v4 now available

[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.

[Timo Pietilä]

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

What does that mean?

[Starhawk]

What does that mean?

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

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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?

[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".

[d_m]

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

[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.

[Magnate]

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

I'm quite happy for someone to go through the whole of ego_item.txt and provide better names for any or all affixes. Personally I would prefer more flavourful names rather than "of Poison Brand" and "of See Invisible", but I'm happy to go with the preferences of whomever is willing to make the edits.

In other news, I just ran my first stats on v4 (after fixing the last stats-affecting bug, #1565). Boy is it mean!! So I've made some adjustments, so that "good" drops can't get "bad" affixes, and a few others. I've just kicked off 50,000 runs overnight, so tomorrow I'll have a good idea of how far v4's item distribution differs from 3.3.0. In the meantime, those of you currently playing might like to upgrade to the newest version, because the one you're currently playing really is ridiculously stingy.

[Magnate]

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.

Hey - how about we move slay and brand multipliers to a pval ...