Class penalties/restrictions that make sense

[Pete Mack]

Um. If you make such a massive change, it's surely 5.0-beta?

[Sky]

Nick, i respect the work you put in the game, but i got to say, was there something wrong with 4.1 ?
It's mostly bug-free, balanced if-not for the endgame once you get to be super-OP but hey, every game has an endgame. It plays well, runs on everything, and it's fun. I would totally recommend 4.1 as the ultimate Angband.

You made some changes that are more than welcome, you got rid of Too Much Junk, solved crippling curses, and stopped the +25 speed ring festival. It's perfect, so why change it?

I know what you want to do, make a class-based game. That's all good and well but maybe it should not be Angband?
We just wanted a little nerf on the ranger shot DPS ... not a rework of everything.

In this game, class is almost irrelevant once you get to a decent CL. If you want to have it the other way around, then it becomes a variant, not vanilla.

I mean, dont get me wrong, i think you got some nice ideas, for another game.
Now you get rid of acid bolt, and you got a fast mob that wrecks in melee and can only be damaged by acid .. well duh i need my acid bolt. I cant every round 1phase 1acidspray with 50 mana, and other examples that force you into a monsters and AI redesign.

Just ... mantain Angband. And work on NewAngband which im sure will be supercool, with no hunger, where the rogue can only rogue, the priest can only use left-handed blessed maces forged in June under a new moon, and the mage just stair scums .. ok im sorry i got a little carried away and do not want to go the passive-aggressive route.

Im perplexed as to WHY. And as Gordon Ramsay says, "know when to stop".
The game is perfect now, it doesnt need any new mechanics.

[Philip]

Every version is always (was always) the ultimate Angband. Frog-knows was the ultimate Angband. It's also basically unplayable now. Oangband 1.1.0(u) was the greatest version of Angband. It's still a great model for changes, but it's needlessly frustrating, the UI is terrible, and there's a bunch of bugs. Time marches on.

If class is irrelevant once you hit a decent CL, then why bother having classes? The fact that every character plays the same and wears the same stuff after a while is clearly and obviously a flaw in the game. It makes a player think "well, I've won once, but that's basically proof I can win with any class" which is not a way you want the player to think. It makes class a curiosity for new players to deal with until they learn how to get to clvl 40, which is currently about a couple weeks or so, from what I can tell.

I do find the statement that it is balanced interesting. What does that actually mean? Does it mean the classes all have comparable difficulty? That you die at the right rate? That there is some metric the player can follow and know what proportion of monsters they will be able to fight?

That said, you are free to fork Vanilla at 4.1, and then only take in UI improvements.

[Pete Mack]

Um. What? No, mages don't wear the same as warriors, not even close. Yeah, every class will wear Feanor or Thorin, but that says nothing about the class: those are just phenomenal artifacts. (And a warrior might well pick Haradrjm (+5,+5) <+2> instead.)

[Estie]

I take blame for my last post in this thread. It was born of anger and frustration.

That being said, I really dont like where this has gone, and exactly because I was supportive and engaged I now feel like in a nightmare. It will pass.

[Sky]

If class is irrelevant once you hit a decent CL, then why bother having classes? The fact that every character plays the same and wears the same stuff after a while is clearly and obviously a flaw in the game.

I profoundly disagree with this. Every class has its own way to get to the endgame, every class has minor differences, but as a player you have the entire spectrum of options regardless of what class you start as. This isnt a flaw, but rather is the core of the game. Changing it to where a class cannot phase or cannot TO is not angband. You would be arbitrarily remove some tactical options to each class so that they simply cannot approach practically a problem with a common solution.
For example:

Mages have bad melee, but a CL20 mage can still melee some orcs.
New problem: nerf mage weapons and armor so even that is impossible.
New solution: make mage spells even more powerful at higher levels, make advancement even slower.

This isnt an improvement, but the equivalent of forcing everyone to play kobold ironman - take away the option of a better race and recall; you removed the melee option from the player because "other classes melee too".

My warriors cant cast Rift. My rogue cant clear graveyards and my mages sure dont grind balrog pits for xp. But they can all have 230 AC if they want to, they can all wield Calris, heck you can even wear Gorlim as a mage, i dont care. But the choice of class appropriate gear is made through the benefits of the game mechanics, not through the necessity of having different play experiences.

TLDR

Having 100 options is good. Dividing them into block of 20 and calling them "class" is not good.

[bunnies]

Just ... Mantain angband. And work on newangband which im sure will be supercool, with no hunger, where the rogue can only rogue, the priest can only use left-handed blessed maces forged in june under a new moon, and the mage just stair scums .. Ok im sorry i got a little carried away and do not want to go the passive-aggressive route.

