Current master post-4.1.3

[Carnivean]

7. As an animal loving and vegetarian druid, it feels thematically wrong to go around killing cute fluffy creatures, like cats, jackals, wolves, bears, tigers, oliphaunts and, um, hounds. Maybe give the druid a politically-correctly-named spell that would mass banish these creatures?

Animal Rescue. These beasts are clearly in need of rescue, having been taken out of their native environments, let loose into a barren, rock-filled mine amid monsters that aren't prey/food. The druid could transport them back to their native lands.

Zephyr Hounds, to my mind, are not natural animals and would not count. I think of them the same as the corrupted wolves (darkhounds) in the Wheel of Time series. While still animals they don't have a natural environment outside the mine.

[jevansau]

Having also recently completed a druid run through, I'll add my comments:
For most of the game fox form was my highest damage option, even in its current weaker form. Sometimes bear form was better, but there was rarely much in it.
Drúedain form was only rarely useful - taking out drolems for the experience - green dragon pits, large poison breathers.
Eagle form was mostly useful for late game exploring as it avoids traps.

Started playing as a fragile rogue, but mostly as a stealth warrior.

For me, Wild Forces was the most disappointing book.
I haven't tried a necromancer for a while, but mages have a much better damage output and positioning, and priests have similar damage output and great defense.
There are lots of good crowd control spells, but that isn't the issue by the time you have the book and the spells.
While Meteor swarm/Rift should be a good combination, but by then melee is usually preferable.
If you got it earlier it might be more useful.

[Voovus]

Nick,

A few comments on a recently played-through a Druid. I'm sorry these may sound negative, but the truth is that I found this Druid less fun than in an earlier version of yours.

1. The early game is tough, and the Druid is rather fragile. Poor melee, poor casting, poor spell damage and no form of object detection for usefully sneaking around. Before being nerfed, Fox Form made the Druid into a good warrior, but that's no longer the case.

2. I haven't found the Druedain form useful. Yes, it worked well on a bunch of ologs, but by the time you get it these guys aren't an obstacle anyway. I think it would be far more useful if it appeared at character level 10 (with a lower damage reduction, say clv/2) - it would then make it possible to take on orcs and trolls at the cost of low speed.

3. Bear Form comes way way too late, and isn't powerful enough. By the time I got it I was fighting Ungoliant, so couldn't have a real melee druid for most of the game. I was still hoping to melee fight Morgoth, but found that I would only have about 300 damage output plus the disadvantage of difficult healing. The Con bonus is an optical illusion, since after switching to a bear you cannot heal up to full and, like the problem with the previous necromancer, you cannot rely on the Con bonus as at some point you'll need to switch back out. I would suggest putting Bear Form at level 20 or 30 (if Druedain is at 10) and giving it +2 attack speed instead of some of the other bonuses. The reason for the attacks instead of straight damage is my experience with the pre-nerfed fox: it encourages the player to use heavy weapons (high dice, low number of attacks) instead of the traditional ones (low dice, high number of attacks), which adds variety to the game.

4. Eagle Form again comes a bit too late. By that stage the druid already has the Haste spell (assuming spellbook found), some stealth and standard methods of escape (Teleport/TO). Might be better around character level 20 for general exploration, or 30 for early vault looting.

5. It would be really nice if one could pick up objects without shifting out and back in to an animal form. It gets a little frustrating.

6. The fox has become a bit too weak. Maybe a higher stealth bonus would make it ok, if you don't want to give it physical power.

7. As an animal loving and vegetarian druid, it feels thematically wrong to go around killing cute fluffy creatures, like cats, jackals, wolves, bears, tigers, oliphaunts and, um, hounds. Maybe give the druid a politically-correctly-named spell that would mass banish these creatures?


Also, a bug that I thought had already been fixed:

On a randart: "When activated, it teleports you randomly about 606f the largest distance you could go."

[Nick]

OK, I have a guess for which commit introduced this, but haven't worked out why yet.

[mrfy]

I'm also getting the same behavior with the latest pre-compiled nightly: angband-win-4.1.3-215-gfb594ca9b

I think that was before the latest changes?

