[Announce] PosChengband 6.1.0 Released

[HugoVirtuoso]

6.1.0 bug:
Escape to wilderness map still works against nearby sleeping?! monsters!

[nikheizen]

6.1.0 bug:
Escape to wilderness map still works against nearby sleeping?! monsters!

Hugo this is not a bug, please stop reporting it.

[HugoVirtuoso]

6.1.0:
Posting here to make sure chris notices -
Armory has a big pricing bug. Apparently, all Armories are affected as far as I know. I'm playing a Tonberry by the way. I have yet to test if this pricing bug has anything to do with current race. Please see these screenshots: (a), (b), and (c)

[MITZE]

Vapor Quest Bug

Tried entering Vapor Quest in no_wilderness mode, and the game crashed on me. Upon reload, the entryway for the quest is no longer there, and the quest is still in my questlog. Talking to the various quest-givers changes nothing.

This was also on the webserver, though I don't see why that should make a difference.

[debo]

I had this with the new quests also. For me personally, I built with-no-install and was running the game from the main poscheng directory. When I ran the binary from src/ I wad able to enter the new quests without crashes. The old quests didn't have this problem, I'm not sure why.

[wobbly]

Colour scheme wise anything yellow is pretty confusing for the summoner at the moment. Dreadmasters is the main one that keeps confusing me. I keep thinking they are allied summons.

[debo]

I have to say that quickband mode is good. I think actually reducing it to just the experience, healing, and drop-quality changes would be enough.

I would actually go so far as to say I think that this should just be the default way the game is played. I find most of the difficulty in poscheng is because of randomized energy, the rest boils down to annoying stuff I have to put up with to get that thrill of being put in any situation where I could be double-moved into death. The healing changes are also good, but they were combined with nerfing the heck out of healing staves, so this wasn't so obvious until the serpent fight (where I was able to mostly rely on normal !healing, which was nice.)

I don't think the unique% mode makes much difference to play length or difficulty, but I think it would be cool to add a few thousand more uniques and then expect that everyone will play with 30% or something. (This isn't a joke.) It'd be like the mugen of angband variants.

Anyhow, count this as a vote to get rid of the quickband option, get rid of some of the superfluous stuff (e.g. statboosts every 3 levels instead of every 5) and just roll the rest of the changes into the main game.

[Philip]

I had the quest entering bug with wilderness mode in Vapor Quest, as a Quylthulg with pets.

[MITZE]

Quest Bug?

Just ran into a crash while doing The Thieves' Hideout; I have a suspicion that it was caused by killing all monsters, stumbling into a summoning trap, and then killing all monsters again.

[Philip]

I got very nasty behavior trying to summon in quests which I had finished. Any interaction with the (hostile) summoned monster would crash the game. Dunno if that's related or not. It is fair for summoning not to be possible in a finished quest, but it's probably not the intended behavior.

[nikheizen]

Yeah currently if you somehow summon anything after finishing the quest, the best solution is to just leave the quest.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Future suggestion:
The Anti-Summoning attribute should really, really be considered on The One Ring artifact and maybe other rarest arifacts too.

[krazyhades]

No way. They're already very very strong.

[Susramanian]

Weaponsmith feedback

Here’s some feedback on Weaponsmiths in 5.0.5, most of which I assume is still valid for 6.1.0:

First, thank you for this wonderful class. It got me my first Poschengband winner and kept me entertained for many hours after I killed the serpent.

In the early game, the class is underwhelming. You rarely get to use your smithing abilities except to absorb hit/dam/AC essences. It takes forever to accumulate enough essences from ego items to be able to afford adding egos with Smithing. By the time you accumulate enough early-game ego essences (fire resist, free action, etc.) to smith with them, they’re not going to do a whole lot of good; you’ve already found and equipped good gear with those qualities built in. To fix this, I’d suggest lowering the essence cost of early-game egos.

In the late game, the class is extremely powerful, but much of the Smithing abilities feel superfluous. The problem is that optimal gearing (armor-wise) is virtually always the same: apply slaying to powerful ego armor. You can get your resists and stats elsewhere. It would be much more fun if Smithing armor involved more interesting choices. To fix this, I would allow Weaponsmiths to affect +hit and +dam on armor just like +AC on armor-- separately from the single stat, bonus, resist, sustain, ability, or telepathy. Of course, the size of the hit and damage bonus would need to be lower than what is currently possible when applying slaying. So for any piece of armor you want to use, you max out its hit, dam, just like its AC, then choose something else to add… and that choice would be an interesting one with lots of options. Overall, this would result in weaker Weaponsmiths in the extreme late game, which is probably a good thing, but with much more interesting and frequent Smithing.

Weapons of sharpness don’t drop after a certain depth. As near as I can tell, they’re the only source of the *sharpness* essence in the game, which is one of the best endgame essences. Trying to accumulate enough *sharpness* essences to use in the endgame shouldn’t involve going back and grinding mid-game content for drops. In my copy, I just removed the max depth on the sharpness ego.

Late in the game I found myself resenting the extreme rarity of Crafting scrolls, and thinking that it would be really fun if Weaponsmiths had an ability that worked similarly. What if using the “Absorb all essences” ability on an artifact granted an “essence of crafting” or something, and those could be used to fuel a smithing ability that mimicked a Crafting scroll? Maybe five essences of crafting per use.

It would be nice if the “Remove added essence” ability actually gave you back the essences you remove, like the “Absorb all essences” ability. The fact that it doesn’t makes me hesitant to use Smithing in many situations.

Once again, tons of fun! I enjoyed it immensely, despite the wall of text above. Overall, I’d like to see changes that make Smithing something that Weaponsmiths use more frequently, because crafting stuff is great fun, and of course we want to do it more often

[Flauterfiddle]

I'd just like to say a huge thank you to Chris for this release. I've missed a few releases and this one is like a whole new game!

I *love* the change with the staffs and wands recharging. Much, much more sensible and restores a lot of balance to the early game.

As always, trying to win with a Possessor, the best class I have ever played in any variant, bar none :=)