I disagree. The only reason why I came back and became engaged was because the game evolved into 4.x, which I enjoyed much more than previous versions. If the game is on maintenance mode and doesn't evolve, it will stagnate and eventually die.

That said, I agree that the class feature branch is quite a drastic departure from Vanilla. Which is why I advocate making smaller incremental changes, getting everyone settled in, before eventually adding new mechanics if desired.

i profoundly disagree with this. Every class has its own way to get to the endgame, every class has minor differences, but as a player you have the entire spectrum of options regardless of what class you start as. This isnt a flaw, but rather is the core of the game. Changing it to where a class cannot phase or cannot to is not angband. You would be arbitrarily remove some tactical options to each class so that they simply cannot approach practically a problem with a common solution.

Actually, the classes don't have perfectly even parity right now; warriors will never have mana and cast spells from spellbooks, priests will never have 6 blows with weapons, mages will never be able to cast Heroism from Tensers. But the effects can be replicated with devices. The class feature branch intends to makes classes even more distinct by adding unique spells and playstyles, which judging from your comments, doesn't sit well with you.

But your comment got me thinking, what if we went all the way in the other direction? What if Warriors could cast spells from all spellbooks, but with absurdly high failrates? What if Mages could temporarily attain 6 blows from equipment / consumables, and also cast self Heal? Frame it in terms of Schools, or Affinities. Just as Race determines starting stat bonuses and innate resistances/sustains, Class determines affinity to various schools. Warrior have high affinity with Fighting, but very low affinity with Arcane, Holy, Necromantic, etc. They can cast light room, but maybe <1% success rate. This might be increased with equipment that increases Arcane affinity, or temporarily with consumables. Similarly, mages can quaff potions that increase Fight affinity which affects blows/round. This would be compatible with the class rework, and sounds like a more Angbandy philosophy.

Maybe an idea worth considering?

[fizzix]

That said, I agree that the class feature branch is quite a drastic departure from Vanilla. Which is why I advocate making smaller incremental changes, getting everyone settled in, before eventually adding new mechanics if desired.

I don't think that's the way to go. I really think we need to move more towards the DCSS model where fairly large gameplay changes get implemented in each version (along with many balance tweaks).

It's true that things don't ever get "settled" but players are always free to load up old comfortable versions and play them.

[Pete Mack]

So long as there *are* old comfortable versions. I'd love a 4-retro version, with 3.0 gameplay, but 4.0 UI and RuneID.

[Derakon]

I don't think that's the way to go. I really think we need to move more towards the DCSS model where fairly large gameplay changes get implemented in each version (along with many balance tweaks).

It's true that things don't ever get "settled" but players are always free to load up old comfortable versions and play them.

A complete rework of classes doesn't strike you as a "fairly large gameplay change"?

[major digression starts here] IMO the important things for releases, roughly in order of importance, are:

* Releases must happen, at a sustainable tempo (not too fast for the developers to maintain work/life balance, not so slow that the community suffers for lack of progress). In practice this seems to work out to something around once a year, not counting patches.
* Each release should have enough gameplay testing thrown at it for us to be reasonably confident that the changes it incorporates achieve their stated goals.
* Each release should make the game more fun.
* Each release should be substantially different from prior releases.

This ranking has a couple of weird-seeming consequences:

* It is better to make small or even untested releases than no releases.
* It is OK to make changes that make the game less fun!

The important thing to realize is this: change is essential. If development stagnates, then the community will eventually get bored and disintegrate. Maintaining a reliable development pace is thus more important, to the community, than making certain that development is pointed in the right direction. Of course we want every change to be a good change, but not to the extent that there's nobody left to play the game by the time it comes out.

Put another way: if we wait to release until we complete all of our grand objectives, then in practice the release will never happen. I've seen far too many projects, games and "serious" software alike, die because the devs were insistent on getting everything right. Worse is better than nothing. If that means that 4.2 has some warts that we didn't get around to fixing (or that we plan to fix as a side-effect of the feature work for 4.3), that is OK.

In the extreme case that players feel that a release was 100% a mistake, they can continue to use the old version and pretend the release never happened. Nick exercises no dictatorial power here; he is maintainer merely because nobody else feels strongly enough about the game to want to take on the job. The more realistic case is that some percentage of the player base will decide to stick with old versions, and gradually fall out of the community as the rest of the player base moves on. Hopefully at least as many new players will join the community as we lost, so that the community remains vibrant and active.

[fizzix]

A complete rework of classes doesn't strike you as a "fairly large gameplay change"?

It does. And I support it and other similar changes.

[Nick]

OK, good, sufficient spread of opinion that I can justify doing whatever I like

I will at least try to start implementing some of the needed changes to the new classes (without waiting for the end of the comp, I think), and we'll see where we go from there.