v4 now available

[takkaria]

You mean the old "of Venom" ego item? That's the x3 brand; clearly a separate name is needed for the x2 brand. Though yes, "Forester's" is misleading. I'd go with "Toxic" personally.

But really, any reasonable name selection will be easily learnable. Fix bad names, but good flavorful names are better than good nominative names IMO. In other words, "Venomous" is better than "Poison Brand".

Maybe they don't need different names - they're both doing the same thing. They could just have different multipliers. Who says that some branding isn't more powerful than others? (The analogue being pval-modifying affixes: they're not called of strength, of lesser strength, of greater strength, etc...) I think this would probably make things a lot clearer than having different names.

[d_m]

How about "of Lesser Venom"? I think that's pretty accurate.

[Derakon]

Why not call poison brand poison brand? Why make things less clear to players? This is supposed to be angband, right? Not a variant loosely based on angband?

You mean the old "of Venom" ego item? That's the x3 brand; clearly a separate name is needed for the x2 brand. Though yes, "Forester's" is misleading. I'd go with "Toxic" personally.

But really, any reasonable name selection will be easily learnable. Fix bad names, but good flavorful names are better than good nominative names IMO. In other words, "Venomous" is better than "Poison Brand".

[Nomad]

Okay, after playing a few games, some thoughts on affix names:

* Protection and Slaying are a definite improvement over the previous names. Much clearer.

* I'm not sure about the Forester's/Emerald/Ruby/Sapphire/Topaz names for weak brands; they sound more like they should be equivalent to things like hunter's/journeyman's and diamond/blackrock that only affect weapon stats. (ETA: and I see this has already come up in the time I was typing this up.) I think names that are more clearly related to the brand in question would be better; I'd suggest:

BRAND_ICKY -> Serpent Tooth
BRAND_FIZZ -> Corrosive
BRAND_BUZZ -> Crackling
BRAND_WARM -> Fiery
BRAND_COOL -> Icy

* The Observation/Seeing division throws me, because I'm so used to assocating helms of Seeing with see invisible. Can I suggest changing Observation to the more prosaic "of See Invisible" and renaming Seeing to "of Clear Sight" or something just to break the former assocation? (Plus then you'd be able to use "of Seeing" as a theme to recreate the old ego.)

* Might I suggest naming the stat sustain affixes after the +1/-1 potions? It's much easier to associate Intellect, Contemplation, etc. with the appropriate stats than learn a bunch of new, loosely related names.

* Plus one really trivial grammatical quibble: "Tough" sounds a bit awkward paired with object names that already contain an adjective (e.g. "a Tough Soft Cap" cries out for a comma in the middle). I think it really needs to be a transitive verb with an -ed ending. "Toughened" is not a great word, though, so maybe use "Reinforced" in place of Tough and "Layered" or "Fortified" to replace that?

[Timo Pietilä]

Very close. Forester's is the weak x2 poison brand, but everything else is right. (I haven't renamed the previous ego types, so Slay Animal is still called that.)

Man, I still don't grok the knowledge menu code, after three years of trying.

How would someone know that Forester means poison brand? I certainly would have no clue about what it does, and as you can see from Derakon answer to me he had no clue either.

Why not call poison brand poison brand? Why make things less clear to players? This is supposed to be angband, right? Not a variant loosely based on angband?

[Magnate]

I haven't gotten to play v4 yet due to the OSX UTF-8 bug, but at a guess, "Forester's" is the Slay Animal prefix, Parrying gives an AC bonus (as in Defender / Holy Avenger weapons), and of course Broken gives penalties to-hit and to-dam. All three of those were on the weapon Wormtongue dropped. In "standard" parlance it'd be something like this:

A Trident of Slay Animal (1d8) [+4] (-5, -3)

So basically Wormtongue dropped a nominally-excellent item except one of the affixes was bad, rendering the item useless as a whole. A bit like if you got Aggravating Boots of Stealth.

Very close. Forester's is the weak x2 poison brand, but everything else is right. (I haven't renamed the previous ego types, so Slay Animal is still called that.)

Man, I still don't grok the knowledge menu code, after three years of trying.

