I want more hitpoints

[Pete Mack]

I used to hate V mage. But after I started extreme diving with it, it turns out to be a seriously fun class. I play almost exclusively High-Elf because it forces me to do extreme things for EXP...and it lets me cruise past 1700' without worrying about See Invisible. It's the one thing a character really needs to dive, because of passwall monsters and the high cost of the full detect spell. I also find worrying about strength to be seriously tedious.

I haven't played vanilla in years, but you people are making me want to try a mage.

[debo]

I haven't played vanilla in years, but you people are making me want to try a mage.

[Pete Mack]

Orfax, not Boldor. Orfax has only 120 HP, so it only takes ~4 cold bolts to do him in. His entourage included only 1 master yeek. I agree is a genuine threat. I managed to isolate Orfax at the end of a long hallway. Picked his entourage off by standing exactly 21 squares from sleeping Boldor. He only got 3 turns awake.

[kandrc]

I killed Orfax with a few cold bolts, after zapping his entourage with lightning bolt.

CL 11 is my magic number to take on Wormtongue without Wand of Wonder. With WoW (or a lucky launcher/ammo find), I'll take him on every time, and I've managed to kill him as early as about CL 4.

Orfax, on the other hand, I consider much more dangerous. With teleport to, confuse, slow, summoning, and an entourage that usually includes master yeeks (who do much the same thing, en mass, plus poison), I don't have a magic number, but it's probably more like CL 15, maybe 17 before I'll face him, and it depends on whom he's with.

These levels are with a mage. Other classes, other tactics.

[Pete Mack]

Sky: Here's an example. I used NO l33t skillz. I just bought MB1, MB2, an extra torch, a few !oil and 1 !hero* or emergencies, 1 ?Recall, and a few !CLW and a good stack of ?Phase. (I used extra money/no equipment birth option.) Got lucky with ?Deep Descent at 100' or 150'. When I hit 400', I detected a red icky thing, then went and killed it. Bingo! CL 4 and 5. Total kills at CL 11, 650' High-Elf mage: 72, or 6.5 kills/level. This is *easy* to do. It took 5000 player turns, about 15 minutes of gameplay. I need to dive more because I'm running out of sufficiently high-EXP low-HP monsters. Reached CL 11 on a dark-elf priest. (Dark elves are great targets for EXP, except for Dark Elf Lord and Sorceror, who can kill you too fast.)

* A stack of oil and a single buffing potion or scroll make a huge difference for low level mages and priests. It lets you fight a single low level tough monster (e.g. Bullroarer) as if you were a ranger, and lets you level up to where you can use lightning bolt or cold bolt. I killed Orfax with a few cold bolts, after zapping his entourage with lightning bolt.

[Pete Mack]

Would a list of dangers together with example monsters help? I assume the passwall mob is dreads, and yes they'd be bad news OOD at dl 25 (they're native to dl 35.) But they are incredibly rare much out of depth: Vaults are very uncommon below dl 30, and you have to be very unlucky to get dreads as one of the monsters. It's not a case that's worth worrying about, since the odds of it happening are near zero; much lower than other risks:

Here's a partial list
Paralysis: Homunculus is minor risk at dl 15. By dl 25, there are a number of monsters to watch for (Gorgimaera, carrion crawler, ghoul. Ghast, Basilisk, and trapper come soon after.) You van avoid most of these by disciplined detection. The only two that have ever got me past detection are trapper (really easy to miss) and carrion crawler (thought it was an orc Captain.) Of course, I lost a number of characters to sloppy play before getting the hang of diving.
SI: At dl 35, dreads are native. At that point, SI becomes very important, especially if you can't detect them and avoid them. ESP makes a good substitute with only a very few
exceptions.
PASSWALL: Ghosts coming out of nowhere are dangerous starting with dread. After that, ethereal dragon an death drake are very bad news. Ethereal dragon can get you with confusion attack making escape problematic. They also breathe for big damage.

