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After playing for a long time on version 4.0.5, I've been trying out version 4.2.1 and seeing how it shakes out. My previous first impressions post related my impressions after my first win, using a fighter character to test out the basic system.
This time I decided to test one of the new character classes: the blackguard. I played twice and died twice in the endgame before winning on my third try (http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=23845), which basically gave me almost three full games to base my impressions of the blackguard on.
Before I get into the blackguard specifically, I want to discuss more general impressions of Angband 4.2.1.
In general, I found that my previous first impressions were largely confirmed (I urge people to read that post). I won't repeat everything in that post but I do want to highlight certain things, and mention a couple new general items.
* The upgunning of so many monsters is pretty irritating. Now there are tons of monsters more powerful even than powerful uniques, which doesn't make that much sense. Also, some of them offer criminally low experience points for killing them--the Maia are the worst offenders here, where there are several very powerful and dangerous maia only worth a few thousand XP. Once a upon a time, maia were a great source of consumables for the end game. Now they are simply something to avoid, to destruct, or to teleport away. Disappointing.
* The upgunning of artifacts is equally annoying. There are a virtually unlimited number of artifact weapons with +20 to over +30 damage, while artifacts with stat gains of +5 or +6 are very common, and immunities are routine. There are now far more powerful rings, as well as artifact torches and lamps as well, adding to the mix.
Note that the solution here is NOT simply to make artifacts weaker, because you basically need more powerful items in order to have a chance of dealing with all of the super powerful monsters. Rather, BOTH artifacts and monsters need to be taken back down to a normal, non-steroidal level. There are ways to make Angband more difficult for veterans without simply making everything more gigantic.
* It is good that items have a better chance of affecting monsters, as in 4.0.x many items were worthless because they were more likely to just lose you a turn than have a useful affect on a target. However, it looks like most of these have 100% chance of success. This makes Rods of Slow Monster almost broken, as they are guaranteed of slowing everything except huorns and vortices, unless a use failure occurs. Even Sauron and Morgoth are slowed, although the rod for some reason malfunctions more often when used against Morgoth. I think there needs to be a small chance that the rods will have no effect. I accumulated 4 rods of slow monster relatively early and basically fought against slowed opponents for the whole rest of the game.
* Some of the items are now too common. In previous versions, some magic items could be found only at such a depth that the player probably already had better gear before finding the items in question. Other items, useful when a player had 2 or more, were simply too rare for that to happen except once in a blue moon. Some of this has been fixed, but Rods of Magic Mapping are now way too common and players can easily accumulate a huge stack of them pretty early. I think there was some overcompensation here.
* Stairs. It's really annoying that stairs no longer appear in rooms, except for those "rooms" which contain de facto corridors within them. Also, stairs are too often concentrated in those rooms, either, with three or four down stairs in one of those rooms, for example. The previous system of stair placement was much better.
* I now have no idea what missile weapons can do in terms of damage, because apparently it's all been changed.
* My sense so far is that playing styles are likely to change quite a bit. With 4.0.x I would proceed down the dungeon at a good clip, then once I had the stats and items (esp. esp/detection and teleport other) to survive in deep depths, I would move down much faster, then spend some time at the deepest levels to get whatever consumables or other missing items I needed before I went into the final battles.
I see no reason to do that now. The deepest levels are far too dangerous to want to spend a lot of time in them, while it is easy to get endgame weapons and other powerful artifacts even in the mid-depth dungeon levels. Now it seems wiser to build up a character and get as many consumables as possible at levels shallower than DL80 or so, then try to get to DL99 while spending as little time as possible in the dungeon levels in-between.
* I'm not sure why there seems to be so many ways to get strength and constitution back, but not dexterity.
* To reiterate from the previous post, all the new tunneling or rock-traversing creatures are just irritating. They also mean that characters really need to have a lot of teleport other or destruction just in order to survive. Some of these need to be eliminated or have those abilities removed.
