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I recently beat Angband for the first time, with no deaths, as a dwarf paladin: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=20499. Before this point I had never really played past the first 10 or 15 levels, always as a warrior. I decided I was going to try to beat it recently as I made another run. Certainly I am no expert on Angband now - but I will throw out some observations I had anyway.
First, before I start, Angband really is brilliant - its brilliance I think lies in its unique mixture of simplicity and complexity. It is hard to describe what this really means, but I think the lack of race/class activated abilities, millions of passives, etc make the game more streamlined. All the fluff - quests, towns, etc, just don't matter. You go down to win. That's all you need to know.
I had a few thoughts during that run I'd like to share.
1) Identification sucks once you hit DL60 or so and start running into larger vaults more frequently. I'm aware of the pseudo ID but at that point you aren't going to be using it anymore as you will have perma identification options. The squelching options were also not enough. The issue is once you start hitting vaults with 100 items, you can either A) choose to ignore everything that is not an artifact by just using squelching and picking up everything or B) mindless, tediously, identify everything that looks interesting. I know you can id stuff on the ground, but even so...it was just.so.tedious. Combine that with the fact at end game, you need to start transitioning your weapons over to higher base damage weapons, and it becomes even worse. I won't even get started with ranged ammo.
My suggestion: grant better dropped item pseudo at high levels. Tell me this is a "whip of *Crap*" so I can just ignore it and move on. I see use cases for having class-specific pseudo at low levels, but I don't see that any of that really makes any difference to the game at high levels. At that point everyone has rods of ID, or spells, or whatever, and frankly it just makes larger vaults, which can already be tedious enough to clean out, even worse.
This is the #1 reason I probably won't play Angband again. It was no longer fun during the prep period before I dropped to DL100.
2) What is the point of two handed weapons? When I first got a mace of disruption, I thought to myself, this sucker has to be two handed with that base damage. But it wasn't. So two handers are basically just there for the low levels? I don't see a reason to ever use one - they don't compete with the end game high damage one handers, and they cause you to lose an artifact slot, resists, AC, etc which are clearly very precious. And I never saw one that did any significant base damage, and certainly not 50%+ more than one handers, which is what you would expect for losing out on a shield. I'd say just remove them or make them relevant.
3) Uniques that don't drop. I'm pretty sure the elemental uniques don't drop anything, for example. In a game where everything revolves around items, fighting uniques that don't drop anything once you kill them is just irritating.
4) Weird uniques. Sometimes I felt like I came around a corner and "You see Darth Vader. You see Braveheart." I'm not a big LOTR guy, sure I've read the books and the movies, but a lot of these uniques seemed like they were pulled from other mythologies, and it just seemed...weird.
5) Quiver management. I basically just gave up managing my quiver. Even with macros I just said screw it. Having to identify every stack of arrows, and having fifty million arrows of "extra damage to A" and extra damage to "B" was just too much and then having to select the right one for each shot...ugh. I'm not the only one. I looked through the ladder and many people, you could tell, just gave up on arrows, as they beat morgoth with 22 arrows of tickling (+1, +0) or whatever. Maybe paladin is just easy and other classes need them for kiting - frankly I just facetanked every unique in an anti-summoning corner.
6) Dispel evil/undead. Is there points to these spells and, well, offensive spells in general (activated breath attacks from artifacts, all the rods/wands of tickling? I mean they made mobs giggle during endgame, which was amusing, but certainly I had no intention of sitting in an undead vault, or any vault, and just spam that spell the fifty times it would take to kill something. Are these spells basically not useful later?
7) I'm not sure if this is how it works already, but I think having temp+perm resistance should make that damage school's inventory effects much less likely to happen. As it happened, I gave up fighting some of the end game uniques (I think I left some wolf and the tarasque), because they were murder to my end-game consumables, and I had no immunity to cold, so I just TOed them and said screw you guys.
8) Too much reliance on speed at end-game. The end game is all about maintaining enough sustained speed, probably 20+, with the ability to self-haste using pots/rods/etc since you simply cannot let a unique double turn you or that could be it, especially morgoth or some of the big breathers. It also seems like the only weapon brands that matter end game are extra attacks, disruption, and maybe holy avenger (although I never found any holy avenger weapon that outclassed my artifacts). You also need to find high damage versions of these, because, and I could be wrong, it appears your blows/round is capped at 5 regardless of how light the weapon is. So once you cap out your stats, you have to start using higher damage, slower weapons since they still cap out at 5.
