[Announce] PosChengband 4.0.0 Released

[krazyhades]

Cool, a new version. I'm happy with the 555 fix. But, not with clone monster. With the loss of clone monster (And 'dispel' still really being 'Uncounterable Dispel All'), that's gg. I guess I'll go for another nightmare win in the future when the game goes in a direction that appeals to me. RIP.

(Disclaimer: I haven't played the latest version, just going by what I read.)

I'm more or less neutral on removing clone wands...I never used them to grind drops or xp anyways...you get more enough just adventuring the various dungeons.

But Dispel is pretty stupid, yes. It's main purpose seems to be automatically making characters that center around one or more major buffs feel awful and play mostly like worse versions of other classes in many situations. Particularly annoying because most classes that use lots of buffs are hybrids that suffer even more than most because their worse mana pools and casting fail rates make a dispel turn extra punishing. My attempts have led me to decide there is no reason to take a buff realm (especially craft) over one with healing, damage of a good element, or sorcery.

While we're at it, the overwhelming majority of Brand Weapon spells are awful because even on high mages they show up way too late, long after all relevant monsters resist, and all your weapons are already better unbrandable artifacts or egos...and the few great boosted non-ego non-artifacts that you do find you will want to save for artifact creation or reforging, not a worthless branding. Perhaps most egregious is the one in Death, as poison is super useless, the spell shows up super late, and Death is already really bad on hybrids, containing essentially a haste with fear immunity and lowers AC (very serious cost!), the genocides, a reasonable temp resist spell, and that's basically it. But death was pretty bad anyways, because even on pure casters that can use the offense, everything resists, and the power level of the Genocide/Mass Genocide is way too low to rely on...the staff exists at similar power and the scroll at much higher.

[Cold_Heart]

I'm more or less neutral on removing clone wands...I never used them to grind drops or xp anyways...you get more enough just adventuring the various dungeons.

But Dispel is pretty stupid, yes. It's main purpose seems to be automatically making characters that center around one or more major buffs feel awful and play mostly like worse versions of other classes in many situations. Particularly annoying because most classes that use lots of buffs are hybrids that suffer even more than most because their worse mana pools and casting fail rates make a dispel turn extra punishing. My attempts have led me to decide there is no reason to take a buff realm (especially craft) over one with healing, damage of a good element, or sorcery.

While we're at it, the overwhelming majority of Brand Weapon spells are awful because even on high mages they show up way too late, long after all relevant monsters resist, and all your weapons are already better unbrandable artifacts or egos...and the few great boosted non-ego non-artifacts that you do find you will want to save for artifact creation or reforging, not a worthless branding. Perhaps most egregious is the one in Death, as poison is super useless, the spell shows up super late, and Death is already really bad on hybrids, containing essentially a haste with fear immunity and lowers AC (very serious cost!), the genocides, a reasonable temp resist spell, and that's basically it. But death was pretty bad anyways, because even on pure casters that can use the offense, everything resists, and the power level of the Genocide/Mass Genocide is way too low to rely on...the staff exists at similar power and the scroll at much higher.

While I agree that elemental branding spells are somewhat useless, I can not agree with what you say about Death school at all. I do not know what kind of experience with this school you have but here are some notes from a pure caster (sorcerer) point of view:

1) It gives you early poison resist buff (earliest in game?)
2) It gives you early AoE nuke (earliest in game?)
3) Malediction and Horrify stun greatly
4) Unlimited uses of genocide and mass genocide. I don't you give this the credit it deserves; starting every level with a genocide of inconvenient targets makes life substantially easier.
5) Vampirism True - 300 healing + 300 damage to living in one turn. I don't think you give this the credit it deserves either. This is *the* spell that can keep a mage alive through midgame, melting ancient dragons, wyrms, giants and the like.
6) Animate Dead, Raise the Dead - I don't need this on sorcerer because I have better sources of pets usually, but on 2-school mage or hybrid why wouldn't you want varied and hillarious high level pets that get better the deeper you are, for free?
7) Battle Frenzy claims to lower your AC but in reality it not only does not do that, but it actually gives you 5 AC. This spell is effectively self-haste + self-heroism + self bless combobuff. Most characters would want want want all of this.
8) Id/*id* from book, even semi-reliable, is nice to have in the long run
9) Polymorph V can be useful as well, as it has many interesting properties
10) Nether storm has potentially ridiculous DPS against non-netherimmune targets if you have the mana (I think highest dps from all nukes).
11) Wraithform - this spell alone makes it worth using the Death school.