Now on to the Blackguard class. Overall, I liked the class less than I hoped I would. It starts with a really strange rationale--it's essentially a berserker who also casts magic spells, which just doesn't make sense. It's also something that's very hard to find an analogue for in the LotR mythos.
* Melee. While I like the idea of a character class that likes to use bigass weapons, penalizing the character for using smaller weapons when the character class is supposed to love melee seems like a bad idea. It seems to me that a bonus for using big weapons, normal use of small weapons, and a very big penalty for missile/thrown weapons would make more sense. Because of the character's inability to use small weapons, as well as only having 5 attacks, plus something of a missile penalty, my impression is that it seems rather weaker than a fighter overall.
* Spells. The blackguard class has awful spells, in general. Ideally, one would want each spellcasting class to have at least one "killer app" utility spell (like object detection or speed for rogues, or heal for paladins or orb of draining for priests) as well as at least one "super" spell (like mass banishment or restoration or word of destruction, etc.).
The blackguard certainly has a killer app utility spell in the spell that makes him immune to confusion; I constantly cast it. The berserk spell is also nice, as is the venom spell. The shape change spell was fun to mess around with but by the third game I was hardly using it, simply because there are many tactical limitations with being in animal form. Unholy reprieve was certainly handy and the tunneling spell was useful. All the other spells had little or no use to me. So basically I was regularly casting just a few spells and ignoring all others. I easily could have left the 2nd and 3rd spellbooks back at home when I went against Morgoth and Sauron.
I think the spells need to be improved for this class, to make them more interesting and useful, or the class should not be spellcasting and some of its abilities should be made inherent. It would be a natural for this melee-loving class to have a "teleport to" spell, for example, that would bring far away monsters close to it so it could engage in melee.
The character class should also have a spell or ability that would help it fight while surrounded--something that would give it more attacks or more damage the more monsters are adjacent to it.
Also, I should note that the spellpoints to spells ratio is strange here. Given how few spells are useful (but also even assuming all are useful), characters can easily accumulate 350 spell points, most of which will never be used, even with the mana draining penalty for the character.
I found mana scrolls of very little use for this class, even in the final battles.
This time I decided to test one of the new character classes: the blackguard. I played twice and died twice in the endgame before winning on my third try (http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=23845), which basically gave me almost three full games to base my impressions of the blackguard on.
Before I get into the blackguard specifically, I want to discuss more general impressions of Angband 4.2.1.
In general, I found that my previous first impressions were largely confirmed (I urge people to read that post). I won't repeat everything in that post but I do want to highlight certain things, and mention a couple new general items.
* The upgunning of so many monsters is pretty irritating. Now there are tons of monsters more powerful even than powerful uniques, which doesn't make that much sense. Also, some of them offer criminally low experience points for killing them--the Maia are the worst offenders here, where there are several very powerful and dangerous maia only worth a few thousand XP. Once a upon a time, maia were a great source of consumables for the end game. Now they are simply something to avoid, to destruct, or to teleport away. Disappointing.
* The upgunning of artifacts is equally annoying. There are a virtually unlimited number of artifact weapons with +20 to over +30 damage, while artifacts with stat gains of +5 or +6 are very common, and immunities are routine. There are now far more powerful rings, as well as artifact torches and lamps as well, adding to the mix.
Note that the solution here is NOT simply to make artifacts weaker, because you basically need more powerful items in order to have a chance of dealing with all of the super powerful monsters. Rather, BOTH artifacts and monsters need to be taken back down to a normal, non-steroidal level. There are ways to make Angband more difficult for veterans without simply making everything more gigantic.
* It is good that items have a better chance of affecting monsters, as in 4.0.x many items were worthless because they were more likely to just lose you a turn than have a useful affect on a target. However, it looks like most of these have 100% chance of success. This makes Rods of Slow Monster almost broken, as they are guaranteed of slowing everything except huorns and vortices, unless a use failure occurs. Even Sauron and Morgoth are slowed, although the rod for some reason malfunctions more often when used against Morgoth. I think there needs to be a small chance that the rods will have no effect. I accumulated 4 rods of slow monster relatively early and basically fought against slowed opponents for the whole rest of the game.
