About Armor...

[Estie]

AC was raised across the board because armour class is not valuable. An interesting decision to say the least.
If something is not valuable and you give everyone more, does it become more or less valuable?
If melee is not dangerous enough is the solution to make it safer or more dangerous?

Not sure you grasp the issue here. The objective is to make AC value a consideration (and not only resistances or other modifiers). So yes, if AC protects more from melee, it will be valued higher compared to, say, fire resistance. If you reduce AC, players will certainly not take it more into consideration.

The fact that melee damage plays a small role in the spectrum of dangers is a different matter entirely. While it might be a good idea to change that, it is not clear how that can be achieved without other (possibly unwanted) consequences.

The first obvious idea is to make phasing less available, but then this has always been a feature of Angband and it is unclear if that, in the end, really would make players want to wear heavier armour.

Back when Magnate made this change my idea was to make npc archers more impactful, effectively introducing physical ranged damge into the spectrum, against which armor class would help of course. As it stands, everything dangerous is magic and elemental.

[Werbaer]

Right now I'm running a LVL 26 Dunadan Ranger (Sparrow) with a STR stat of 18. She is wearing Soft Leather Armor of Resist Fire [8, +6].

Should I be going for tougher armor at this point (ones with the -1 & -2 to hit penalty)?... meaning going for armors with higher than the overall [14] AC than my current armor provides, despite it Resist Fire protection ?

As a ranger (or mage, or mid-level priest) i don't care at all about armour class. You shouldn't be in melee with tough opponents. So any additional ability the armour provides is probably more valuable than AC.

[Grotug]

Am I the only one who values AC around here? I always find it very puzzling when I read posts saying how unimportant AC is. I've won this game many times and I can tell you AC is a key part to winning. Absolutely essential. Yes, I prefer melee classes, but there are enough of those in the game and enough great melee weapons in the game to make meleeing a popular way to kill high value targets. The longer you can stand toe to toe without phasing, the less likely you will phase into more danger. I just don't understand this argument that AC isn't important! The mind boggles.... All my easiest wins are when I have 200+ AC.

Sure, it's true I'm not going to give up a base resist in the end game to get more AC, but I will, and do, give up high resists for more AC and speed if I can afford to (I will take 20 base speed over 23 or even 25 base speed for an increase of 30AC every time; speed armors are overrated unless you are hurt up for speed; of the dozen+ ego speed armors I've found I think I've worn an ego speed armor exactly zero times; and I don't just mean in the endgame or final fight; I mean any time I find a speed armor at any point in the game, I always have something better or enough speed elsewhere to make such a choice an inferior one).

As for why there isn't more ranged damage from missiles is a very good question and something I've wondered about from time to time. Sure seems like a good idea to at least try out some deep-dungeon enemies that fire 150 damage arrows repeatedly. You could have all sorts of different high level (native DL80+) ranged missile attack enemies, shooting all sorts of elemental missiles, even arrows dipped in chaos (that would be a seriously dangerous enemy if you don't have pConf where high AC could be super important). Missiles could even cause severe and mortal wounds. Could add a deep level Ranger unique that occasionally unleashes a barage of heavy hitting arrows. He could even have a special attack (and maybe @Rangers could get it as an end-game level spell, too). The spell would be called barage of arrows. Shoots three four or five arrows at once for like 80 mana.

And for those who say Angband doesn't need anymore super dangerous monsters that are auto-TO'd, might be fun to make a unique Ranger that knows how to use the terrain to their advantage for hockey stick positioning against @ so that @ can't just easily TO him everytime.

It's always been kind of frustrating that a high end ranger never gets 100% accuracy against low level monsters, and one of the more frustrating aspects of playing ranger. I understand mages are fragile and so they make up for that with 100% accuracy damage spells, but seems like rangers should at least gain 100% accuracy on lesser foes.

[wobbly]

Not sure you grasp the issue here. The objective is to make AC value a consideration (and not only resistances or other modifiers). So yes, if AC protects more from melee, it will be valued higher compared to, say, fire resistance.

Really? Because you listed a bunch of reasons why you don't value it, & I didn't see a lack of AC on the list. If armour is too heavy already it's still too heavy if you double the AC, triple the AC or quadruple the AC. Fact is that's helping the lighter armours more then the heavy armour. If light armour of rfire is sufficient AC already then that's even more the case if you raise the base standard. There's a reason the classes most likely to have use for an accuracy ring are the ones that had trouble hitting in the first place. The only way increasing the AC means decreasing the weight is if you can now get the same AC from a lighter set of armour.

[Derakon]

The old AC rescaling wasn't just "multiply the numbers on armor and then reduce the effectiveness of the numbers in the code." It actually changed the effectiveness of armor in terms of mitigating damage from melee.

