Early game Unangband

[Napsterbater]

Why are so many race/class combos in Unangband virtually unplayable? I tried playing a Hobbit Bard and couldn't hit anything without Bless/Guided Blow. I don't expect to be as powerful as a warrior, but this is ridiculous. My Fighting is listed as Very Bad, but this isn't reflected in the ToHit/Damage, which says I'm swinging +6/+0. Pretty good right? Even at clev 7 I still needed Bless to hit anything reliably that wasn't a centipede.

[Napsterbater]

To even kill anything at clev 1 required me to carry a sling and sling 4-8 stones at each centipede. It's unbelievably tedious.

[jens]

In vanilla a big part of your ability to hit comes from race/class skill settings. I guess it's just balanced a bit tighter...

[andrewdoull]

Why are so many race/class combos in Unangband virtually unplayable? I tried playing a Hobbit Bard and couldn't hit anything without Bless/Guided Blow. I don't expect to be as powerful as a warrior, but this is ridiculous. My Fighting is listed as Very Bad, but this isn't reflected in the ToHit/Damage, which says I'm swinging +6/+0. Pretty good right? Even at clev 7 I still needed Bless to hit anything reliably that wasn't a centipede.

Hobbits are much better at thrown weapons than melee to start with, so use that. Bards never get very good at shooting, because their bow slot should be filled with an instrument instead.

FYI - The last winner on the ladder was a bard: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11417

[Napsterbater]

Hobbits are much better at thrown weapons than melee to start with, so use that. Bards never get very good at shooting, because their bow slot should be filled with an instrument instead.

FYI - The last winner on the ladder was a bard: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11417

OK, went into the dungeon with a stack of 14 daggers. The first fruit bat I met killed me. I had yet to hit it once. Also, I'm tired of my ring specialists getting cursed rings of teleport to start out with. It would be nice if that ring was identified, too. Aren't they supposed to auto-id rings?

[Napsterbater]

Couldn't kill a shrieker mushroom with darts, this time I started with thrown weapon specialty.

[Napsterbater]

Ah well, back to Vanilla. It seems I just don't have the patience for Unangband.

[Therem Harth]

Did you encounter any traps? Last time I played Un, I was instakilled by a gas trap on level 1...

[LostTemplar]

Unangband is somewhat fun. Last time I played it I got bored by constantly being throwed into nowhere when taking stairs, just was unable to go anywhere. Maybe this was fixed, and it is worth another try.

[HallucinationMushroom]

I didn't encounter any glitches like that with Croaker. Some of my summons got ignored by uniques but that was about it.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to getting a hobbit bard off the ground would be getting your stats distributed in a satisfactory way. I would rank the 5 stats you need like this: Con, Siz, Dex, Str, Cha and put enough in agility for a non-penalty. I have been playing with some hobbit thieves lately and find that loading up on con and siz is pretty much required for survival.

You boost 2 stats every few clevels and 5 every 10th level. For experimentation purposes, I would highly recommend going into debug-mode (ctrl+a) and giving (ctrl+c) a brand new hobbit bard 99 (ctrl+o) potions of experience. Drink them and play with different stat choices to see what kind of character you can expect to have at different clevels. I didn't bother doing that with my troll bard since he only needed to focus on dex and cha, but with a hobbit it's going to be much more of a juggling act to get what you want.

I was able to go the fighter route, but I imagine a hobbit bard would have to rely on sneaking, throwing and finding items in rooms to get by for quite a while.

[Derakon]

Generally when I play a new variant, I roll up someone strong and dumb. There's always going to be surprises, and they tend to be easier to absorb if you have a few extra layers of muscle. Once I'm more experienced I'll give the fragile races/classes a shot.

[Therem Harth]

My trap instakill was with a Giant of some sort actually (I think Frost Giant). Now that I think of it, a trap doing that much damage was probably a bug.

[nooblet]

Melee in Un seems to be harder to do well than in V, even as a good melee class. I remember the high-end melee fighters were better than their V counterparts which made up for it.
The game was way too weighted towards melee classes for my liking... being a mage was perilous to the extreme, let alone a bard.

[Napsterbater]

I would rank the 5 stats you need like this: Con, Siz, Dex, Str, Cha and put enough in agility for a non-penalty. I have been playing with some hobbit thieves lately and find that loading up on con and siz is pretty much required for survival.

As a Hobbit Bard I have to put in more points to Agility than to Size in order to come out without a penalty. I'm actually thinking now that the best bet to survive is to forget about stats and keep the gold to buy a nice enchanted weapon or rod with.

You boost 2 stats every few clevels and 5 every 10th level. For experimentation purposes, I would highly recommend going into debug-mode (ctrl+a) and giving (ctrl+c) a brand new hobbit bard 99 (ctrl+o) potions of experience. Drink them and play with different stat choices to see what kind of character you can expect to have at different clevels. I didn't bother doing that with my troll bard since he only needed to focus on dex and cha, but with a hobbit it's going to be much more of a juggling act to get what you want.

See this is why I don't have the patience for Un. I like the game to make my gameplay decisions for me. I'm not one of those who spends hours poring over the D&D rulebooks looking for the right combination of spells, feats or whatever to make my character a superman. I just want to have fun. I can do this with any race/class combo in Vanilla. In Un, just to get started I have to make a zillion false starts, read spoilers, ask for advice. If I wanted that, I'd still be playing Nethack.

Sure I could just go with a Troll Warrior and bash everything to death. But I can do that in Vanilla too. I like the idea of Un because it's got a lot of promise of variablility, it looks like a game I could get lost in. That's why I keep coming back to it. I want it to work for me. But come on, I can't kill anything at clev1 dlev1 by throwing with a hobbit thrower? That's a problem. Maybe it's WAD, in which case I'm totally missing the point of how to play the game. Do I just sneak around until I find a good enough weapon to kill with and just hope I don't get instakilled by a trap?

[Napsterbater]

Tried a Hobbit Thief, and enchanting my starting weapon to +4/+4. Couldn't melee goats in town with it, but I was able to set it in a trap and kill the Goats with it. I'm thinking traps are the way to go here.