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Build page now has builds with this most recent bug fixed. I think.
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One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. -
necromant
I took a peek at the necromant spells.
This is an incredible piece of creativity, atmospheric dense AND totally useless and destroying this game.
The necromant is something like a 'dark' druid with his shape changes. Very sadly i can only resume this changes are unprofessional made, not conforming to a certain goal and ruining this great game.
You are not maintaining Angband Nick, you are creating Nickband. That is a hell of a difference in my eyes.Blondes are more fun!Comment
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It's fine to disagree with what Nick is doing. This work is being done in a branch, which is effectively a mini-variant -- it won't be incorporated into Vanilla until and unless it can be accepted by enough players as being a good, positive change. So now is definitely the time to weigh in and let your voice be heard.
But please, be more diplomatic. There's no reason to call Nick unprofessional or say he's destroying the game. That kind of hyperbole is not required to help us understand how strongly you feel about the subject; its only effective purpose is to hurt peoples' feelings.
Nick is giving his time and considerable expertise to us completely free of charge, and he does a hell of a lot more than just this branch -- he fixes a lot of bugs and has made massive improvements to the codebase. We want to keep him around! So I'm not just getting offended on his behalf here; I'm trying to convince you to not try to kick our maintainer out!Comment
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+1 to everything Derakon said regarding Nick and all he does for the game.
“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadComment
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I haven't had a chance to play this branch, but I've liked what I've read so far. I'm definitely looking forward to the changes to the magic realms character classes and I think Nick is doing a great job.Comment
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Burn, burn, burn it all down! Honestly Tibarius's comments are making me curious enough that I'll probably take a look soon. Nickband sounds kinda interesting. It's been a bit since vanilla gained something new playwise.Comment
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I went to the builds page, and i see the latest osx build is Angband-osx-4.1.2-10-g54cf322.dmg, which has the "new Mage" class but not the necromancer. is that the most recent one I should try?Comment
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No, you want the one with the highest number after 4.1.2, which is Angband-osx-4.1.2-93-gbf7df0a.dmg.
This one will always be close to the top, but we have been having some issues with our autobuild (we suspect it's some webcrawler pushing the build button at random) which is resulting in extra builds appearing.One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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Using that recent version you pointed out and I just found a rod of Illumination. In the description it says "When activated, it lights up the surrounding area and fires a ball of with radius 2, dealing 2d8 at the centre, which your device skill increases by 52 percent."
It doesn't appear to fire a ball of " ", it just lights up the area.Comment
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New builds up on the build page (Windows, MacOS).
The main (only?) noticeable change is that the Command spell now works almost as intended. Once a monster is commanded it can be made to move or stand still (using the direction keys), drop a random item ('d') or cast a random spell ('m', requires a monster target).
Currently if you try to move into another monster it just fails; I am planning to have the commanded monster able to melee other monsters. It's possible that spellcasting should be generalised to targeting arbitrary directions as well (although that doesn't make sense for some spells), and targeting the player.One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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This seems to have gone very quiet. Nick, here are some comments on the Druid and the Necromancer. I completed the game once with each. Feel free to ignore the suggestions - I don't know whether you find "it moans" (without suggestions) or "it messes with your mind" (with suggestions) more annoying. And apologies for the length...
The druid was a lot of fun. I played before the removal of +5speed to the fox, so these comments may be out of date. I spent 99% of the time in fox form, and biting Morgoth's head off as a fox is perhaps a little silly. But if you're planning to nerf the fox, please strengthen the bear correspondingly (and maybe put it at the start of book 2?), as the fox had roughly the appropriate strength for a melee character. The "+1 attack/round" is also an interesting dynamic, as it makes heavy weapons useful in the early game that you'd never use otherwise. And Glaive of Pain was great! In fact, a "+2 attack/round" (say, for the bear) could make the melee-based druid feel even more different from warrior & the usual gang. What would also have been very convenient is if one could drop and pick up items while shapeshifted.
The necromancer seems to need quite a lot more work, I'm afraid.
Darkness: I really like the idea, and the different feel it gives to the character from the rest. However, the tiny vision radius is frustrating, and as soon as I found the Phial I immediately switched to using a light source and spamming light area with the phial or a rod. Any chance of increasing the Nec's sight radius in darkness to, say, 2 base + 1 per 5 levels, i.e. 2 at the start and 12 at the end? A bonus of +4 Con in darkness, instead of +3 Stealth, would also be a much better incentive not to use a light source, especially for high level characters, since the difference between 18/160 and 18/200 Con is massive. Equivalently, it could be a -4Con penalty in light. This would also make the Nec vulnurable to creatures that have a light radius, like druids, priests, paladins, the ainur and fire-based monsters.
Disenchant: this is effectively the Nec's Orb of Draining, and I spent most of the game throwing it at everything in sight. Virtually nothing resists it, Annihilation is only 50% more powerful but costs 3 times as much and doesn't even affect everyone, Unleash Chaos has nasty side effects (waking everyone and possibly polymorphing something into a time vortex, gravity hound, shrieker mushroom patch etc). The de-magicising effect is a nice touch and a nice bonus. I found Storm of Darkness also fairly decent.
Curse: tried a few times, but didn't find it powerful enough to justify the hp cost. How much damage is it actually meant to do?
Vampire form: nice idea, but I found it impractical. There are too many creatures out there that can take off >400hp without first asking you for permission, so the 50% life cost is a possible suicide.
Undead: in the early game, undead are some of the most dangerous opponents for the Nec, which seems silly. The problem is that they are immune to Nether Bolt, some are immune to Sleep Evil, and the Banish Undead spell doesn't teleport them nearly far enough for the mana cost. I'd suggest the rather extreme solution to make Banish Undead actually banish them, "Banishment"-style. It would mean that the Nec would never have to fight non-unique undead, which would make the class much more special... and make the Nec the only one happy to see graveyards.
Bat Form: the +3 speed often gets effectively lost due to overweight caused by the loss of strength.
Noxious Fumes: found it too weak to be useful. Kobolds are immune to it, and orcs are too strong.
Shadow shift: is this in every way worse than phase door, or have I missed something?
Dispel Life: nice to get rid of hordes of nonsense in the late game, but has too high fail rate early on to be a proper battle spell. I played with max possible starting Int (18/50), but even so couldn't sensibly use it before raising Int a couple of times.
Warg form: Nec is very bad at melee, and the temporary berserk boost isn't sufficient to fix it. But then, maybe my character was just too magic oriented.
Crush: Um. No disrespect, but when running around 4000 feet down in Angband, my Nec would like to instantly get rid of ancient dragons, not metallic centipedes...
Power Sacrifice: nice spell. No complaints!
...And so this 26-year old hobbit kid, with wavy brown hair, decided to go off and become a necromancer, learning to dispel life, turn into a vampire and spread darkness. "You are a credit to your family" ?!?!Comment
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