[wobbly]

Agree on brands. The only thing I've ever used it for is poison resist on a wizard staff. Disagree with death being bad on hybrids. For the paladin you've got a stun, a resist, a haste+heroism+bless & berserk.

If you're a ranger life is going to have to compete with herbal heal. I haven't played a life ranger to see how they compare but I assume the fail & SPs cost are going to be better for nature there. Their 2nd realm tends to be quite bad.

[krazyhades]

Wraithform is good, but the majority of death is really shitty lategame. Pretty much everybody who wants it has access to plenty of regular Genocide at similar spellpower with the staves. Early game their AoE and Maledection are good, and as I already said yes their early buff spell is good, but haste is unexciting (literally every character that makes it to high level is already permahasted very very easily), their damage spells are heavily resisted by almost every relevant late enemy (demon/undead/serpent), vampirism true is great but only works on life-bearing monsters (which are by far the least important type to care about).

Death later on is far far worse on hybrids than life, and far far worse on pure casters than chaos.

[Cold_Heart]

Wraithform is good, but the majority of death is really shitty lategame. Pretty much everybody who wants it has access to plenty of regular Genocide at similar spellpower with the staves. Early game their AoE and Maledection are good, and as I already said yes their early buff spell is good, but haste is unexciting (literally every character that makes it to high level is already permahasted very very easily), their damage spells are heavily resisted by almost every relevant late enemy (demon/undead/serpent), vampirism true is great but only works on life-bearing monsters (which are by far the least important type to care about).

Death later on is far far worse on hybrids than life, and far far worse on pure casters than chaos.

With carrying Death books you save up to four inventory slots (geno device, massgeno device, self-haste device, *id* device), which can be used for other interesting devices or swapitems for extra flexibility. And I don't know what you mean by "by far the least important type" of monsters - elemental "D"s are super good sources of gear and experience throughout the game, and with some resistances you can facetank them with vamp true easily.

It is the most flexible of all schools, providing a good mix of offensive (decent nukes), defensive (buffs, restore life) and supportive (id, summoning, detection) capabilities. Sure, the Chaos has probably better nukes but it has no defensive spells, no summoning and has potentially lethal failure to cast consequences. And Life has no attack spells worth bothering with, no summoning, no haste. So for a build that benefits from flexibility, Death would be a better pick in the long run.

Also, wraithform.

[krazyhades]

I agree that Vampirism True is incredible against life-bearing opponents, and definitely carries Death high-mages for a long time, but its utility falls off a ton after level 50 (when basically 1/3 of the game still remains). I like the feel of Death realm in some ways, and I agree that you point out a lot of its strengths, but I still think it is worse than any realm except for Arcane and Craft because of the lack of reliable heals and trouble hurting demons/undead without a golfbag of devices. Also, hybrid classes have a *huge* amount of trouble getting Wraithform castable, and it costs them a huge % of their mana pool, and the hybrids also basically cannot use much of the offense/vamp true. Book casting Genocide is in my experience super underwhelming because of the low power level when you get it; by the time you are higher level yourself it is not really better than a Staff of Genocide, and before then a Wand of Teleport Other is generally as good or better.