[Derakon]

I haven't gotten to play v4 yet due to the OSX UTF-8 bug, but at a guess, "Forester's" is the Slay Animal prefix, Parrying gives an AC bonus (as in Defender / Holy Avenger weapons), and of course Broken gives penalties to-hit and to-dam. All three of those were on the weapon Wormtongue dropped. In "standard" parlance it'd be something like this:

A Trident of Slay Animal (1d8) [+4] (-5, -3)

So basically Wormtongue dropped a nominally-excellent item except one of the affixes was bad, rendering the item useless as a whole. A bit like if you got Aggravating Boots of Stealth.

[Timo Pietilä]

It means that a weapon that was generated with multiple affixes ended up being (-5, -3) and completely useless.

A bit more precise please. Only thing I understood from that was that it was broken, and because of that probably useless.

[Magnate]

While I'm crying about things in v4 that are stressing me out... (lol) ... I'm glad I'm not playing a ranger. I could deal with the new 25-max stack size. Sure, less arrows in the quiver.

But... each 25-stack is taking up a regular inventory space now? Wow, that's harsh!

That's not v4 though - that will be in 3.4 too. But I think your point about Broken is well made - it shouldn't really render useless a weapon with two decent affixes.

I just fixed the artifact bug, so no artifacts should be obvious until you pick them up ... working on squelching and knowledge menus now.

[Starhawk]

While I'm crying about things in v4 that are stressing me out... (lol) ... I'm glad I'm not playing a ranger. I could deal with the new 25-max stack size. Sure, less arrows in the quiver.

But... each 25-stack is taking up a regular inventory space now? Wow, that's harsh!

[Starhawk]

What does that mean?

It means that a weapon that was generated with multiple affixes ended up being (-5, -3) and completely useless.

[Timo Pietilä]

This weapon's known properties are: Forester's, of Parrying, Broken.

What does that mean?

[Starhawk]

Ah, my first good weapon drop... wait! "Strange" pseudo-id?

This weapon's known properties are: Forester's, of Parrying, Broken.

Aaaaaaaaaargh, thanks a lot Wormtongue!

My CL17 High Elf Rogue is doing 24DPR,can't stand up to Uruks in combat, and was just very nearly killed by white lice.

[Magnate]

I wonder if it's worth reintroducing enchant weapon and armour scrolls to the shops for v4? They're dramatically more useful now that egos aren't guaranteed high hit/dam bonuses, and it's no longer easy to buy up huge stacks of scrolls, since money is much sparser in selling games without tons of high-level egos to sell.

(I have never been so delighted to see a scroll of *Enchant Weapon* in the Black Market as I was in my last v4 game. It enchanted my trident of Slay Evil all the way up to +3,+3! I survived all the way to dlevel 36 with that unheard of level of awesome might.)

Another way to ease up the low damage woes in the early game might be to restore the hit/dam bonuses on Rings of the Dog, or else have Reckless Attacks start dropping a little earlier.

These are both good ideas - though I am really pleased to see that +3,+3 is considered powerful in v4! But seriously, I just want to put down a marker here about combat in v4. Fizzix and d_m and I have a load of ideas that we want to test, from separating out AC into evasion/absorption (threads passim) to making damage come more from dice and less from plusses (you might have come across that idea before ...), making more distinction between light/DEX-driven weapons and heavy/STR-driven weapons, and so on. This is not to say that we can't make any balance changes like the ideas above (we do after all want a playable game while we're working on changes to combat), I just wanted to warn ppl that combat will change quite a bit as v4 develops.

EDIT: FWIW, my half-troll warrior is doing 42 dam/round in 3.4 blows with the Sharp Dagger (+0,+2) that he bought at the start of the game. But I'm only at about 750' so far so not overly surprised to have found nothing better yet.

[Timo Pietilä]

I wonder if it's worth reintroducing enchant weapon and armour scrolls to the shops for v4? They're dramatically more useful now that egos aren't guaranteed high hit/dam bonuses, and it's no longer easy to buy up huge stacks of scrolls, since money is much sparser in selling games without tons of high-level egos to sell.

Another way to ease up the low damage woes in the early game might be to restore the hit/dam bonuses on Rings of the Dog, or else have Reckless Attacks start dropping a little earlier.

While still not playing v4 this sounds too harsh to me too. Even F-K doesn't penalize early game that much. For "light weapons have too high damage" I would remove early off-weapon bonuses like Dog, Reckless attacks (and mouse) to compensate and tweak blows table so that weapon weight plays smaller role in blows you get.