Class/magic feature branch

[Pete Mack]

Minor note: thancs had been 2d4 (+4,+6) for as long as i can remember, until the bonuses were doubled, but enchantment scrolls were removed from the stores. (+6,+8) or so would be about the right compromise to make up for eliminating easy enchantment.

[Derakon]

While on the subject, would it be worth rethinking the enchantment bonuses on weapons? At present, +10ish damage starts appearing very early in the dungeon, especially on artifacts. The base weapon damage almost gets lost in the calculation (except with brands), because the extra bonus from the enchantment and the melee bonus from high Str tend to be far greater.

The old "v4" variant was very revealing on this front. It separated +hit, +dam, and +AC from ego attributes, so you could find e.g. a (+0,+0) Flaming weapon. This made it blatantly obvious that the most valuable property of an early weapon is its +dam.

I would not at all be opposed to making it so that "ego" does not necessarily imply "good" in the early game. A flaming dagger (+0,+0) is still a decent weapon since it does 3*1d4 damage per blow against most enemies, but it's strictly worse than a dagger (+0,+8) and often worse than a dagger (+0,+4).

(While we're at it, let's nuke the *thancs back to 1d4 (+4,+6); currently they are ridiculously way too good)

[Voovus]

Regarding the blows, seems odd to redo them and not fix the dagger issue. I mean if you aren't doing a major change and rebalance it doesn't matter but once you are you may as well fix some problems rather then just changing it to change it.

While on the subject, would it be worth rethinking the enchantment bonuses on weapons? At present, +10ish damage starts appearing very early in the dungeon, especially on artifacts. The base weapon damage almost gets lost in the calculation (except with brands), because the extra bonus from the enchantment and the melee bonus from high Str tend to be far greater.

[Carnivean]

Or we could increase the penalty for having a weapon that's too heavy to be wielded effectively with a given strength

This makes the most intuitive sense to me. Heavy weapons are going to be less effective for weak characters because they are too hard to wield properly.

Perhaps the answer lies with accuracy based damage? We already have critical hits that do more damage. Why not have shitty hits do less damage? A character that spends their time training with a weapon (or weapons in general) is going to do a better quality of strike with a given weapon, and the difference between a glancing blow or a low momentum blow and a high quality blow is going to be big in real life.

[luneya]

Heh, well, fair enough. I'll freely admit to not having done a broad survey on this topic.

The dagger issue can be fixed separately, assuming it needs to be fixed. It's a little weird, sure, but I actually kind of like the progression it creates where gradually bigger and bigger weapons become viable to wield.

That said, the fact that large weapons are de facto junk in the early game, and especially the fact that weak melee characters want big weapons while strong characters want small ones, are both suboptimal.

Yes, exactly. I agree that it's good having a progression from light weapons to heavy ones as your character gets stronger, but the situation of characters that don't get a second blow even with a dagger or whip breaks the model. Perhaps the best solution is to shift the formula so that every character--even a mage with minimum str--gets two blows with a minimum-weight weapon, and then blows increase as the player gets stronger (possibly increasing more for melee classes), and decrease with weapon weight. Or we could increase the penalty for having a weapon that's too heavy to be wielded effectively with a given strength, but tweaking the blows formula will probably work better, and we can always strengthen other damage sources and monster hps to compensate if the adjusted formulae make melee stronger across the board.

[wobbly]

Ok so currently it's kinda adjusted str * class / weight across 12 bands of dex with moving a dex band shifting you up 1 str category. the numbers hold along a diagonal in the table. Close to anyway

Edit: Ok I get what that is trying to do now. I'll shuffle it off to it's own thread once I've looked at it a bit more.

Edit: Wow. That table is starting to make a huge amount of sense for a game with high str to dex variance (like say dice rolled stats) & an integer no. of blows.

[wobbly]

It would certainly be more convenient for some stuff if every class is using the same blows calculation. If I want to re-calibrate to use weapon weights closer to something like Sil this is easy for a single class. The minimum weight for the mage calculation is 4lbs (I'm looking at 4.1.2) or 1 rapier weight. The weight is a straight divisor (of adj_str_blow[]). So perhaps if you hold the ratio of weight to the rapier the same, then you can hold the balance. Then the other classes have different minimum weights and it complicates matters. Maybe a bit, maybe a lot, I haven't done the maths.