So basically, yes, I agree you point out death's strengths, but I don't think that's enough to make it better than Life, Chaos, Sorcery, Nature, Daemon, or Armageddon. I haven't played much with Crusade, so I can't judge there really, and Trump is kindof...odd, not sure how to compare it with Death. I think Death is only clearly better than Arcane and maybe Craft.

[debo]

The only good realms are ones with rockets. The rest are garbage.

[HugoVirtuoso]

The only good realms are ones with rockets. The rest are garbage.

Example of this: Armageddon

[Cold_Heart]

Rockets are terrible in both damage per mana and damage per turn.

All schools of magic are good.

[murphy]

I dont understand the demands for monster lore, isnt a staff of probing sufficient if you're willing to spend one inventory slot and one turn.

I just discovered I can use weaponsmith powers to enchant a poison needle, is that a bug?

[krazyhades]

I dont understand the demands for monster lore, isnt a staff of probing sufficient if you're willing to spend one inventory slot and one turn.

I think for the most part the issue lies in the fact that, while monster knowledge is preserved across games played on the same savefile, in practice people are not in a position to always only use their one save. They may delete the save on dying, or create a new save with a different name, or make a save on a new version, or on a different computer, or have multiple concurrent characters on different saves.

If you in practice actually only had to probe a monster once to have permanent access to knowledge of it, this would be fine, but in reality that does not happen for most people in most situations.

[Cold_Heart]

I think poschengband would benefit from having a system like "pseudo-id for monsters" where one could roughly evaluate how dangerous any detected enemy is for @ without any previous knowledge or spoilers. E.g. wearing no rFire and evaluating a hell wyrm would tell you "better run away" even though you don't actually know yet that it breathes fire.

I think a system like this will go a long way; a lot of MUDs have it, too.

[AnonymousHero]

I think for the most part the issue lies in the fact that, while monster knowledge is preserved across games played on the same savefile, in practice people are not in a position to always only use their one save. They may delete the save on dying, or create a new save with a different name, or make a save on a new version, or on a different computer, or have multiple concurrent characters on different saves.

Yup. Certainly, for me it's mostly about the annoyance of having to start all over again probing things (sounds wrong, doesn't it?). I actually never use Probing items/skills -- I just read the r_info.txt/monster.txt/whatever instead. Turns out it's more convenient to just have it open in a separate terminal/editor and use text-search to locate the monster you care about.

Eventually you get to know most of the monsters pretty well anyway, so even that becomes redundant for all but the most exotic monsters. (Which, granted, there are quite a few of in Poscheng )

If you in practice actually only had to probe a monster once to have permanent access to knowledge of it, this would be fine, but in reality that does not happen for most people in most situations.

This would be much better, but would still have the strange effect of eventually making Probing items into junk items (likewise skills). EDIT: Well, alright you also gain concrete HP knowledge, but that's so marginal that I've not even taken advantage of that information even once during a decade+ of play.

In my fork of ToME 2.x, I've decided to just remove the monster memory entirely in favor of full knowledge. Much simpler and gets rid of ton of (likely) buggy code.

In practice it's not like it's particularly unbalancing.

[murphy]

well i'm just speaking to my own preferences here, but a game where winning is predicated on using spoilers isnt my idea of a fun game. I play randarts because I dont want to memorize all the standarts. I stopped doing fixed quests because sting always seems to be in the same place. and to get the scoop on monsters, im ok with carrying probing :-)

[AnonymousHero]

well i'm just speaking to my own preferences here, but a game where winning is predicated on using spoilers isnt my idea of a fun game. I play randarts because I dont want to memorize all the standarts. I stopped doing fixed quests because sting always seems to be in the same place. and to get the scoop on monsters, im ok with carrying probing :-)

Well, you don't have to use spoilers, but if you're anything like me, eventually you will (passively) memorize what (almost) every effect/monster does. (Of course some things in Poscheng are so illogical that they might be beyond learning this way. I'm thinking specifically the whole "virtues" system here. Thankfully it's optional.)