v4 now available

[Nomad]

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.

[Starhawk]

It remains to be seen whether this is a good change or not. And we're certainly open to feedback. Surely, you shouldn't be able to kill everything dlevel 10 and below trivially with a kobold rogue and a +0, +0 dagger, which was the old behavior. We may have gone too far the other way though!

In my few days playing v4 with warriors and rogues, I've developed the opinion that yes, you have indeed gone too far in making the early game difficult. I've finally gotten a rogue to CL16 and have yet to find a weapon that does more than 20DPR, even with a High Elf with ridiculously tweaked stats. Hacking away at every orc and large kobold for 10+ rounds isn't rewarding or fun. The only reason this character hasn't joined the heap of all the other toothless, weak patsies is because I got a lucky drop of a suit of 62 AC armor. Which has destroyed my mana pool but enabled me to sit in a hallway chopping away at kobolds. And yeeks. And snagas. Endlessly. Until they finally, FINALLY die.

Sure, it's more challenging. It's a LOT more challenging. But it's also frustrating and kind of dull. I'm hoping for a lucky weapon drop at some point so I can get to the parts of the game I enjoy.

[Timo Pietilä]

Which is kind of how it's supposed to be: warriors find the early game easy, the late game hard. Magi the opposite. Everyone else somewhere in between.

Warriors are actually very good at the end. It's the mid-game where they suck (much like priests: lack of hound detection).

I find rogue most difficult and mage second most difficult. Paladin is boring and Ranger, Priest and warrior best. In that order probably (though priest is easiest, it isn't most effective class, Ranger can make minced meat from just about anything in no time flat)

[Magnate]

I would be interested in hearing your alternative choice for least powerful class? Rogue seems like a no-brainer to me for that title.

IMO the power ranking of classes is highly dependent on play style. Rogue and Ranger are the top two for me, because I rely on stealth to survive the first half of the game. Then come warrior and paladin, because I can partially adapt to survive using brute force instead of stealth. Last come priest and mage, because I can't keep them alive long enough for their big advantage (0% fail) to make a difference.

But if I had to choose a least powerful class for anyone, it would be the warrior. IMO the increased inventory headaches caused by not having any spells mean that it has fewer options in the late game than any other class.

Which is kind of how it's supposed to be: warriors find the early game easy, the late game hard. Magi the opposite. Everyone else somewhere in between.

[EpicMan]

Since (magical) simply implies pluses or maluses, not necessarily magical in nature (e.g. rusty armor), why not call it "unusual".

Also, if slay demon is a property of an item being made of iron, it *should* be known on ppickup. As many demons as there are in Angband, I think this would be common knowledge for the people living in the town. It's just like knowing the dice on a weapon or the base AC of an armor.

[sethos]

Given a choice between this and Nomad's idea of name matrices, I think the latter would look better and have more flavour, if it could be done comprehensively. I'm still mulling it over - it really needs affixes broken down into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categories - that's not actually that hard, as I have a spreadsheet which more or less does that.

Agreed, an array of appropriate names sounds best - But it might take a while to get something that makes sense for ALL cases. perhaps Something could be done, BandAid style til that's all figgered out?

Is there perhaps a simpler solution:

If you choose to squelch an affix, an item with no other affixes is squelched. If you have chosen to squelch all the affixes on an item, then it gets squelched. If not, it doesn't.

Wouldn't that cover a fairly large proportion of use cases? That's what I'm planning to implement first, if nobody beats me to it. Obviously it can be improved from there.

Umm, Yes. I do think that will handle most cases. I was going to come out with an example of when it wouldn't work, but it started sounding stupid and whiney. So Let's go with yours.
*edit* removal of excess smilies and typos, bah.

[BlueFish]

Well many would disagree - those of us who prize stealth highly.

I would be interested in hearing your alternative choice for least powerful class? Rogue seems like a no-brainer to me for that title.

[Magnate]

Couldn't autoinscription flags be used for the flavors not listed (as per NPP?)
{elec, Fire, Sdig, Demon *undead* R_fire, etc}

or would it be more practical to have the identified item simply flagged with a * and a number for additional Prefixes/Suffixes:

ex. Sharp Iron sword of undead slaying, acid and enchantment becomes:
Iron Sword of Acid (*1,*2) to denote one additional prefix and two additional suffixes not listed in the name. 'I'nspection would, of course, reveal all of the powers- and could even show the "FULL" name

I think that the * idea was already suggested, I'm just trying to expand upon it.

Given a choice between this and Nomad's idea of name matrices, I think the latter would look better and have more flavour, if it could be done comprehensively. I'm still mulling it over - it really needs affixes broken down into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categories - that's not actually that hard, as I have a spreadsheet which more or less does that.

I do foresee a need for a more finetuned squelch system though, more than just squelch if less than X affixes.

I'd imagine that squelch should head in the direction NPP has gone, but a step further
EX:

Lv 1 squelch: Ego Squelch this affix when found alone.
Lv 2 squelch: squelch items found when all affixes listed are set to Lv 2
Lv 3 squelch: Always squelch any item with this affix.
Never Squelch: Do NOT squelch this affix, even if another affix on the item is at Lv 3.
Normal: like Never, 'cept for the Lv 3 exception.

