Issues on current master

[Nick]

The latest builds on the nightlies page now have

• saving throws and fixes for status effects and
• fixes to the randart generation crash, and the DL99->DL100 crash

So we would like to hear about balance for both the status effects and the randart generation algorithm.

[Sky]

yass!
i can finally into morgoth.

[PowerWyrm]

Looking at the new changes for confuse monster, the duration was changed for "confuse monster" (wand + spells) and "confuse monsters" (staff), but not for other effects using MON_CONF: Totila activation (MON_CONFUSE) + Bedlam spell.

[Gwarl]

The latest builds on the nightlies page now have

• saving throws and fixes for status effects and
• fixes to the randart generation crash, and the DL99->DL100 crash

So we would like to hear about balance for both the status effects and the randart generation algorithm.

Gah I still have a character alive from the last build. I just found two scrolls of deep descent though so I'll see about fixing that

[PowerWyrm]

"Farmer Maggot looks for his dogs. . Farmer Maggot tells you to get off his land.."

Adding damage for melee attacks didn't take into consideration FM's moaning when dealing with punctuation. Similar issue should also happen with Orfax and co's insults.

[Sky]

curses are seen as egos. this leads to a Ring Of The Dog getting sold for 1800 gp in the market (it's normally a 20 gold item).

[Estie]

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=20710

Playing with randarts as always, this is the first character with artifacts that are substantial upgrades to ego items, in about 10 who made it to the lategame.

4 of the 12 slots are better:
- the ring Eriel is basically a ring of damage with some stats
- the Arkenstone is always better due to activation
- the armor with 2 attacks
- the cap Nelch is a hat of telepathy plus seeing + 5 int

In the rest of the slots, the best artifact is either inferior to or of similar level as the ego, and my other characters had either no or maybe 1 useful artifact (apart from the Arkenstone).

This would not be a problem except the point of randarts is making unpredictable items that lead to somewhat interesting choices when combined to the endgame set. As it is, this does not happen

The story of how this has come to pass, in my view, is as follows:

A new distribution by Fizzix led to previously rare egos becoming commonplace, like great weapons of <high ego> or cloaks of the magi. This made vanilla substantially easier. To counter that somewhat, the measure was to (slightly) nerf artifacts - the most powerful items - both the standarts (for example, Sting and Thorin), and, I assume, if the power value was adjusted, also the randarts based on those standarts.
This pushed the artifacts down close to egos in power, only barely held above by the synergies of the standart set. The randarts that lack this synergy are typically below the egos.

Now if the artifacts were to be improved, this would certainly lead to an "easier" game (again) and more powerfull characters. Difficulty is subjective; however, in my opinion it was a bad idea to try to increase it by tinkering with the artifacts only.

If there is to be a meaningfull option to play with items of random properties, I can see various ways to achieve this:

- randomize the egos in some way
- improve the artifacts; this will lead to powerfull characters and an easy game
- nerf the egos and keep the artifacts as is, so you end up using more randarts.

I dont know how difficult vanilla should be and I dont really care all that much, but it would be nice if there was a way to play with random items that lead to a variation in setups. It is the only way I want to play vanilla. Playing ten games to get one where 1/3 of the items are different is not that.

[PowerWyrm]

Sleep monster is a big big mess. There are duration values everywhere in the code and the text files and I don't see any coherence in them. The problem is that these values must match monster "sleepiness", so why not simplify the effect by removing the duration and simply affect the timer depending on that value? The corresponding formula is in place_new_monster_one():

int val = race->sleep;
mon->m_timed[MON_TMD_SLEEP] = ((val * 2) + randint1(val * 10));

This would also foolproof the case where a monster is supposed to be always awake (sleepiness = 0) but lacks the NO_SLEEP flag.

[PowerWyrm]

Looking at the new changes for confuse monster, the duration was changed for "confuse monster" (wand + spells) and "confuse monsters" (staff), but not for other effects using MON_CONF: Totila activation (MON_CONFUSE) + Bedlam spell.