Note that orange, pale green, light blue, and pink monsters all tend to be more dangerous than others. Shimmering monsters too. Of course this isn't reliable, but it's useful as a quick check.
Poison: Dl 40-45 First big poisoners are Ancient green dragon (280HP) AMHD (lots) drolem (lots). Greater basilisk and Deadly Horror do significant damage too. Drolem is the worst: Cold blooded, invisible to ESP, non-evil. Fortunately, it is quite rare, so you can usually survive for a while without coming across one. At this point, light rods start to be useful in hallways without ESP and/or full detection.
I don't usually use =rPois except as a swap. It's a nice thing to have, but you can survive without it if you are careful, especially as a mage spellcaster.

[kandrc]

You keep harping on this ring of damage. The ring choice wasn't the mistake. Insufficient paranoia was. The ring may have been the right choice. It was probably the right choice.

As for =poison resist, in nearly 25 years of play, I don't recall ever having used one. You don't need poison resist. Just don't get breathed at; it's not that hard.

And =see invisible? I rarely use them. Most of the dangerous invisible monsters are evil. It's not strictly needed as long as you have MB3, PB1, or staff of detect evil.

Ring slots are far too valuable to waste on things like these, even in the early game. Get them in another slot, or do without.

98% of my deaths are due to carelessness. The death that you've described here was also due to carelessness.

[Sky]

i mean casual.

see, I KNOW i made a mistake. i'm still here, no? i understand that no SI and not paying attention to what i was seeing is the issue, bit of a shame the game gave me two OOD rings of damage (one +9, one +14) and i swapped.

but the reason that caught me will invariably catch many other players too.

1) the room LOOKS EMPTY. this visual clue is much stronger than a small "it hits you" message that quickly flashes at the edge of the screen, and which you see thousands of every hour of play, with almost all of them being irrelevant.
(this is perhaps angbands greatest fault and something which could be addressed in a potential UI redesign in V 5.0)
the game is being a bit of a bastard putting a single defenceless mob as bait while having a very powerful death drake which is otherwise hidden.
And this happens in other situations as well. Imagine long empty corridor, it's just natural to hold down the walk button, and yet that can mean death before you have a chance to react. Some aspects of the play mechanics cannot be changed as they are, intrinsically, the game, but some other can, for example have a box (not one that gets covered when the game is fullsized, as everyone without a HUGE screen or two would do) that flashed AND HOLDS important messages for a while, prossibly in BRIGHT YELLOW OR RED.

2) the choice of ring of damage +14 over ring of see invisible should easily be to go with damage, as it doubles the player's output of DPS.
Again, *i* understand that angband is the opposite of this, but it's maybe the only game that gives more importance to minor things over major; the definition of "minor" and "major" is debatable, but if you look at, shall we say, the competition, they do tend to go one way instead of the other.

all the observations you have made are correct, and frankly i'm not beating myself up about that death (unlike my CL45 death to plasma hounds after finding Feanor), but none of those "lessons" are evident from general play. they only become evident after prolonged gaming, and i would add "with forum advice" too.

This is why someone exposed to angband but without the help of years and years of wisdom of experienced players, will simply fall again and again to the same traps.
Oh you died to a stupid death!
Yes but i had good reasons NOT to go with (ring of rPois, ring of SI, ring of FA, whatever) because i had THIS BIG ASS WEAPON.

I agree that the kids of today thing that complex games are dumb and we should not encourage that, but we can make tiny adjustments that help the stupid or unlucky, me included, such as my proposal to not allow exceptionally low hp scores for the first 3 levelups.

Gwarl, for example, says i have nothing but myself to blame. Yes, except the OOD passwall invisible overpowered mob that i can only escape with 1) teleport staff (or fail at 50% cast rate) 2) specific knowledge of WHAT is hitting me 3) enough paranoia to NOT "see a mob in an empty room, assume i can kill it".
One would argue that the variance of possibilities in angband is excessive. But me, and you, have the knowledge of what that means, most casual and sadly (to answer your previous question) new players will not, and just conclude that angband "is dumb".

Egavctip says that angband is a ninja game in disguise of a hack n slash. True, and i would say that the disguise is excellent, so much so that it would fool everyone.





Again, angband is hard for, i agree, good reasons. Marketing it is not the right choice of words, rather, i would say "popularize it". Instead of removing passwall invisible drakes OOD, make it more obvious that you are being hit by something invisible. Make it so that there's no unnecessary struggling at low levels because of a couple unlucky rolls. Tweak out the little niggles to make it into a game where the game experience is smoother and less puzzling to the those who do not have tons of experience.