Is there perhaps a simpler solution:

If you choose to squelch an affix, an item with no other affixes is squelched. If you have chosen to squelch all the affixes on an item, then it gets squelched. If not, it doesn't.

Wouldn't that cover a fairly large proportion of use cases? That's what I'm planning to implement first, if nobody beats me to it. Obviously it can be improved from there.

[sethos]

Couldn't autoinscription flags be used for the flavors not listed (as per NPP?)
{elec, Fire, Sdig, Demon *undead* R_fire, etc}

or would it be more practical to have the identified item simply flagged with a * and a number for additional Prefixes/Suffixes:

ex. Sharp Iron sword of undead slaying, acid and enchantment becomes:
Iron Sword of Acid (*1,*2) to denote one additional prefix and two additional suffixes not listed in the name. 'I'nspection would, of course, reveal all of the powers- and could even show the "FULL" name

I think that the * idea was already suggested, I'm just trying to expand upon it.

Either way, items with extra powers would be seen as such, and @ shouldn't mind taking a moment to 'I' those extra useful items.

I do foresee a need for a more finetuned squelch system though, more than just squelch if less than X affixes.

I'd imagine that squelch should head in the direction NPP has gone, but a step further
EX:

Lv 1 squelch: Ego Squelch this affix when found alone.
Lv 2 squelch: squelch items found when all affixes listed are set to Lv 2
Lv 3 squelch: Always squelch any item with this affix.
Never Squelch: Do NOT squelch this affix, even if another affix on the item is at Lv 3.
Normal: like Never, 'cept for the Lv 3 exception.

Well, There's My good deed for the day, Gonna read "There and Back again" (AKA the Hobbit.) now.

[fizzix]

Ah, I see the difference is that rogue class bonuses were nerfed. Was that necessary? I don't think rogues were ever too powerful... they are unequivocally the least powerful class.

Rogues have the third highest melee, the second highest device skill, and the best stealth. They also have access to one of the most useful spells in the game, detect objects, which will be even more useful if the rod of treasure location gets nerfed or removed.

The starting bonuses for classes have indeed been adjusted. It used to be that mages and priests had significant net penalties. And the other classes had small - substantial net bonuses. The stats have been lowered so that rogues, rangers, and paladins come out even. mages and priests still have penalties, but not as severe. And warriors have less of a bonus than before.

It remains to be seen whether this is a good change or not. And we're certainly open to feedback. Surely, you shouldn't be able to kill everything dlevel 10 and below trivially with a kobold rogue and a +0, +0 dagger, which was the old behavior. We may have gone too far the other way though!

[Magnate]

Ah, I see the difference is that rogue class bonuses were nerfed. Was that necessary? I don't think rogues were ever too powerful... they are unequivocally the least powerful class.

Well many would disagree - those of us who prize stealth highly.

Anyway, leaving aside the debate, this isn't a v4 issue. All classes have had their stat bonuses reduced a bit, and the number of birth stat points has dropped from 24 to 20. All part of making the early game more challenging. It's in dev versions of 3.4 too ...

[BlueFish]

Ah, I see the difference is that rogue class bonuses were nerfed. Was that necessary? I don't think rogues were ever too powerful... they are unequivocally the least powerful class.

[BlueFish]

Did kobold rogues need to be nerfed because they were too powerful? I just started one in v4 after having played them in 3.2, and starting stats are very low compared to 3.2. Did I accidentally change some maximize option or something, or was this intentional?

[Magnate]

Squelch/ID issues in the latest build (02dd343):

I picked up a Long Sword, it pseudo-ID'd as {magical} and auto-squelched itself. By unsquelching and wield-testing I was able to discover it was Cheap, which was obviously why the "squelch bad" setting worked on it.

I had seen a Cheap item before, so I'm assuming rune-based ID did its job and I 'knew' it was bad, but for some reason it didn't become explicitly identified until I wielded it in combat.

Runes != affixes. A "rune" is a symbol for an object property, e.g. slow digestion, feather falling, slay troll, extra blows etc. There are no runes for +hit, +dam, +ac, +dice or +sides. So all the affixes that only modify those things (all the cheap/sharp qualities, and all the hobbitish/giant types etc.) will not ID via rune-based ID. Dice mods are obvious - you can tell instantly if a longsword is 2d4 or 3d5 rather than the usual 2d5. But hit/dam mods are not obvious, which is why Cheap doesn't ID until you attack with it.

But I think perhaps it is time to separate {magical} into {good} and {poor}, since (i) these affixes are non-magical anyway and (ii) you probably can tell by looking at an item which side of bog-standard it is.

If we do this, the expected behaviour would be that it pseudos as {poor} and then auto-squelches - or pseudos as {good} and doesn't.

Anyone want to argue for a different approach to pseudo and squelch of weapons?

[Magnate]

There's a bug with making character dumps; the details of objects aren't 'printing' fully to the text file, so you only get the first letter of each line, like this:

h) a Cloak of Shielding [1,+7]
     B
     
     P
     
i) a Tough Large Shield of Resist Acid [5,+3]
     D
     
     P
     C

Oooh, that's new. And it hasn't been reported in V. I wonder what's causing it. Will look into it - thanks for the report.

EDIT: I can't reproduce this. Can anyone else duplicate this behaviour? Nomad - can you attach a savefile which will (on your system) generate this kind of dump?