Current master post-4.1.3

[Chud]

I don't usually find rogues very satisfying, personally. It seems like conceptually rogue = thief, more or less, and as a thief you generally want to avoid fights. Avoiding fights doesn't really play very well in Angband though - it can be done, sure, but it's a bit painful and tedious. So, you end up tweaking the rogue into a somewhat weaker fighter with somewhat better utility spells, but that's about it. Meh. (IMO )

[Derakon]

What should the rogue's niche be? There's not a lot of room for "tricky" characters in Vanilla, I feel, mostly because there's not a lot of monster behaviors to take advantage of.

I can conceive of a character that fights mostly by way of traps, but they'd need to have pretty big payoffs to be worth the time investment of setting them up and luring monsters over them. Stealing doesn't seem that useful to me -- why steal when you can kill and then take all of their possessions? And other core "roguish" concepts like having a deep bag of tricks and skills mostly mean replicating the utility abilities of other classes, which seems counter to Nick's design ethos.

[Pete Mack]

Nick--
The new rogue is kinda boring. The *only* major non-utility spells are detect monster and detect objects--nearly everything else is just a convenient substitute for magic devices, or otherwise not all that useful. Hit-and-run would be a nice melee escape except it leaves the monster aggravated. Create doors and stairs were more useful.

[Gauss]

Yeah !Experience should restore before increasing as all other stat potions do. Otherwise it would be wasting them.

[Derakon]

My memory is that !Experience has never restored experience. I can see an argument for changing that, since stat-gain potions restore before boosting, but I don't think you're seeing a new behavior.

[kandrc]

The necromancer that I posted about a week or so ago whose vision went black, turns out I had inadvertently equipped a +1 to light shield. Been away from the game since then, but figured it out this morning.

Just got my EXP knocked down a few 100k points by a ringwraith. Followed that up with a !Exp, which did not first restore my experience. Is that a change? A bug? Or has it always been that way? I'm pretty certain that it used to restore then at 100k.

[wobbly]

Not sure if anything can shapeshift into an invisible monster (I think the enchantress can?) but the messages behave strangely in this circumstance.

So visible -> invisible - It shimmers and turns into "invisible monster name".
Invisible -> visible - No message.

[Chud]

Balance observation for Druids... in the early-mid 30s for CL, around DL40 give or take, it's starting to be a fair challenge to find good damage output as I haven't found the last dungeon book yet. Maybe that's ok, and the solution is dive (carefully) for the last book? I'm finding I have to abandon a fair number of fights at this point though, for better or worse. Also, there doesn't seem to be any good source of "un-resistable" damage, a-la magic missile or mana bolt, for those occasional annoying baddies who seem to resist everything. I end up relying on wands for most of those.

[Thraalbee]

With access to shops it works as is. Its just no longer a fun class to play with norecall.

[fph]

Shoot 'n 'scoot sounds fun -- it forces some interesting decisions, and requires the player to be prepared. However, I am afraid that for most of the game rangers will just buy ?phasedoor and largely ignore it.

The other spells sound odd from a purely mechanical point of view (a bow shooting a rounded pebble?), but I realize the problem. Maybe it's time to restore good old (+0,+0) ammo creation for the ranger? Or to give them again a higher +shoot bonus with a bow, to force launcher selection for the endgame?

[wobbly]

Has shield bash been fixed yet? I can see a change in the code here, but in-game I've had the next turn after every stumble. It's hard to tell if it's working as intended & I'm getting lucky or still broken.

[Thraalbee]

Suggestions for Rangers, currently lacking imo

I liked the nerf of rangers when it came. Competed an ironman run soon after and it felt quite balanced. However with then new nerfed (NOT!) monster and spell list I'm not all that happy. Basically (ironman) I need to carry three launchers and three sets of ammo (max 40 per stack) to be effectively a Ranger. But then there is no room for devices which doesnt help and I get slow. Mostly I just end up with an inventory quarter full of useless stacks of ammo (waiting for a decent launcher) and meleeing the crap out of most foes. Not that the ranger is bad at melee and the stealth sure helps. Its just it feels like a rogue, not a ranger. Also, the spellboks are useful but a bit boring.

Some ideas of spells that would help (we may have to work on the names)

* Early Spell "The big Short" that improves your short bow efficiency in an interesting way, e.g.

• Allow the bow to shoot also iron shots and pebbles

• Increase to-hit with a decent number, not sure what is decent but thinking a fixed value of at least +20 since this is mostly useful early on

* Early Spell "The Silence of Lambs" that improves your short bow efficiency in an interesting way, e.g.

• Increase your stealth by at least +3 while a short bow is equipped until the next melee attack or it times out

* Later Spell "Thé OooLong" that improves your long bow efficiency in an interesting way, e.g.

• Allow the bow to shoot also bolts

• Decrease chance for ammo to break

* Mid level Spell "Shoot 'n scoot"

• Charges the short/longbow with a phase door to immediately follow the next shot

* Another possible early Spell is the "22 bullets", useful if above is not implemented

• Converts any ammo to what your current launcher needs. Decent chance of converting slays e.g. (35 + level)% and e.g. (50 + level)% of to-hit and to-dam.

[PowerWyrm]

Started to port some of the new stuff for PWMAngband. Already found something that got wiped in the process:

commit a5a39d2 (Improve monster detection code, add detection of living monsters)

When detecting invisible monster, the lore telling that the monster is invisible isn't updated anymore.

before: rf_on(lore->flags, RF_INVISIBLE);
after: nothing

[gglibertine]

The primary thing was confusion about who could read what books. Previously all casters could read all books of their realm; with the current situation, at least full casters still can.

I'm certainly open to re-reverting this depending on how people feel about it. Maybe I should start a thread specifically for how to handle books and what their names should be.

Other than making it so that it was harder to find spellbooks you could actually use in the dungeon (which could theoretically be fixed by just spawning more books or preferentially spawning readable ones), my primary issue with the half-caster spellbooks was that it wasn't easy enough to identify whether I'd be able to read a book or not. In shops I ended up buying expensive books that it turned out I couldn't read because e(x)amining them there didn't tell me.

[wobbly]

Did something change with the spread of monsters in pits? Ant pits for instance seem to have a lot more silver ants then before. Is this because of the code which makes low level monsters rare in the late game? It's the only thing I can think of that might be doing this.

Taking a look, it changes the probabilities in the allocation table? Does this change all monster placement including pits/vaults/summons?