Edit: So currently nothing in the 3-9 or 10-17 range of dex matters? or the 7-15 str range? Not sure I like how it is currently at all. hmm...
Edit 2: Was looking at the wrong numbers for str. It changes all along the range
Edit 3: Str is linear up to 17. Then increases 10/weight per /10 increase after 18 str?
Edit zillion: dex (starting at 3) is 7 zeros,7 1s, then 3,2,2,2,2,2,3,3,2,3 (the last is 3 11s)

[Derakon]

Well I don't know about the 50% business but for the rest you're obviously not looking far. Crawl has sword n board vs 2-handers, sil has it, PCB has 2-hander, sword n board & 2-weapon. PCB has the opposite problem for most classes(the damage sucks due to accuracy). Saying it can't be done 'cause too much damage when there's a clear case of the opposite... (after all that, I actually don't like 2-weapons either).

Heh, well, fair enough. I'll freely admit to not having done a broad survey on this topic.

The dagger issue can be fixed separately, assuming it needs to be fixed. It's a little weird, sure, but I actually kind of like the progression it creates where gradually bigger and bigger weapons become viable to wield.

That said, the fact that large weapons are de facto junk in the early game, and especially the fact that weak melee characters want big weapons while strong characters want small ones, are both suboptimal.

[wobbly]

Regarding the blows, seems odd to redo them and not fix the dagger issue. I mean if you aren't doing a major change and rebalance it doesn't matter but once you are you may as well fix some problems rather then just changing it to change it. Over the years I've got the impression people think this means O-combat which they don't like. PCB is however vanilla combat. Chris simply fixed the problematic part of the range.

[wobbly]

Well I don't know about the 50% business but for the rest you're obviously not looking far. Crawl has sword n board vs 2-handers, sil has it, PCB has 2-hander, sword n board & 2-weapon. PCB has the opposite problem for most classes(the damage sucks due to accuracy). Saying it can't be done 'cause too much damage when there's a clear case of the opposite... (after all that, I actually don't like 2-weapons either).

[Derakon]

Does it work better when you have to choose between a second weapon and a shield? Especially if you start making AC more relevant.

I have never seen a game where a shield was worth more than increasing your damage output by 50% or more. Plenty have tried, none have succeeded.

If you cut blows by one,
1. what does it do to +blows weapons?
2. Multiplier may need adjusting, since full casters are already pretty strongly penalized here.

1. I guess +blows would need to apply after the -1 blow from being a pure caster.
2. Multiplier would be the same for all characters, just where the formula outputs 3 a pure caster would get 2 and a warrior (once high-enough level) would get 4.

[Pete Mack]

If you cut blows by one,
1. what does it do to +blows weapons?
2. Multiplier may need adjusting, since full casters are already pretty strongly penalized here.

[Huqhox]

To reiterate a suggestion I made awhile back: give everyone the same blows formula, but penalize mages and priests 1 blow (to a minimum of 1/round), and give warriors a flat +1 blow starting from level 20 or 25 or something. Thus the pure casters would need to work extra hard to get their second blow/round since they'd have to get to where the formula is outputting 3 blows; meanwhile, warriors get max blows as easily as everyone else does, their max is just better.

This sounds good to me

[Carnivean]

I've always found dual-wielding to be pretty silly, so personally I would prefer some other means of differentiation. Plus, the game gets awfully easy once you're dealing more than a certain percentage of your enemies' HP in damage per turn, so boosting offense is something to be done with care.

Does it work better when you have to choose between a second weapon and a shield? Especially if you start making AC more relevant.

[Derakon]

At the very least, bring back the extra attack (and reduce max blows to 5.) The 6th blow is currently a mirage for HT and Dwarf, and isn't easy to get with many endgame weapons for other races.

To reiterate a suggestion I made awhile back: give everyone the same blows formula, but penalize mages and priests 1 blow (to a minimum of 1/round), and give warriors a flat +1 blow starting from level 20 or 25 or something. Thus the pure casters would need to work extra hard to get their second blow/round since they'd have to get to where the formula is outputting 3 blows; meanwhile, warriors get max blows as easily as everyone else does, their max is just better.