why the dwarf warrior is king of stealth

[wobbly]

Some thoughts from playing a dwarf warrior. I had fun, I should put that upfront as the following is mostly criticisms.

Infinite !clw : neither price, slot or weight stops a warrior regenerating at 20 hps/round & never needing to rest. I suspect that multiplys stealth more then people realize.

Infinite ?phase: As above. With 40 it makes sense to blink till you land right. A huge stealth booster. It's a fun game, but over generous.

Free stealth gear: never had to sacrifice anything important to stack on stealth gear

Too generous with telepathy & TO. The warrior is a lot better at the warrior game then mage. It's still great at the mage/rogues game. The extra hps absorb the fail rate problem

[wobbly]

So started playing vanilla again, after mainly playing anything but V, so this may as well just become my rant thread about all the things I think have gone wrong in modern V

Chapter 2 killing the early game:

The early game in old angband, for me, mostly consists of collecting an early consumables set. This was deemed scummy & boring. It was replaced with modern vanillas just give the player all the stuff design. I disagree, but find it a reasonable enough decision.
Question: What have you actually replaced it with?

Town: Buy all the consumables. The nothing but free stuff starts.
Early Huge levels: Mostly empty except for free stuff.

The trouble here seems to be you removed all the horrible cursed junk (a good decision), but now that's just replaced with more free early consumables.

A modern lvl 1 character is the kind of character that can blink at will & insta-heal every round. By all means reduce scumming. By all means remove cursed junk & fix the id system (which you guys did). But why replace the early game with 15 dungeon levels. huge empty dungeon levels. Of nothing but free candy.

[Huqhox]

So started playing vanilla again, after mainly playing anything but V, so this may as well just become my rant thread about all the things I think have gone wrong in modern V

Chapter 2 killing the early game:

The early game in old angband, for me, mostly consists of collecting an early consumables set. This was deemed scummy & boring. It was replaced with modern vanillas just give the player all the stuff design. I disagree, but find it a reasonable enough decision.
Question: What have you actually replaced it with?

Town: Buy all the consumables. The nothing but free stuff starts.
Early Huge levels: Mostly empty except for free stuff.

The trouble here seems to be you removed all the horrible cursed junk (a good decision), but now that's just replaced with more free early consumables.

A modern lvl 1 character is the kind of character that can blink at will & insta-heal every round. By all means reduce scumming. By all means remove cursed junk & fix the id system (which you guys did). But why replace the early game with 15 dungeon levels. huge empty dungeon levels. Of nothing but free candy.

I think there's certainly an argument for scaling the size of the early levels, so level 1 is the smallest then they get successively larger until a specific level (10? 15? 20?)

In the old days levels were all the same size; that's not the case anymore but apart from labyrinth levels that's not currently exploited

[quarague]

Infinite !clw : neither price, slot or weight stops a warrior regenerating at 20 hps/round & never needing to rest. I suspect that multiplys stealth more then people realize.

Infinite ?phase: As above. With 40 it makes sense to blink till you land right. A huge stealth booster. It's a fun game, but over generous.

I think both of these are true but only relevant for a relatively short section of the game. The early game has become quite easy IF you know how to play angband. A knowledable player could start at dlevel 10 at level 1 without too much trouble. A player new to rogue likes will die a lot before ever getting to dlevel 10. So it's a balance thing, just dive as quickly as you can if you feel bored.
Once you get to say dlevel 30 or so, regenerating 20 hps/round is nice but will not save you from actually dangerous things. Any char above level 25 or so will get infinite phasing, usually from spell. Against ranged monsters multiple phases are rarely better than a single one. And you can always go from a bad situation to a worse one.
So yes, buying a couple of clw and phase doors in town trivializes the first few dlevels but not that many.

[Pete Mack]

@quarangue--
This has always been true, at least for non-ironman games. What is easier now is ironman.

I further point out: CLW is nearly always available in the store even in older variants. And once you get enougb gold, curing was 100% available by buying out the alchemist for ~5000GP. I only ever bothered when I was short of healing vs. Morgoth. But it was always an option.

[wobbly]

So yeah you're eventually going to get unlimited consumables just like you're eventually going to get effectively unlimited TO & banish outside of various challenge modes such as speed or ironman. It's the space before that that I'm interested in. When the player isn't some kind of drug fueled blinky bill. Vanilla is designed to ensure that's the time between start and shop 5. I'm pretty sure if drops were messed in such a way that the base consumables stopped dropping, people would put a lot of hard work in to "fixing" it.

Telling me to drop 10 levels before I start playing actually doesn't help. Yes the game will be more difficult but what's bothering me is actually going to be more true in 10 dlvls time. Short of ironman. Sometimes when people talk about these issues they're told to go play ironman. Not everyone who wants a tighter balance or harder game wants to go that extreme. Sometimes angband's special problem is invoked. The infinite dungeon. 99% of RPGs have the same special problem. It ain't that special. It's still a problem & none handle it perfectly. Plenty handle it better.

Look through suggestions sometime. How often are otherwise good suggestions knocked back on the ground angband is a game of teleports? Sil is sensible here. It gets rid of them and performs wonders. I like the teleport game. Keeping them makes the challenge of dealing with it harder, but well things being hard doesn't mean they shouldn't be tried.

What I'm suggesting is a space where the game can have a different dynamic. There are 100 levels it ain't lacking in space. A space where more interesting dynamics then "I'll just TO everything" can occur. Where melee can be dangerous instead of I'll just teleport. Where tactical positioning can occur. If someone tries telling me that game already exists, it's Sil, then well I think I've actually heard of that game before y'know....

Anyway, if no-one is interested in having that kind of game in V, I'll put it in my own. Maybe I manage it, maybe not & probably a bit of both, just putting it out there that the current balance might not be ideal. That Vs dogma might just be a chain around it's neck.

[Pete Mack]

OK, i will buy that. Yes, i agree that the base mechanic needs to be harder in V, especially esrly V. I just think the way to fix the early game is with the occasional genuinely dangerous monster. Bullroarer on DL 1 is a real challenge. Too bad it never happens.

[Derakon]

DL1 I think has almost literally a 0% chance of out-of-depth monsters -- I don't think I've ever seen Grip or Fang there, for example. That's actually reasonable IMO to ensure that there's at least one level where completely new players can figure things out.

DL2 is where the gloves should come off at least a little.

[wobbly]

I've seen the dogs on lvl 1 and certainly blue yeeks. I suspect special rooms. Last version of quickband they were near guaranteed. Even prepared a lvl 1 human mage has a hard time, especially straight of the bat. I'm not sure what's best. At the moment I just want to get my mess in to playable form so I can judge better.

[Pete Mack]

It occurs to me that there was one other change that made infinite phase and CLW possible in the early game: the elimination of Charisma and vast reduction in store prices early. I have advocated in the past that prices be scaled to chsracter level to recover some of this. (And possibly cut the prices of TO objects to offset it--TO is the one thing that is significantly harder to get now than in 3.0, with much higher price and greater rarity.)

[Derakon]

I'd be fine with just making things 25% more expensive across the board, period. I recall stat potions being around 30k for my characters, instead of the 24k they are now, so that would put the numbers about right.

[wobbly]

A lot of prices seem wonky. Something with a base price of 1 is still crazy cheap with a big enchantment, particularly armour.

Cure light wounds changed at some pt itself, though likely for the best (I do think 20 is high however). The interesting example is Sang. Grab a stack go down to lvl 2 and find a novice warrior. You're lucky if your breaking even in melee range, let alone geting a go. Though like more to do with Sang then potions themselves.