(difficulty modes can always be added, for those who want to bonk Morgoth on the head with a store-bought shovel ...)

[Derakon]

Im going to go through the objections one by one when im at my pc, instead of my phone, but the argument is not "a good angband player would have thougth of that", but rather how the game messes with casual players.

Did you mean "new" instead of "casual"? Because there's a big difference, and I would argue that Angband is not really a game for casual players; it's too unforgiving of mistakes.

Additionally, could you please give your opinion on this statement? "Angband is a game in which you are expected to die many times, but in general each time make it a bit further than the last time because of what you learned from the previous character."

[Sky]

Im going to go through the objections one by one when im at my pc, instead of my phone, but the argument is not "a good angband player would have thougth of that", but rather how the game messes with casual players.

[Pete Mack]

Ethereal Dragon or Death Drake. Both are invisible and go through walls ethereal hits to confuse and breathes darkness/light for 350HP. Death Drake breathes nether for 350 and hits for experience drain. The Ethereal dragon in particular is very bad news. Detect evil or higher level detect monsters would have found it. By DL 35, Dreads are native, and you absolutely must either detect them or have SI or ESP. They are lethal otherwise.

I would think that getting drained by G at lower levels would be enough to convince you to use SI by DL 30, unless you are diving very aggressively using stealth, detection, and avoidance.

[kandrc]

everyone and their dog knows Dwarf Fortress, Pixel Dungeon, FTL, Darkest Dungeon, or even Dark Souls.

Dwarf Fortress is the only one of these that I've ever heard of.

We no longer live in the 90s. people no longer like to nerd out to games demanding a complex understanding of hidden rules,

I'll give you that we no longer live in the 90s, but nobody wants nerdy complex games? Says who? In the 80s and 90s, games were hard. Some of us (most of us here) liked it that way, and lament the watering-down of games that was necessary for them to be marketable to the mainstream. Nobody's trying to market Angband. We don't have to coddle. You're welcome to fork the game. You can add potions of 1-up to the temple.

There are a number of interviews of early authors/maintainers available online. I tried (not very hard) to track one down where it talks about what they did when somebody won in the early days; they talked to the winner, found out what he (it was always a "he") did, and modified the game so that it couldn't be won that way again. The game was designed, from the beginning, to be nigh unwinnable. That's good game design!

There's only one invisible dragon in the game, the Ethereal Dragon, native to DL 45. It was 12 levels out-of-depth, which means there was a vault nearby. It's also pretty hard to wake up, which means that you had bad stealth and spent many turns within 20 squares of that vault. And you never detected it. And you woke up a bunch of other baddies before you woke that dragon. If the dragon hadn't been there, one of those other things would have killed you instead. The only reason it was the dragon was that ethereal dragons pass through walls and have speed +10, but it's pretty clear that your tombstone was already engraved.

It's pretty cool that you already had resist confusion at 1650', though.

EDIT: As Pete Mack points out below, there are two invisible dragons. I forgot the Death Drake. Same MO. Same issues. Same damage. But maybe you didn't have resist confusion after all.

[Pete Mack]

One reason we recommend diving faster is because losing a character at dl 40 is much less painful if it only took an hour of play to reach it.

Finally, there are user's guides for Angband around, with information that includes things like when FA/SI/rPois become nice to have, and when it becomes a real risk to do without unless you are playing a very careful game. And yes, it's quite possible to use them as swaps, so long as you remember to put them on when you need them. (From your death to an invisible dragon, you may conclude that you need SI almost all the time, except against selected dangerous enemies.)

[Egavactip]

Sky, I was sympathetic to you (as I believe some classes need a hit point floor for the first couple of levels) until your last message. Addressing your last message only, and none of your earlier ones, trotting out other games to throw at Angband is, well, stupid. Angband has lasted for decades--it is not an unsuccessful game. The problem is that you have played some other games and you think that Angband should play like those other games. But the key to understanding Angband is that it is *not* a hack and slash dungeon crawl game. It is a stealth and ninja game in the *guise* of a hack and slash dungeon crawl game. The lesson that repeated play of Angband teaches is that brute force--even for fighter types--cannot win the game for you. You will always need to know when to run away, when to avoid a fight. Sometimes the only way to win an encounter is not to have had it in the first place. Angband is designed this way. Just when you think you have gotten enough gear to be safe and you start getting cocky, the next tier of Angband nasties rises up to meet you and to show you that you have zero reason to be cocky. There are some circumstances even my most powerful characters ever will still simply avoid.

