[Announce] FrogComposband 7.0.nougat released

[Sideways]

Some people would like feeling changes to be less disturbing than they currently are, rather than more disturbing. That could potentially be an advantage, since it means I'll look into the disturbingness of feeling changes at some point and can try to find a way to make everyone happy.

[Pete Mack]

So you would like level sensing ti be a full disturb rather than a minor disturb. It is easy to fix

[CyclopsSlayer]

Is there something that you can do so that if you activate recall and then wait for the recall to kick in, it notifies you and stops the resting if a special feeling is detected
It has happened to me many times that I rest, then am told there is a special feeling and am then yanked out

Haven't tested in Frog, but in the past, a second reading/cast of Recall would cancel the first.

[Sideways]

I can't use maul, the knockback and auto-follow irritates me too much


The hammer of Atlas is 90 pounds, I think there is a 25% chance of it dropping for maulers
The best mauler weapons I've found were Armageddon lances/heavy lances weighing a bit more than 60 pounds, don't know what their max weight is
To get those numbers were you wearing the one ring and that ring of power that gives +3 weaponmastery

Yes, also Robe of Kamikaze Warrior for another +2 Wm, and assorted +to-dam equipment (and the massive crown of chaos so I could equip Grond without heavy wield).

I forgot Atlas. It's still less good than Grond and Iron ball though (Iron ball's huge dice are... huge, and Grond's native kill dragons is what makes it #1 for really massive damage); but it does allow >6000 damage/turn, not far off Iron ball.

[Sideways]

Don't worry about maulers and steel dragons, they're still plenty strong. I did some experiments last night on mauler top damage (for unrelated reasons; Gwarl and kobold were interested) and concluded that with ideal equipment they can get up to >10000 listed average damage against dragons with Maul and Crushing Blow, down from ~12000 without the nerfs (and less than half of that reduction is actually the mauler nerf, most of it is the slay nerf which applies to all classes). That's a drop from absurdly high damage to... still absurdly high damage?

(Granted, the only weapons that get a mauler anywhere near that ballpark are Grond - need to win with something else - and Iron ball - need to get lucky; but if all else fails, maulers always have Drain, which is made of overpoweredness.)

[Sideways]

The pickpref should call potions:healing something else, like "potionsf healing", to make sure there's no ambiguity. I will fix that in the default pickpref.

(Generally, in this game, if you want to make something totally unambiguous, you need to put ^ at the beginning of their full name and $ at the end; like ^olog$ to make sure you get an olog, and not a novice archaeologist which contains the string olog. But in this case, the full name of potions of healing is "potion of healing", and by the time you've typed that you've already disambiguated them from potions of *healing*, so there's no need for that kind of trickery.)

[CyclopsSlayer]

There seems to be a problem with the auto-destroyer: whatever rule is applied to healing potions is also applied to *healing* potions

Possibly the search type it uses? 'healing' and '*healing*' both contain the string 'healing'?

I use partial name searches all the time when searching the web for things.

[Sideways]

Under weapon proficiencies, poison needles are classified as swords

Shouldn't they? They're a stabbing weapon, certainly more akin to daggers etc. than to hafted weapons or polearms.

[Gwarl]

I am planning to allow randart jewellery drops at some point, but they will likely not be as strong as they are in Compos.

The drop rates have gone way down.

[wobbly]

Berserk is cancelled whenever you use a healing potion, I think this makes berserk borderline useless

you can use vampirism, I think cure wounds staves as well. I used to sometimes berserk Smaug with mages when he dropped the 3rd book. You can get a lot of damage out before you need to heal quite often. The increased device fails make it too risky after a point, but till then it's gold. It's also a less painful way to train the dual-wield skill, because you are actually hitting.

[wobbly]

Here's dual-wield for the stat stick in the J-fight.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=21245

I'd have better damage with just the runesword but would have scarily low speed & missing melee sustains. Pretty sure I dual wielded most of the game, accuracy isn't a big issue for something with easy access to berserk.

[Sideways]

I am planning to allow randart jewellery drops at some point, but they will likely not be as strong as they are in Compos. (Though even if I copied Compos's code outright they would not be as strong as they are in Compos, at least the rings, because of changes to how Wm is valued.)

Anyway, I want people to have a real incentive to complete the druj rooms in Royal Crypt; viz. better-quality jewellery randarts than you're likely to find elsewhere without reforging.

Re: statsticks and dual-wielding: remember that the further into the game you get, the more resists, bonuses etc. you'll get from your other equipment, and consequently the less you need from your weapons (and also, you get better shields to directly replace the other weapon with). I think dual-wielding is viable in the endgame, certainly on a character like yours, but it's probably more likely to be good in the middlegame.

[Gwarl]

In composband we have randart jewellery *and* reforging.

[wobbly]

Samurai has hidden bonuses for katanas and wakashis. I suspect 2-handed weapons being best damage is by design. However dual-wield is good if you find 2 great light weapons before a 2-hander. Sting and another artifact short sword can be strong but mostly dual-wield is worse outside the dual-wield classes. Even when it's good getting the skill on-line can take longer then finding a more appropriate weapon.

[Sideways]

I have a warrior with mastery in dual wielding and with gloves of genji, and yet I think his dps against AC 175 is no better then wielding a weapon 2-handed
Am I missing something or is dual wielding now only a good option for berserkers and ninjas

Supposing your math is right, that means that compared to wielding a single weapon 2-handed you're getting the resists, bonuses etc. of two weapons instead of one without really losing much. (You do need to carry the weight of two weapons and will trigger monster auras more often, but if the weapons are sufficiently good statsticks that's still an excellent trade.)

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=21451, for example, dual-wielded successfully for a long time without genji gloves or dual-wielding abilities. Towards the end it was probably a mistake to keep dual-wielding; as wobbly correctly notes in the comments, single-wielding would have been better. But for much of the game it made sense (despite probably being bad from a pure damage point of view) because it allowed him to wield two statsticks simultaneously.