[Announce] FrogComposband 7.0.mango released

[Derakon]

If I recall correctly, frequency of criticals depends on your accuracy, while quality of criticals depends on weapon weight. Vorpal weapons get their own separate roll, where if you succeed at getting a vorpal critical, you then roll again, and keep rolling until you fail, with the number of successes determining the quality of the crit.

[Pete Mack]

Usually it depends on weapon weight. (A big weapon like a MoD or Grond gets way more superb and *GREAT* criticals.)

[Derakon]

As I understand it, the weapon damage display in this line of variants is done by simulating a large number of attacks and taking the average of the results. Assuming the sim calculates criticals (and I see no reason why it wouldn't), crits should be included in the weapon damage display.

[wobbly]

V has multiples as well. I'm pretty sure frog estimates it too but not necessarily that well. Sharpies in particular seem to do more then is displayed & I remember Chris explaining that it shows an estimate. It's probably worth turning the numbers on sometime & comparing if you are curious. I've never checked but may now that it's come up.

[Pete Mack]

In V, at least, criticals are included in weapon damage estimates. Big dice weapons do up to 10% more than their nominal damage.

[Sideways]

[*]To auto-pickup artifacts you need to enter "artifact" in the autodestroyer, for it to be consistent with the other commands in the autodestroyer it would need to be "artifacts"

"Artifact" is a modifier similar to "common", "nameless", "ego" etc., rather than an item type like "armors", "shooters", "weapons", so the singular is consistent. I am currently testing a pickpref with "?unidentified artifact items", which so far seems to be producing the desired behavior; viz. un-IDed sensed artifacts are automatically picked up and identified, and listed as wanted objects if they couldn't be identified, but already identified artifacts are not automatically picked up or listed as wanted objects.

[CyclopsSlayer]

The following is my opinion, hopefully it is reasonably accurate

Critical hits are multipliers, "Good hit", "Great hit" and "*GREAT* hit" are criticals, each has a higher multiplier than the previous
Sharp/vorpal weapons apply a multiplier to the base damage of the weapon, "You have gouged him", "You have cut him in half!" are vorpal criticals, each with a higher multiplier than the base, and the latter with a higher multiplier than the former
The effects of the multipliers are more visible on a 6d8 weapon than on a 1d6 weapon

It may be that, because of the way armour works, criticals are especially helpful against opponents with high AC

Thank you. that matched my gut feelings about them, but without seeing an actual damage number, (ie. You hit for 42, 21 after armor. etc) it is hard to rate efficacy of weapons.

[CyclopsSlayer]

Just a curiosity thing, but is there somewhere that documents the difference in the various attack messages?
Hit and Miss are of course obvious. What about 'Good hit', 'Great Hit', 'Gouge', 'Backsatb', 'Cut half through', etc? Are these messages simple color, or do they have meaning? And if so what meaning?

[Sideways]

A few quick notes:

- Mushrooms of cure poison do cure all poison.
- Potions of restore mana are very useful even to no-SP classes (other than berserkers) because they partially recharge devices. I routinely take potions of restore mana to the Serpent fight on characters with no SP.
- Barbarian talismans with -1 INT are okay, they are not empty.
- Everyone receives a blade of chaos for sand pit. You don't need to individually report every class it's useless to because it's useless to everybody, barring a really lucky ego or artifact roll.

[CyclopsSlayer]

With weapons bonuses and dual wielding, half the bonus is applied to each weapon, so each weapon gets (0.5, 1.5) from the new gloves
And with the displayed weapon damage, I think it runs many simulations and takes an average, so the displayed damage can vary a bit

Thanks, it just seemed odd that it didn't change the main hand at all, and had a major effect on the offhand.
I know with rings they only affect the matching Hand. ie. A Ring of Combat +Dmg on the right hand only affects the right-hand weapon.

[CyclopsSlayer]

Math Oddity

So, I was dual wielding a pair of daggers on a Ninja.
Wearing the Set of Gauntlets (+1,+1) from the Thieves quest I was doing 39 Main hand, 21 Offhand. I upgraded the Gauntlets to a Studded (+1,+3) set.
The damage changed from 39 > 39 Main, and 21 > 25 Offhand.

Really seems to be odd rounding or something.

[Derakon]

I have little experience in playing characters with SP and there is an attack against such characters that catches me off guard, I think it is something like "It gazes into your eyes and you are blasted by psionic energy": it damages, confuses and drains all SP, is there any resistance against such attacks, for instance does chaos res give some resistance to it

Being blasted by psionic energy is a spell that dates from Vanilla, and is harmful to both magical and mundane characters. Assuming FrogCom doesn't change things, the only defense is your standard saving throw, so e.g. an amulet of antimagic would be helpful, as would improving your WIS score.

[wobbly]

Found a figurine of a jumping fireball. I don't use figurines often & they're actually pretty harmless but I did think it was cute & would be happy with them appearing often enough to carry a few.

[CyclopsSlayer]

Monks, live and die by their stuns. Their damage in the early game is rather pathetic. Slays and Ego effects would really help there. It isn't that hard to find a good Ego weapon in the early levels, I recently got a (craft) sword out of Town Trouble. So, when the Monk is trying to reach double digit damage a round, a weapon user is doing 30+.

Post 30's, Slays would speed things up, but when your foe is just standing there stunned as you plink away at their health, not really needed.

BUT! What would the justification be for the gloves to not work? Make all Spiked and Studded gloves 'Icky Wield'? That way Monks could still find gloves to match the already tough to fill resistance holes.

[Sideways]

• With the mauler skill "close in", selecting the skill then cancelling cancels the action, but the cost in HP is still deducted
  [...]

Thanks, a few quick comments:

- Quest rewards cannot be lost *just* because the player has a full pack (the reward is dumped outside); however, if the player then does some routine-feeling thing like going back in to request a new quest without picking up the reward first, then the reward will be lost. While avoidable, this is obviously not player-friendly, and I'll try to think of some solution to it.

- Showing item weight on examination is a good idea.

- Adding the life rating in the character sheet is also something I'll probably do.

- I don't think most players auto-center the map while walking; certainly I don't. You can make it a default setting in your own copy either by using the same savefile repeatedly (thereby inheriting the old player's options as defaults) or by editing pref-opt.prf.

- Displaying weapon damage for non-equipped weapons is a good suggestion, but one that would be very tricky to implement. Vanilla does this, and it has been a constant headache to maintainers. Implementing it here might be even harder, since Vanilla doesn't have to worry about multiple weapon slots.

- Telling the player that unimprovable items are unimprovable seems reasonable (the same goes for items that can be enchanted but aren't affected by it, like robes of the twilight).

- It will always be possible for the same randart name to appear repeatedly, because the list of randart names is finite and will be exhausted eventually. What could be done is make sure no name will appear twice before the list is exhausted, but it's a lot simpler from a maintaining point of view to simply allow it to happen, and trust that it doesn't happen too often (or at least too obviously too often) as long as the list has enough names. I will probably add more names for randart rings in the next version.

- Artifact quivers have been suggested before, it's an interesting concept but I don't really have any great ideas for what an artifact quiver would actually do.

- I have no idea whether glove slays not applying to unarmed combat was originally intended or not. I would say that 1) it feels strange from a logic point of view but 2) before I change it, I'd like to hear from players with monk experience what it would do to monk balance, and whether it would make unarmed combat too strong (my instinct is that it probably would).

- I will look into Close In, it doesn't feel like something that should be uncancellable.