Preparing for 4.2 release

[Pete Mack]

This is pretty broken, I agree. If you are going to use deadliness, you really need to make the base damage higher, since angband monsters tend to have more HP than O monsters. Or you need to make the deadliness multiplier higher. +10 should be closer to 100% than 50%. You knocked the value of that sling almost to zero here. (Difference between 5 dam and 6.4 dam is just miniscule, and it is worthless after around DL 5.)

Finally, compare it to magic devices. With this calculation, a sling will ALWAYS be worse than a lousy wand of lightning, which I never carry for more than a little while. You need to balance damage with other forms of offense.

[jevansau]

I think those calculations show why in variants that work of damage dice and % damage increase, ammo damage is always set much higher.

The current values are designed for much of the damage coming from damage bonuses.

[fph]

Some math: with the new system, melee DPR is

nblows * base_damage * (1+weapon_bonus)

where nblows scales from 1 to about 6 with CL, and base_damage currently from 2 to 20 depending on the weapon (with more powerful weapons at lower DLs).

Ranged DPR, on the other hand, is

nshots * base_damage * launcher_multiplier * (1+launcher_bonus) * (1+ammo_bonus).

where nshots ranges from 1 to 2 (maybe 3 for rangers with very good equipment), base_damage*launcher_multiplier scale together from 3 for a sling with pebbles to 12 for a heavy crossbow with bolts, for regular ammo, and 4x as much for specialty ammo such as mithril.

weapon_bonus, launcher_bonus, ammo_bonus all scale from 0 to about 1, very loosely dependent on level, but it's not impossible, with some luck, to find enchanted arrows and a bow of power with high bonus even early in the game. They are forced to have the same scale, if we want enchant weapon scrolls to work in the same way on all targets.

The most obvious asymmetry is that there are more multiplicative factors for ranged damage. This might require some more work to balance, but it's not so big of a problem.

In my view the biggest problem is that ranged damage scales less sharply with CL, since nshots is a lot more flat than nblows. This makes ranged damage very equipment-dependent, so luck-dependent. A possible solution would be having nshots scale with level like nblows (with rangers getting a bonus), but that would require everyone to blow through much more ammo. What about having a STR-dependent, or DEX-dependent, might multiplier? That would restore some scaling with CL for ranged damage.

Another effect of the change is that ranged damage now scales linearly with ammo and launcher type: slings will always deal less than half as much damage as crossbows. This isn't necessarily bad, but it makes them almost useless in the late game. Maybe bows and crossbows should be deeper items, so that there is a gradual upgrade through the game, with crossbow the natural late-game choice for everyone who isn't a ranger.

[Thraalbee]

Why not make the draw (~multiplier) of a launcher require a minimum strength?
Sling = none.
Short bow = low
Long bow = bit higher
Light Xbow = high
Heavy Xbow = very high

We already have min strength for lances and other super heavy melee weaps

[fph]

Another point to consider is that ranged damage is currently a very effective way to get through the early game, for various underpowered race/class combinations. A gnome mage is much tougher to play without a sling or a bow.

[wobbly]

Why not make the draw (~multiplier) of a launcher require a minimum strength?
Sling = none.
Short bow = low
Long bow = bit higher
Light Xbow = high
Heavy Xbow = very high

We already have min strength for lances and other super heavy melee weaps

I'm not certain what you mean. If you mean a minimum str to use a crossbow, the game already has that.

If you mean the multiplier is based on str(draw) thats odd on mechanical device like a crossbow. It takes str or a mechanism to load it, not to shoot it.

I've been contemplating str based shots/round with a bonus for rangers with str being draw on a bow or reload on a crossbow. The idea being slings are fast first (like the dagger) and the crossbow never getting enough shots/round to be ideal for late game rangers, but never got round to plugging in numbers to see if it worked out right.

[Nick]

New builds up on the nightlies page and angband.live which try to deal with some of the issues raised so far in this thread:

• Rangers get a new spell, Create Arrows, which allows them to convert a staff into a stack of arrows. The better the staff, the more likely to get better arrows
• Rangers get .1 extra shots every 3 levels now, so that's up to a max of 1.6 - almost back to their former glory
• 9-headed hydras made to summon much less (and breathe more), and reduced hitpoints for them and gorgons
• Staffs of starlight now give off damaging light; wands of Door Destruction replaced with wands of Darkness

Thanks for all the discussion of the percentage damage option - hope people are having fun thinking about it. I'll probably play with it a bit to see if I can make it viable without wrecking regular damage, but it really was a spur-of-the-moment addition. So probably I'll be more focused on bugfixing.