9) Make townspeople passive. Having them follow you around and having them disturb you during recalls is just annoying.
10) Get rid of black reavers, or whatever they were called. GOD they were annoying :-)
First, before I start, Angband really is brilliant - its brilliance I think lies in its unique mixture of simplicity and complexity. It is hard to describe what this really means, but I think the lack of race/class activated abilities, millions of passives, etc make the game more streamlined. All the fluff - quests, towns, etc, just don't matter. You go down to win. That's all you need to know.
I had a few thoughts during that run I'd like to share.
1) Identification sucks once you hit DL60 or so and start running into larger vaults more frequently. I'm aware of the pseudo ID but at that point you aren't going to be using it anymore as you will have perma identification options. The squelching options were also not enough. The issue is once you start hitting vaults with 100 items, you can either A) choose to ignore everything that is not an artifact by just using squelching and picking up everything or B) mindless, tediously, identify everything that looks interesting. I know you can id stuff on the ground, but even so...it was just.so.tedious. Combine that with the fact at end game, you need to start transitioning your weapons over to higher base damage weapons, and it becomes even worse. I won't even get started with ranged ammo.
My suggestion: grant better dropped item pseudo at high levels. Tell me this is a "whip of *Crap*" so I can just ignore it and move on. I see use cases for having class-specific pseudo at low levels, but I don't see that any of that really makes any difference to the game at high levels. At that point everyone has rods of ID, or spells, or whatever, and frankly it just makes larger vaults, which can already be tedious enough to clean out, even worse.
This is the #1 reason I probably won't play Angband again. It was no longer fun during the prep period before I dropped to DL100.
2) What is the point of two handed weapons? When I first got a mace of disruption, I thought to myself, this sucker has to be two handed with that base damage. But it wasn't. So two handers are basically just there for the low levels? I don't see a reason to ever use one - they don't compete with the end game high damage one handers, and they cause you to lose an artifact slot, resists, AC, etc which are clearly very precious. And I never saw one that did any significant base damage, and certainly not 50%+ more than one handers, which is what you would expect for losing out on a shield. I'd say just remove them or make them relevant.
3) Uniques that don't drop. I'm pretty sure the elemental uniques don't drop anything, for example. In a game where everything revolves around items, fighting uniques that don't drop anything once you kill them is just irritating.
4) Weird uniques. Sometimes I felt like I came around a corner and "You see Darth Vader. You see Braveheart." I'm not a big LOTR guy, sure I've read the books and the movies, but a lot of these uniques seemed like they were pulled from other mythologies, and it just seemed...weird.
5) Quiver management. I basically just gave up managing my quiver. Even with macros I just said screw it. Having to identify every stack of arrows, and having fifty million arrows of "extra damage to A" and extra damage to "B" was just too much and then having to select the right one for each shot...ugh. I'm not the only one. I looked through the ladder and many people, you could tell, just gave up on arrows, as they beat morgoth with 22 arrows of tickling (+1, +0) or whatever. Maybe paladin is just easy and other classes need them for kiting - frankly I just facetanked every unique in an anti-summoning corner.
6) Dispel evil/undead. Is there points to these spells and, well, offensive spells in general (activated breath attacks from artifacts, all the rods/wands of tickling? I mean they made mobs giggle during endgame, which was amusing, but certainly I had no intention of sitting in an undead vault, or any vault, and just spam that spell the fifty times it would take to kill something. Are these spells basically not useful later?
7) I'm not sure if this is how it works already, but I think having temp+perm resistance should make that damage school's inventory effects much less likely to happen. As it happened, I gave up fighting some of the end game uniques (I think I left some wolf and the tarasque), because they were murder to my end-game consumables, and I had no immunity to cold, so I just TOed them and said screw you guys.
8) Too much reliance on speed at end-game. The end game is all about maintaining enough sustained speed, probably 20+, with the ability to self-haste using pots/rods/etc since you simply cannot let a unique double turn you or that could be it, especially morgoth or some of the big breathers. It also seems like the only weapon brands that matter end game are extra attacks, disruption, and maybe holy avenger (although I never found any holy avenger weapon that outclassed my artifacts). You also need to find high damage versions of these, because, and I could be wrong, it appears your blows/round is capped at 5 regardless of how light the weapon is. So once you cap out your stats, you have to start using higher damage, slower weapons since they still cap out at 5.
9) Make townspeople passive. Having them follow you around and having them disturb you during recalls is just annoying.
10) Get rid of black reavers, or whatever they were called. GOD they were annoying :-)
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