Is it worth taking a -2 penalty to speed in the early game if you can become borderline immune to melee in consequence? Because I've had that happen, through a lucky drop of adamantine armor in the early game, before the AC rescaling happened.

AC has three main problems, in my view. First is the fact that there are an awful lot of attacks that bypass AC's damage-reduction abilities (though IIRC it still helps in keeping you from getting hit in the first place). Not just spells and breath weapons: lots of melee attacks also do full damage regardless of AC. I think pretty much any attack that does not use the hit/claw/bite/kick/crush verbs ignores AC. Moreover, most attacks that have special effects on them ignore AC -- so that Greater Titan's ridiculously punishing hit-to-confuse melee gets through completely unabated.

The second issue is that the community has a bad habit of viewing abilities in a very binary fashion. Does it prevent you from getting one-shot? It has value. If it doesn't, then it doesn't matter. In that lens, an AC boost that reduces the damage you take in melee from Morgoth by, say, 100 per round, isn't particularly meaningful. But if you go from needing to heal every 3 rounds to needing to heal every 4, that's a significant improvement in your action economy.

And finally, it's just plain hard to tell what difference AC is making for you. The game doesn't tell you anything at all about the damage reduction it gives you, nor which attacks are affected by it. You can learn your chance to be hit, but it's hard to tell how much improving your AC would affect that.

[Sparrow the Dunadan]

Am I the only one who values AC around here? I always find it very puzzling when I read posts saying how unimportant AC is. I've won this game many times and I can tell you AC is a key part to winning. Absolutely essential. Yes, I prefer melee classes, but there are enough of those in the game and enough great melee weapons in the game to make meleeing a popular way to kill high value targets. The longer you can stand toe to toe without phasing, the less likely you will phase into more danger. I just don't understand this argument that AC isn't important! The mind boggles.... All my easiest wins are when I have 200+ AC.

Sure, it's true I'm not going to give up a base resist in the end game to get more AC, but I will, and do, give up high resists for more AC and speed if I can afford to (I will take 20 base speed over 23 or even 25 base speed for an increase of 30AC every time; speed armors are overrated unless you are hurt up for speed; of the dozen+ ego speed armors I've found I think I've worn an ego speed armor exactly zero times; and I don't just mean in the endgame or final fight; I mean any time I find a speed armor at any point in the game, I always have something better or enough speed elsewhere to make such a choice an inferior one).

As for why there isn't more ranged damage from missiles is a very good question and something I've wondered about from time to time. Sure seems like a good idea to at least try out some deep-dungeon enemies that fire 150 damage arrows repeatedly. You could have all sorts of different high level (native DL80+) ranged missile attack enemies, shooting all sorts of elemental missiles, even arrows dipped in chaos (that would be a seriously dangerous enemy if you don't have pConf where high AC could be super important). Missiles could even cause severe and mortal wounds. Could add a deep level Ranger unique that occasionally unleashes a barage of heavy hitting arrows. He could even have a special attack (and maybe @Rangers could get it as an end-game level spell, too). The spell would be called barage of arrows. Shoots three four or five arrows at once for like 80 mana.

And for those who say Angband doesn't need anymore super dangerous monsters that are auto-TO'd, might be fun to make a unique Ranger that knows how to use the terrain to their advantage for hockey stick positioning against @ so that @ can't just easily TO him everytime.

It's always been kind of frustrating that a high end ranger never gets 100% accuracy against low level monsters, and one of the more frustrating aspects of playing ranger. I understand mages are fragile and so they make up for that with 100% accuracy damage spells, but seems like rangers should at least gain 100% accuracy on lesser foes.

Although I have limited understanding of what you all said, I think yeah, AC should be important. To me AC = standard Defense... I don't know if that's entirely accurate (probably not), but that's how I'm looking at it, until I can have an easy but more accurate view of it for Angband 4.1.3 as I am playing here.

The question I was having was basically related to the (-1) and (-2) values given to 'heavy' types of armor. Of course there is abilities and ego status stuff that is an important consideration, but then that comes with trade off questions. Like do I sacrifice 10 AC for a resistance, or do I keep the 10 AC and just be more cautious and spending more MP on monster checks, and using MP and ammo to reduce the monster's ability to do ability sort of damage (like throw a poison ball or spit acid or use disenchantment).

Now that that the (-1) (-2) values have been answered, I can move forward in the game the way I wish to. I did trade out my resist fire armor for my dragon scale. And I'm doing okay. More on that in the thread of Sparrow's adventures. ^w^

[Pete Mack]

For choosing basic dragonscale armor, it pretty much comes down to how much damage your other options can do. Does the occasional 150 damage make a big difference in your character's power? Then use it. That said, I have used Dwarven green DSM +2 to the very end of the game. Dwarven DSM with resist poison is better than many artifact armors, never mind the low-ish AC.