Also for the "wonder" effect (PROJ_MON_CONF).

[Nick]

- nerf the egos and keep the artifacts as is, so you end up using more randarts.

This looks like the best choice to me

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

[Nomad]

- randomize the egos in some way
- nerf the egos and keep the artifacts as is, so you end up using more randarts.

I'm in favour of doing both of these together. Now we've got rune-based ID, what I'd really like is to break the sort of rigid, predictable progression you get of single resist -> Resistance -> Elvenkind -> artefact, etc., and replace all the fixed-trait egos with templates that just specify how many of each random trait they should get. e.g. An armour type that gives one random base resist and one random higher resist; or one with two random higher resists and +1 to a random stat; or a weapon type that gives two random slays and a random ability, etc.

Not sure if we should really have higher-level egos with as many bonuses as Holy Avenger etc. anyway, but even just randomising the existing ones so that instead of guaranteed Slay Evil/Undead/Demon and See Invisible you sometimes get one with Slay Animal/Orc/Dragon and Feather Falling would go a long way to making the really useful ones rarer.

Or maybe you could free it up even further, and just have a list of allowed traits for each slot, and pick completely randomly from those according to the level of the ego. So for instance, for a given slot you might have allowed lists of "good", "great", and "superb" traits. (Say, for an ego helm, "good" might be a bonus to Infravision or Searching, "great" might be See Invisible or pBlind, and "superb" would be ESP.) A level 1 ego would get a single pick from the "good" list. A level 2 ego would get either two picks from the "good" list or a single pick from the "great" list. A level 3 ego might get one "superb" trait, one "great" + one "good" trait, or three "good" traits. Etc.

[Gwarl]

Some of the egos actually predate angband and I'd like them to remain simply for continuity purposes. Personally I feel like most of the higher egos are sadly junk compared to artifacts, to the point where even stuff like HA is usually hardly worth condisering.

I would have ego items start appearing sooner so they get a look in vs artifacts.

[takkaria]

Gah I still have a character alive from the last build. I just found two scrolls of deep descent though so I'll see about fixing that

Savefiles should be compatible between recent dev versions.

[Estie]

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=20713

It seems there is a good chance that rings pick up the "no melee and bad at casting" flag from rings of escaping, which makes even high randart rings all but useless. This should probably not happen, or be reduced to the extent of badly cursed artifacts.

Also I had gauntlets with a curse that gave negative modifier to dexterity; I could remove the curse, but the dex penalty remained.

The phial still looks like dark red *


edit: unbarring ways now works with trapped chests, great!

edit2: or does it ? summoning rune went off this time.

[Derakon]

Some of the egos actually predate angband and I'd like them to remain simply for continuity purposes. Personally I feel like most of the higher egos are sadly junk compared to artifacts, to the point where even stuff like HA is usually hardly worth condisering.

I would have ego items start appearing sooner so they get a look in vs artifacts.

Holy Avenger is an ego weapon with Slay Evil/Undead/Demon, which makes it quite viable in the late game if you get it on a big weapon. It's not that infrequent that you see a winner wielding a Scythe of Slicing (or MoD/BoC) of Slay Evil, especially in randart games. And HA is strictly better than Slay Evil.

The simple fact of the matter is that for weapons, damage is king, and you'll usually find at least one big-damage ego weapon in the game, while randarts are much less reliable. You could "fix" this by restricting the damage output of high-end ego weapons. I believe there's no restrictions currently and indeed that if the game attempts to make an artifact for a weapon type that has no artifacts left (which includes all three of the "big three" weapon types) then it just throws a bunch of +to-hit and +to-dam onto an ego instead.

Something like this:

while (ego weapon fails to pass a check to allow it to be more powerful than intended) {
  weapon to-dam is decreased by 1;
}

should do the trick.