Love what you've done with the place

[sffp]

So I'm an old man player of Angband (and Moria before) from back in the late 80's/early 90's (I can't tell you what version it was - we just played).

I just took a 40th level paladin to a vault where he died while I was fighting Saruman when a Great Hell Wyrm breathed (I swear he had no line of sight - I guess he did) taking out more than 500 HCP.

Oh well, die and learn. (yes, I'm in mourning)

But I just want to thank you for all the improvements and comment on some

First - zero money sales is great - although it is painful leaving behind artifacts
The auto-Id of most objects is a VAST improvement - I can remember clearing out pits and picking up objects and resting and it was such a pain!

Maybe because of the auto id - but I feel like better ego items show up sooner/frequently. I had to make choices between multiple very good items - and that is fun.

I love the curse/rune system. It's also great that there are items that are useful that have negative side effects. My paladin was tooling around with Wormtongue's boots for a long time

A few observations (I miss orb of draining) I understand taking away some of the spells/prayers for the half-classes, but upper level prayers were practically useless for my paladin. What good is a heal prayer when I'm going to fail 40% of the time and it takes 80% of my mana. The slay evil prayer when you likely have an ego weapon already also feels not particularly useful.

Just my two cents for now

(also - it feels like this forum logs you off really quickly...)

[Grotug]

Welcome back! I stay logged in for months at a time if not years.

I haven't played the new Paladin so I can't weigh in there. One often finds very powerful weapons (especially in randarts) that do not have slay evil. In those instances the slay evil prayer is very useful.

[archolewa]

Paladins dont generally start getting much out of their high level spells until they start getting both high level, and high wisdom. Much of the game, the paladin is basically a weaker fighter with renewable staves of detect evil, and cure light wounds.

That being said, the top tier paladin spells are very powerful, just a bit situational. Being able to heal for 300 a pop is obvious. The branding spells mean you can take a mace of disruption of extra attacks and go to town like no paladin has ever gone to town before. Enchant weapon means you always have (+9, +9) amunition. And finally we have single combat.

See single combat affects everyone. See, when youve trapped a monster with single combat, their summoning powers dont work. You know who all the really dangerous monsters are in the endgame? Summoners.

You know who becomes much less scary when you can face him one and one, and you have some the second best melee in the game, oh and you can smite him regardless of what weapon you use? Morgoth.

But yeah, their midgame is a little rough.

[Pete Mack]

You really need to carry !rFire, !rCold now. Monsters do more damage, and only one class has a resistance spell.

[Sky]

just !rFire ....

[sffp]

Are you sure I can use enchant weapon on ammo?
It seems like I could only choose my weapons - but maybe I needed to look in my specifically reference my quiver (a new inventory control that I full-heartedly approve of)

The Hell wyrm was out of level - so alas - I had no access to !rFire yet
I had been discounting dragons - because I had Calris on me and that thing really SLAYS dragonkind

Historically dragon breath damage has diminished as its hitpoints diminished I assume that mechanism is still in play

[Anomander]

You can access your quiver by pressing | and yes you can definitely enchant ammo.
No !rFire till CL40?. If you don't find it in the dungeon it can often be bought in the town at Shop 5 (alchemist?).
Breath dmg is diminished when a monster loses hp. For your example of fire it is 1/3 of current hp but at most 1600 dmg. A Great Hell Wyrm breathes for ~1500 as it has an average of 4500hp when undamaged. With single Resistance that's still 500dmg which is very dangerous to any @, with double resistance only ~167 which a lvl40 @ should have been able to withstand.

[DrWho42]

you've redecorated! i like it a lot

[GrimaTheBold]

Rogues losing the Haste spell bothered me even more than Paladin losing OOD.

Overall I'm not sure I agree with how Rogue and Paladin changed.

[Pete Mack]

OOD wasn't much loss for Paladin. rHeat+rCold spell and Heal300 for reasonable mana cost--those were far more useful. Heal2000 is ridiculously expensive, and nearly useless beyond 300HP: if you are that badly hurt, you can't afford the 5% fail rate.