Angband 4.2.2

[Grotug]

Also: the way to get a lot of charges is to drop identical items on the ground and recharge them individually. A stack of 7 STM will hold something like 90 charges after this.

Would it be too difficult to program recharging a stack to do the tedious thing without having to actually do the tedious thing? How cool would it be to cast an expensive spell called greater recharging and have the spell recharge a stack of 7 wands of STM and occasionally (7 times more often in this case than doing it the tedious way) get a message: "one of your wands of STM backfires! You have 6 wands of STM and 77 charges." Sometimes, with such large stacks, you'd get two wands backfiring when casting this spell for the simple reason of how RNG works.

The only problem I see with doing this is that recharging 7 wands of STM takes a lot more energy the long way than recharging a stack the way recharging a stack currently works. So I have come up with a proposal for addressing this:

To balance the overpoweredness of recharging a large stack in this new way for the same energy cost of current recharging, I would propose removing fast casting and replace it with a spell called greater recharging, a spell now really living up to its name and distinctly different and more powerful than the current recharging spell and scrolls.

Current Recharge spell costs 5 mana, but recharges so few charges to a single wand or stack that the spell in its current form is tedious and needing to be cast all the time.

The way the spell would work in my vision is that you'd get some kind of mana 'discount' for each item in the stack that you are recharging (ie. the larger the stack, the greater the mana value for each item recharged in the stack). The spell would be lousy on a single item, but as a stack got bigger, the value of the spell would increase. For examples:

Greater recharging would cost 8 mana to recharge one wand/staff, but
14 mana for a stack of 2,
19 mana for a stack of 3,
23 mana for a stack of 4,
26 mana for a stack of 5,
28 mana for a stack of 6,
30 mana for a stack of 7,
and 2 more mana for each additional wand/staff in the stack, so
40 mana for a stack of 12,
50 mana for a stack of 17 (I include these ridiculous stack sizes because I can see a situation where Sky is running around on DL 98 collecting an insane number of wands of annihilation for the final fights. )

Fail rates would be the same as the current recharging spell. The main benefit of greater recharging would be the convenience and discount on mana and energy when recharging large stacks, with the benefits increasing with increasing stack size. This is just an example of how the spell would scale for increasing stack size. It might obviously need to be tweaked with play testing, but given that you are getting basically free energy when casting a stack with this spell it seems fair the spell doesn't gain "parity" with the tedious method until your stack size is quite large.

I don't know how much energy it costs to recharge a single wand currently, but you could scale the energy used so that its cost reaches 100 energy with a stack of 5 or greater.

[Bogatyr]

This sounds incredibly tedious, and strikes me as a good reason to tweak recharging so that recharging a stack isnt so heavily penalized.

I know this trick -- but I thought recharging was rewritten a while ago to make this unnecessary? It seems even recharging from 0 charges backfires much more often now. Staves of Detect Invisible, which usually come with 20+ charges, can't be charged higher than about 12 before they explode in 4.2.2.

I'm fine with recharging adding only a few charges per spell, but I think the charging limits should be increased back to near 4.2.0 levels and the backfire reduced back to around 4.2.0 levels. At the most, maintaining a bunch of highly charged stacks amounts to maybe 7 restore mana potions, which are already reasonably plentiful, and it takes a lot of time and mana investment to do.

Limiting the # of charges added per spell alone breaks the charge-tap cheap infinite mana cycle of 4.2.0. In a serious fight there's just no time then to do that. And if I want to spent my time to pre-charge up my stacks before a fight, that should be a play style that's allowed.

[archolewa]

Also: the way to get a lot of charges is to drop identical items on the ground and recharge them individually. A stack of 7 STM will hold something like 90 charges after this.

This sounds incredibly tedious, and strikes me as a good reason to tweak recharging so that recharging a stack isnt so heavily penalized.

[Pete Mack]

Also: the way to get a lot of charges is to drop identical items on the ground and recharge them individually. A stack of 7 STM will hold something like 90 charges after this.

[Pete Mack]

You never see the unique 'v' coming as it never moves. You may want to change its color, as the pale violet is hard to notice. I recommend editing monster.txt to give it the SHIMMER flag.

[Bogatyr]

So I just got to a game-winning clvl 40 gnome mage in 4.2.2 before dying in a major vault on DL 74 (Narya, Soulkeeper, Ingwe, Rohirrim, RoS+10, RoS+9, the list goes on), and about 20 uniques, the unique vortex got me, never saw him coming. Decided my Narya and RoS+10 left me with too few HP so I swapped in Calris. Duh. Decided I didn't really want all the not-yet-TO'd guys waking up, so took off Calris. But then my HP were low *and* I had woken up some things, obviously wasn't aware of 'v' waking up, though. First gnome mage death in many years, winning's become quite easy with stealthy mages. Pissed me off, because I'd just found Narya and was preparing to go unique Balrog hunting (Smaug was there, too).

My take on 4.2.2 is that it's OK for mages. But recharge / tap have been swung so heavily in the nerfed direction after the "free infinite mana" excesses of 4.2.0 that they've become unusable. Recharge backfires way too frequently and at lower charge counts, so building up a decent stack of charges to tap later is nigh on impossible. I found myself basically never using Tap, and just reaching for !Restore Mana every time. So I'd say: ease up on the charge limits a bit, and backfire a bit less frequently. It was fun to have another means to gain mana back, now that's gone.

[Nick]

Thanks everyone for all the commentary, bug reports etc on 4.2.2. They are not being ignored.

[Sphara]

Necromancer 4.2.2 on angband.live:
Warg Form spell description doesn't mention you getting two bonus attacks. Just that you gain a form of a warg and get Berserk status with cost of some HP.

Don't know if this is intentional or not, but the extra attacks are invariably the reason to cast this spell.

[wobbly]

The changes that stop item landing on webs is causing arrows to boomerang.

[wobbly]

There seems to be a bug with lighting. I'm wielding forasgil (+1 light) but don't have a light radius without a torch.

Edit: ok, I can still see my own square, e.g. cast and read scrolls

[will_asher]

It was an orc, so he wouldn't be standing on impassable rubble.

(I think you should be able to target monsters in a wall too, but that's another thing)

[PowerWyrm]

Found another bug: unable to target monsters who are standing on rubble.
EDIT: weird... sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. Not sure what makes the difference.

Passable vs unpassable rubble?

[will_asher]

Found another bug: unable to target monsters who are standing on rubble.
EDIT: weird... sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. Not sure what makes the difference.

[Nick]

My gripe with the gauntlet level is that they don't seem that rare. And of course there is no corresponding reward to the risk.

They should be roughly 1 in 200 levels, and only deeper than level 20.

Point taken on the rewards.

[jevansau]

My gripe with the gauntlet level is that they don't seem that rare. And of course there is no corresponding reward to the risk.