So, yes, contrary to what some other people have said here, super bad luck with hit points can indeed affect you in the early or even mid game (that's when I find it the most problematic). But even though that is the case, it only happens once in a while, not enough to unbalance the game. Most of the time, once you find your Angband groove, you can get by just by getting by. I hope you achieve that level of groovitude and can enjoy the game the way most veterans do.

[Gwarl]

jesus derakon, talking with you is like hitting my head against a brick wall.

When everyone else is telling you the sky is blue, but you keep insisting it's green, it's possible that you're the one who's colourblind.

nothing.

Then you only have yourself to blame for making the same mistake again.

Angband requires counterintuitive playing. As such, it doesn't take off, while everyone and their dog knows Dwarf Fortress, Pixel Dungeon, FTL, Darkest Dungeon, or even Dark Souls.

Angband has been going strong for over 25 years. Sure, it's not a huge buzz, but there are a steady trickle of players, who come and go, and it's not going anywhere. Where's Diablo on your list? Most of these games will be a flash in the pan compared to Angband. (Dwarf fortress isn't going anywhere either, but I'm not convinced people actually play it so much as mention it because they're hipsters).

New players, even those who try hard, will simply not come to the realization that a ring of see invisible is a better choice than a OBVIOUSLY MASSIVE INCREASE IN DAMAGE. They will not think "i have learned that status variants such as rPois and pConf are more important than damage output" but rather they will think "the game killed me this is a stupid game".

A ring of see invisible isn't a better choice. It's useful in situations in which you need to see the invisible. You only need one method of seeing invisible - potions work for example. Carry those and you can ignore the ring. There's nothing at all counterintuitive about this. I'd go so far as to say it makes perfect sense.

We no longer live in the 90s. people no longer like to nerd out to games demanding a complex understanding of hidden rules, but rather they want to play the game and make it up as they go along, which is the reason why games like Unreal Tournament have failed and games like Halo and CoD are multimillion dollar franchises.
And you genuinely advise that "the only way to play V is through a series of obscure rules which no sane player will discover on their own unless they band their head against the wall until it bleeds .. or join the forums and get the spoilers from us, and even then it's not guaranteed".

We like to nerd out to games demanding a complex understanding of (actually very comprehensively explained and well detailed) rules. We like this game a lot more than we like CoD. Trying to turn angband into CoD wouldn't get us CoD players and even if it did why would we want that? Certainly not worth sacrificing the game we enjoy to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I would prefer braindead mainstream gaming getting a little more punishing and difficult, rather than the few games we have that are punishing and difficult getting toned down.

In game design, you will always have to choose between depth and playability. Agband sure has a ton of depth, but very, very little playability. There is no moment where you can say oh, im way over my DL minimum, i'll just kill these orcs, because you will lose invariably to one of the thousand variables which are impossible to learn in a short .. reasonable amount of gametime.

I honestly have no idea what you're saying here

But, when you have a sword that does 12 damage, and you find a sword that does 16 damage, you can say "oh good, now i do 4 more damage".
In Angband, the same would result in the player coming to the forums and everyone telling them "idiot, everyone knows the 12 damage sword is SO MUCH BETTER than the 16 damage one, and you would know too if you have observed a small line of text that appeared when you killed the 74th mob of a specific type under some particular light conditions".

No, 16 damage is still better than 12 damage in angband. The problem with angband IMO is that it has a habit of giving you a 100 damage dagger right away allowing you to basically skip the first 20 floors.

there's plenty of people here on these forums. have them all take 1 friend and make them play V without help. Set a number of new players they can have. Then count at what DL they died.

You like statistics, right? Let's see what portion of the game content remains unexplored to an average angband player.

I already did mine. the guy died in town.

Actually I remember now.. that DL27 death was my 2nd character, the first one did indeed die to a battle scarred veteran in the town. But I learned from that. My 3rd character got 1-shotted by an ancient green dragon on DL38. Took me a while to learn to handle ancient dragons.

You seem so completely opposed to everything angband is about.. can I ask what does appeal to you about the game?