* Some of the items are now too common. In previous versions, some magic items could be found only at such a depth that the player probably already had better gear before finding the items in question. Other items, useful when a player had 2 or more, were simply too rare for that to happen except once in a blue moon. Some of this has been fixed, but Rods of Magic Mapping are now way too common and players can easily accumulate a huge stack of them pretty early. I think there was some overcompensation here.
* Stairs. It's really annoying that stairs no longer appear in rooms, except for those "rooms" which contain de facto corridors within them. Also, stairs are too often concentrated in those rooms, either, with three or four down stairs in one of those rooms, for example. The previous system of stair placement was much better.
* I now have no idea what missile weapons can do in terms of damage, because apparently it's all been changed.
* My sense so far is that playing styles are likely to change quite a bit. With 4.0.x I would proceed down the dungeon at a good clip, then once I had the stats and items (esp. esp/detection and teleport other) to survive in deep depths, I would move down much faster, then spend some time at the deepest levels to get whatever consumables or other missing items I needed before I went into the final battles.
I see no reason to do that now. The deepest levels are far too dangerous to want to spend a lot of time in them, while it is easy to get endgame weapons and other powerful artifacts even in the mid-depth dungeon levels. Now it seems wiser to build up a character and get as many consumables as possible at levels shallower than DL80 or so, then try to get to DL99 while spending as little time as possible in the dungeon levels in-between.
* I'm not sure why there seems to be so many ways to get strength and constitution back, but not dexterity.
* To reiterate from the previous post, all the new tunneling or rock-traversing creatures are just irritating. They also mean that characters really need to have a lot of teleport other or destruction just in order to survive. Some of these need to be eliminated or have those abilities removed.
Now on to the Blackguard class. Overall, I liked the class less than I hoped I would. It starts with a really strange rationale--it's essentially a berserker who also casts magic spells, which just doesn't make sense. It's also something that's very hard to find an analogue for in the LotR mythos.
* Melee. While I like the idea of a character class that likes to use bigass weapons, penalizing the character for using smaller weapons when the character class is supposed to love melee seems like a bad idea. It seems to me that a bonus for using big weapons, normal use of small weapons, and a very big penalty for missile/thrown weapons would make more sense. Because of the character's inability to use small weapons, as well as only having 5 attacks, plus something of a missile penalty, my impression is that it seems rather weaker than a fighter overall.
* Spells. The blackguard class has awful spells, in general. Ideally, one would want each spellcasting class to have at least one "killer app" utility spell (like object detection or speed for rogues, or heal for paladins or orb of draining for priests) as well as at least one "super" spell (like mass banishment or restoration or word of destruction, etc.).
The blackguard certainly has a killer app utility spell in the spell that makes him immune to confusion; I constantly cast it. The berserk spell is also nice, as is the venom spell. The shape change spell was fun to mess around with but by the third game I was hardly using it, simply because there are many tactical limitations with being in animal form. Unholy reprieve was certainly handy and the tunneling spell was useful. All the other spells had little or no use to me. So basically I was regularly casting just a few spells and ignoring all others. I easily could have left the 2nd and 3rd spellbooks back at home when I went against Morgoth and Sauron.
I think the spells need to be improved for this class, to make them more interesting and useful, or the class should not be spellcasting and some of its abilities should be made inherent. It would be a natural for this melee-loving class to have a "teleport to" spell, for example, that would bring far away monsters close to it so it could engage in melee.
The character class should also have a spell or ability that would help it fight while surrounded--something that would give it more attacks or more damage the more monsters are adjacent to it.
Also, I should note that the spellpoints to spells ratio is strange here. Given how few spells are useful (but also even assuming all are useful), characters can easily accumulate 350 spell points, most of which will never be used, even with the mana draining penalty for the character.
I found mana scrolls of very little use for this class, even in the final battles.
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