[Diego Gonzalez]

I really like the idea of using staff level to improve the quality of the arrows! Well done!

It would be interesting to have both combat approaches available through options. You will keep the new one?

[gglibertine]

I like *all* these changes. Especially 'Create Arrows', which is so brilliant it feels like it should have existed all along. Thanks for your hard work, Nick. I feel like you've improved the game by leaps and bounds already.

My blackguard is making good use of the Knight's Shield, even though I still haven't found a really decent melee weapon at CL29. (And I had a major setback during my first dive when a room full of dragonflies ruined most of my armour. Those things are NASTY.)

[PowerWyrm]

The help files, especially birth.txt, are outdated. That file is missing the new classes, and description about old classes should probably be revised (for ex: rangers use wisdom instead of intelligence now).

[Derakon]

Apologies, Nick, if you've already thought through all of this. Please feel free to ignore it.

I believe you should be able to get the balance for percentile damage boosts mostly right through pure analysis, though it will of course take gameplay testing to really dial it in. I am assuming however that the goal is "bigger weapons should deal bigger damage" without otherwise affecting balance -- i.e. players will choose different weapons to use, but will otherwise have similar DPS as under the standard rules.

Under that assumption, you "merely" need to look at a variety of scenarios, representing different classes/stats and different "optimal gear". For example, a level-1 half-troll warrior with a Main Gauche under the old rules ought to map to a level-1 half-troll warrior with a Bastard Sword or a Lead-Filled Mace under the new rules. As long as they do comparable damage, you should be within spitting distance of correct balance.

There's a couple of caveats of course, to wit:

* The current system has very flat damage, because most of the damage is constant and the player gets multiple blows per round. Moving to a dice-multiplier situation while at the same time reducing blows per round means that damage will be massively more variable, and should probably be increased somewhat overall to compensate (e.g. 50 damage per blow @ 1 blow/round instead of 10 damage per blow @ 4 blows/round).

* Classes that cannot manage the strength to wield heavier weapons should not be excessively penalized.

* Why would anyone ever want to use a weapon with small damage dice under the new rules? What happens to small-dice artifacts?

* Somewhat minor, but at level 1 characters will not be able to afford the bigger weapons, so damage output in the very first dungeon dive will be substantially reduced compared to current. In general melee characters will have a slower start. This will particularly hurt ironman characters, as few early weapons have big dice.

You may find that this option will also require altering damage dice on weapons. It's possible that you could do this automatically but it'd probably be easier to have two sets of dice in the data files.

[khearn]

I like the idea of a spell for rangers to create arrows. For most of the rangers I've run, the main reason they decide to head back to town is because they've burned through all of the 80 arrows they started the trip with. Other classes go home because they've got full inventories or are overburdened, but ranger just run out of arrows. This should help avoid that.

[Pete Mack]

@Derakon got it right. Do compare the expected mean damage output of a 'good' distsnce weapon wutb a 'good' melee weapon for a given dungeon level. Same for ego items. Distance weapons are way low just now.

[Nick]

The help files, especially birth.txt, are outdated. That file is missing the new classes, and description about old classes should probably be revised (for ex: rangers use wisdom instead of intelligence now).

Yes, I have a ticket for this. Also, takkaria has done an awesome online version of the help. The plan is to cut in-game help to the basics (command keys, symbols, etc), and encourage people to use the online one (which they can also build locally if they want).

Thanks again everyone for the discussion of the new damage option. I am indeed planning to keep it. I agree with Derakon that the small-dice weapon issue is probably the trickiest; I'll give it more thought, and I'm sure I won't be the only one

[PowerWyrm]

Looking at the decoy code, all pathing with PROJECT_STOP flag stops when hitting a decoy, which means player spells and probably missiles will hit the decoy if there is one in a corridor between the player and a monster. Shouldn't that be limited to monster spells only?