I just updated, getting the same with Angband-osx-4.1.3-215-gfb594ca.dmg. reverted to previous version Angband-osx-4.1.3-211-g7f492e5.dmg and "." direction running works again.

[wobbly]

I'm also getting the same behavior with the latest pre-compiled nightly: angband-win-4.1.3-215-gfb594ca9b

I think that was before the latest changes?

[wobbly]

Both shift & . I get the same result. I don't use the mouse

[Nick]

I'm getting a bug in latest master branch where run doesn't work. The prompt "Direction or <click>..." appears and I can just walk around with the prompt still hanging around on the screen. Windows 7, MingW

How are you running - with '.', shift-direction, or the mouse?

[wobbly]

I'm getting a bug in latest master branch where run doesn't work. The prompt "Direction or <click>..." appears and I can just walk around with the prompt still hanging around on the screen. Windows 7, MingW

[gglibertine]

Downloading latest build now! Also, I've been playing Druids a bit and really liking them. One suggestion -- how about giving them mushroom ID? I don't think that's a valuable enough buff to make them OP, but it would fit well thematically. Possibly Rangers should have it too. Or it could be something both classes gain with experience?

[Nick]

New builds are up on the nightlies page, with the necromancer spell Banish Undead replaced with Tap Unlife, which damages the closest undead monster a little and gives that player back that amount of mana. Thanks to kaypy and Derakon for the idea.

[Nick]

New builds are up on the nightlies page, with the following changes:

• More complete key to vault.txt
• Reduction in drop frequency of non-readable books
• Reduction in mana cost and fail rate for some blackguard spells
• Reduction in experience for first cast of some spells

These last two particularly are going to require trial and error to get the balance right; please let me know whether they seem reasonable or unreasonable.

[Nick]

What does SPIRIT flag do?

Monsters with spirits can b e detected or teleported by necromncy spells.

I'd like to report a bug. I found "The Lucerne hammer of absurd dice" on DL23 and the level feeling was 6. Six. Sechs auf Deutsch. Seis en Espa&#241;ol.

9d5, (powerfully) dragons, Lightning brand, pFear, speed regen, and {??} I used the weapon for awhile and didn't seem to be cursed.

Surely, surely, we can all agree this is a bug? I recently reported finding "Deathwreaker Lite" without aggravation (7d8 slay evil, +4 STR, pConf and other abilities) with an also relatively low level feeling (DL51 7-7). But no one seemed to think it was worth commenting on.

Both weapons were easily 9 items in my mind for their depth. Surely slightly above average brigandine armor and this 9d5 weapon should not have the same treasure feeling?

As Derakon suggests, problems with the object power algorithm could explain this.

Also I looked at this & wasn't sure I was looking at the right things, as:

* Original random artifact generator (randart) by Greg Wooledge.
* Updated by Chris Carr / Chris Robertson 2001-2010.

It's definitely changed since 2010

It got a big update before 4.1, but that failed to include the file history...

[wobbly]

OP-weapons seems like one of the few things the code should be able to specifically look for? You can certainly calculate a damage no. for max. stated warrior, no off-weapon damage.

Edit: Thinking about it you know the 3 conditions liable to break things up-front:

Too much damage on the weapon (in particular acid/evil)
Too much off-weapon damage
Too many +blows

Any or all 3 could be controlled with boundary conditions in theory.

Edit 2: Also I looked at this & wasn't sure I was looking at the right things, as:

* Original random artifact generator (randart) by Greg Wooledge.
* Updated by Chris Carr / Chris Robertson 2001-2010.

It's definitely changed since 2010

[Derakon]

Something's probably off with the randart power evaluations, considering the frequency with which we're getting reports of overpowered artifacts. The game just doesn't realize how powerful they are. If we fix that, then the level feeling issue should be fixed as well. Or we could just rip level feelings out of the game.

But yeah, 27d5 per blow against non-lightning-resistant enemies. That's average 81 damage per blow, before considering pluses. At DL23 81 damage per round is pretty good.