Angband 4.2.2

[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.

[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.

[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]

Let's not lose fast cast, the Haste Self spell was always a defining moment in a mage's career. In fact, I think we should put it back closer to where it came from in 4.2.0. I keep mentioning this but I haven't seen any comments: make fast cast attack speed dependent: so that at +0 speed it gives 2x (replacing the lost haste self but only for spells), trailing off to the current 4/3 to +20 speed and higher. This solves both the loss of Haste Self in the early game, and solves being too powerful for high-speed characters in the end-game, but still leaves a reason to cast it.

[will_asher]

Wand of darkness says it does 6d8 damage, but it doesn't appear to do any damage.

EDIT: black market had an unIDed ring of the mouse on sale for $0. So I bought it for the ID. Black market bought the ring back for $90 and now has it on sale for $900. I thought shopkeepers were supposed to know what an idem does?

[Pete Mack]

Plural of Uruk is Urukhai

[will_asher]

Going through the monster list for my variant and wondering why plasma/time/nether hounds give more XP (each) than the ancient dragons native to the same depth.

[Pete Mack]

Time Hounds really should give a ton of EXP, each. Plasma Hounds, not so much. Their main purpose is to keep you from teleporting, except in rare, dire circumstances.

[archolewa]

Plural of Uruk is Urukhai

Are we sure about this? My understanding is that the Uruk are a type of orc created (or at least used) by Sauron, who have been around for a long time, and the Urukhai are the new mixed breed of orcs and men created by Saruman.

Im pretty sure the LOTR appendices make mention of Uruks from well before the time of LOTR.

[Pete Mack]

Could be. I just remember Urukhai as a plural. But it could well be an adjective.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Are we sure about this? My understanding is that the Uruk are a type of orc created (or at least used) by Sauron, who have been around for a long time, and the Urukhai are the new mixed breed of orcs and men created by Saruman.

Im pretty sure the LOTR appendices make mention of Uruks from well before the time of LOTR.

Partially correct. "Uruk" (Orc) - "hai" (folk). Uruk-hai is black speech for "Orc folk". The terms Uruk and Uruk-hai were used interchangeably by Tolkien.

Saruman believed he was creating something new, but in fact was replicating Sauron's method. Uruks first appeared in the Third Age in 2475 in the conquering of Ithilien and the attack and overrun of Osgiliath.

[will_asher]

When you disarm a trap with a rod, the trap reappears after a couple moves. Is that a bug?

[bughunter]

When you disarm a trap with a rod, the trap reappears after a couple moves. Is that a bug?

Does the rod say "disarm" or "disable?"

[malcontent]

When you disarm a trap with a rod, the trap reappears after a couple moves. Is that a bug?

Rods of disable trap seem to have the same affect as the mage spell to disable traps - "KILL_TRAP". From my experience this is always temporary and annoying.

My favorite disable trap method is stone to mud (go around it).

[archolewa]

Rods of Disable Trap are very nice for chest traps though, especially the summon, and explosion traps.