance) or you cannot engage it. If resistance is 1/3 and monsters do 400 damage resistance, we really limit what we can do. 2 monsters in LoS is a death sentence for most characters pre-endgame. Forcing players to handle multiple threats at once exponentially increases different scenarios. (yes exponential is right here, it's literally monsters^n), but no sane player is going to allow themselves to fight multiple monsters when a full health kill is a possibility.

I'm not sure what the best solution is, but I've always pushed for lowering single turn monster damage output and making guaranteed escapes rarer (perhaps these should solely be the domain of rogues and to a lesser degree mages). I certainly understand the fun of sneaking around amongst instant death to try to find quality gear, and that playstyle probably should be encouraged. But we need to do it in a way that doesn't force only 1v1 encounters with monsters that you are properly kitted for.

[bio_hazard]

Just had a thought and I don't know if this is solving any particular problem, but there is a way to have predictable variability in resists that could be tactically interesting.

Say resists start by blocking 2/3 of damage. You receive damage on this element which starts a counter of X normal turns. When the counter is at X the resist blocks only 1/3 of damage, and as the counter counts down, damage reduction increases gradually back to 2/3.

[Nick]

@Estie--
It's really easy to test this. Just edit the list-elements.h file, and make every entry that has resistance to read like poison. I suspect you will end up doing more grinding, not less.

In fact, if you're playing the nightlies, it's easier than that - you just need to edit the numerator and denominator lines in projection.txt.

Personally I think that non-unique monsters that can do 600 damage a turn are a problem for us, and they really limit what challenges we can realistically throw at the player. Realistically this means that you either need the resist to handle the monster (assuming you get a 2/3 resistance) or you cannot engage it. If resistance is 1/3 and monsters do 400 damage resistance, we really limit what we can do. 2 monsters in LoS is a death sentence for most characters pre-endgame.

The damage drop-off of cone-shaped breaths actually helps here quite a bit.

[Nick]

Keep in mind with all this that I am looking at significant adjustment to the monster list, including introducing new monsters, adjusting the depths of current ones, changing movement (and maybe spellcasting) AI, introducing new spells (including some with combinations of damage types), and giving existing attack types extra side-effects when unresisted.

In fact, given that high resists are just a data file change, I'm going to do all this other stuff first.

[fizzix]

The damage drop-off of cone-shaped breaths actually helps here quite a bit.

Yeah it's certainly a step in the right direction, BUT, it's hard to calculate. If a dragon is 5 spaces away how much damage will the breath be? I don't know. The game currently doesn't tell you (unless this has changed). And getting that info to the player in a simple manner seems very difficult.

[Nomad]

Yeah it's certainly a step in the right direction, BUT, it's hard to calculate. If a dragon is 5 spaces away how much damage will the breath be? I don't know. The game currently doesn't tell you (unless this has changed). And getting that info to the player in a simple manner seems very difficult.

I feel like it might be a good move to adapt the "Show damage player deals to monsters" option to display all forms of damage in numerical form - monster on player as well as vice versa, and including damage from things like spells, wands, breaths, etc. rather than just physical damage. (I know the monster damage information is technically already available by monitoring your HP, but it's much easier to grasp what's going on if you read "The Hellbound breathes fire (44)" than if you're trying to calculate 313-269 in the middle of a busy battle situation.)

It would still be a case of discovering how much damage things can do by getting hit once and knowing better for next time, but that kind of learning by trial and error is a grand roguelike tradition, and it would allow experienced players to learn ballpark estimates for things like how much breath damage drops with distance.

[Carnivean]

I see 2 options that make sense:

1) Remove high resists. The attacks are weird, so we can't reduce damage from them. We can keep things that prevent side effects. Cap them to a reasonable damage level.

2) We make high resists more easily calculable, more standard.

2a) We make ALL resists the same and reduce maximum damage caps for the standard 5.

If we make them more easily calculable, with a resist being 40% and a stacking resist being another 40%, then everything becomes much easier to understand.

[Pete Mack]

3. We leave it more or less unchanged, where resists are 'useful but not reliable', with non-random ego resists (light, dark) somewhat more powerful. Note that this list used to include sound and confusion, when they were elemental resists on crowns of serenity.

I see 2 options that make sense:

1) Remove high resists. The attacks are weird, so we can't reduce damage from them. We can keep things that prevent side effects. Cap them to a reasonable damage level.

2) We make high resists more easily calculable, more standard.

2a) We make ALL resists the same and reduce maximum damage caps for the standard 5.

If we make them more easily calculable, with a resist being 40% and a stacking resist being another 40%, then everything becomes much easier to understand.

[Carnivean]

3. We leave it more or less unchanged, where resists are 'useful but not reliable', with non-random ego resists (light, dark) somewhat more powerful. Note that this list used to include sound and confusion, when they were elemental resists on crowns of serenity.

Didn't make the list because it doesn't make sense.

Why would the rules for high resists be so arbitrary, obtuse and worthless when the rules for the normal resists are straightforward? How can you possible sell anyone on the idea that although the resists that you've seen so far offer significant reductions in damage these other, new to you, resists are barely going to make a difference?

You're arguing from nostalgia not from a rational position, at least that I can see so far.

[gameplay appreciator]

Yeah it's certainly a step in the right direction, BUT, it's hard to calculate. If a dragon is 5 spaces away how much damage will the breath be? I don't know. The game currently doesn't tell you (unless this has changed). And getting that info to the player in a simple manner seems very difficult.

Looking at the interface, there's a lot of information that strikes me as totally useless on a turn to turn basis, e.g. current stats, class and race, title. The map is also overly large in the horizontal. It is quite possible to put in an alternate HUD that gives some detail on monsters in line of sight.

[Carnivean]

Looking at the interface, there's a lot of information that strikes me as totally useless on a turn to turn basis, e.g. current stats, class and race, title. The map is also overly large in the horizontal. It is quite possible to put in an alternate HUD that gives some detail on monsters in line of sight.

Off the topic of this thread, but are you aware that you can open more windows and change what they display? There is already a current target window that shows the recall information for the current target and a monster list.

[Derakon]

Off the topic of this thread, but are you aware that you can open more windows and change what they display? There is already a current target window that shows the recall information for the current target and a monster list.

They're right, though -- there's a lot of info on the sidebar that doesn't need to be displayed all the time. That could be removed to make room for other information. Just because the player can add extra windows doesn't mean we should assume they are, or be wasteful of window space.

One of the things I fiddled with in Pyrel was displaying your current resists in the sidebar. I condensed each element name down to 2 characters and then showed the name in a dark color if you didn't have it, and in a brighter, element-appropriate color (e.g. green for poison, lavender for nexus) if you did. If I recall correctly, you could fit all the resists, plus FA, SI, and a few others, into 4-5 rows that way. If we changed it to be 5 characters per element (2-char abbreviation, 2-char resistance percentage, and a space to make the columns more legible) then you'd probably need 10-12 rows, which still ought to be doable if we remove some of the more irrelevant info from the current sidebar.