Armour Classification

[petefj]

As a newbie I am puzzled at the negative classification that precedes some armour descriptions.

Why exactly (-1#) or similar. It does seem odd to offer an armour, describe its hit and magic ratings, and then to stick this in front.

Is there any way of removing this? I notice, certainly at the early levels, that most armour are so described.

petefj

[wobbly]

Do you mean this (-1) [6+0]? That's a -1 to the players melee accuracy. You can pretty much just ignore it, it's not enough to make a noticeable difference.

[Sky]

The values that you see are:
Penalty (tohit,todamage)
Armor class [basevalue,magicbonus]

Heavy armor is clunky and it makes fighting difficult. A mithril plate (-2,-2) [60,+24] <+5> means it has -2 to hit and damage, 60 base plus 24 magic for a total of 84 armor class, and a +5 bonus to a stat (you need to read the description to see what stat.

Some armors can give bonuses to combat .. same thing.

[Derakon]

You can tell what a number means by what shape the parentheses/brackets are. It's

(to-hit modifier, to-damage modifier) [base AC, AC modifier] <stat modifiers>

Where "stat modifiers" include STR/DEX/CON/INT/WIS, but also stuff like speed, searching, stealth, light radius, infravision, etc. You can 'I'nspect the item to get an explicit list of stat modifiers.

[bio_hazard]

Any reason not to change armor info to (-1, +0) to make this more consistent with other items? Although I suppose it would be weird if you got a randart or something that offered a magical melee bonus.

[garden]

Can I second petefj's proposal.

I have been playing Angband (and its predecessors) for 30 years, and I never knew the significance of Augmented Chain Mail (-2) until today, when I discovered this post by Googling 'angband armour negative modifier' (it's the top hit).

Apologies if this is considered necroposting. But when the Google search result has become entrenched this way, you know it's a common query.

[DavidMedley]

Could add what the negative means on Inspection screen. I didn't know that it has no effect on ranged. Seems like it should affect stealth as well.