Current master post-4.1.3

[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.

[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?

[Thraalbee]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Gauss]

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

[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.

[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.

[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 )

[wobbly]

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.

So O had this & you could exploit the AI so they walked continuously back & forth over them, they were pretty powerful. Sangband fixed this, but then it went to great efforts to make it more realistic & complicated to the point where it was ridiculous time & effort to setup traps & lure monsters. It's a nice system but one that would work better in a true RPG. I think somewhere in between would be pretty fun. Simple O/FA traps, with just the most basic fixes from Sangband.

[Pete Mack]

NPP traps are good. Add in an amnesia spell (eg. hold or confuse monster(s)), and then both traps and the hit-and-run spell become more useful.

Chud--
In other variants, rogue gets mage buffing spells. Those let rogue fight well above its weight, and better than warrior in many fights. It is quite different in this new incarnation, and much more like your description

[Mondkalb]

What about a spell that increases stealth temporarily?
And getting experience for sneaking around high level monsters?

[Voovus]

When Nick first introduced the new rogue it was a lot of fun, thanks to the stealing ability: @ could steal from uniques that were far too tough to fight. Unfortunately, stealing was also overpowered, because it was possible to steal from the same unique repeatedly on different dungeon levels if you left them alive. Unfortunately^2, stealing then got nerfed to the degree of being useless.

I would suggest making Hit and Run always succeed in stealing from a sleeping monster, but also always waking them up. This way, you can steal from powerful uniques, but will only get 1 item per encounter (unless you kill them).

I find the new rogue as not being anything like a warrior these days. The Recharge spell makes the rogue more of a semi-automatic-wand-lunatic.

For the more melee inclined, how about an assassination oriented spell, such a doing x5 damage to a sleeping monster?