Ranger in V4 is HAAAARRRRD...

[Old Coach]

Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I can't seem to damage anything with arrows as a ranger. If I fire 5 to 10 arrows into a centipede or kobold, maybe 1 of them will do some minor damage. My dagger also doesn't do damage, and no magic missile until level 3. I have tried various builds, including sinking a lot of points into strength, but still find myself unable to do any damage.

On a side note, I was killing urchins in town to get enough cash to buy some more food (iron man game, learned the hard way by starving once) before setting out, and found $274 worth of gems. This common?

[Hariolor]

Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I can't seem to damage anything with arrows as a ranger. If I fire 5 to 10 arrows into a centipede or kobold, maybe 1 of them will do some minor damage. My dagger also doesn't do damage, and no magic missile until level 3. I have tried various builds, including sinking a lot of points into strength, but still find myself unable to do any damage.

Same experience with my first char - a HE Rogue who could barely take down a jackal or a snake at CL3 with a +15/+15 dagger. The overall pace of combat was enjoyable as I got used to it, but it was shocking to see an "awesome" early weapon (By vanilla standards) do such pathetic damage...

I also just griped about this here. Sorry for the dupes.

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=5234

[Old Coach]

Well, maybe it has just been bad luck with my last 6 attempts at playing a ranger, but... I have emptied my quiver into the first monster I have seen each time I played without killing it. Not enough cash to upgrade bow before descending, and certainly not enough for arrows that would get me past level one. Finally gave up and played mage. So easy in comparison. Never broke a sweat until at DL 5 I read an unknown ? and it turned out to be deep descent...
Well, back to trying a ranger. i am stubborn, I guess.

[Derakon]

It may well be that missile combat is broken currently, in addition to the game generally needing a lot of balancing.

Are you failing to hit the monster, or failing to deal damage?

[jevansau]

I have had similar experiences. I think it is safe to say that missile combat is currently broken. I realise that the values are effectively divided by 10 but with a short bow (+38, +110) and arrows 1d4 (+23,+37) it takes about 20 arrows to take out a disenchanter mold. (L27 warrior). Hitting isn't a problem, but the damage is.

I also had problems getting anywhere with a thief or ranger. Much easier starting out more Prowess focused. Interestingly, with a HT warrior, I'm finding that increasing finesse gives more damage than increasing prowess, at least at this intermediate stage.

One related question - is there any special effect (like armour negation) from slays and brands?

Anyway, the changes look promising and thanks for the hard work.

Regards,
Jonathan

[Derakon]

To my knowledge, slays are still just damage amplification for the moment. They add to the damage multiplier you get from Prowess; thus:

#blows = finesse * weapon balance
damage/blow = (dice roll) * (prowess * weapon heft + slay)

These numbers don't take crits into account. Balance and heft are the weapon's finesse and prowess multipliers, respectively.

Disenchanter molds have average HP of 72, which means (given the quoted 20 shots to kill) you're doing on average about 3 damage/shot. Looking at the missile attack code (attack.c's make_ranged_shot function), damage, barring crits, appears to be determined as follows:

damage = ((dice roll) + prowess) * (slay multiplier) / 100

Which appears to basically render the die roll completely pointless because of the division by 100. In your case, you have a total +147 to prowess, a maximum die roll of 4, and no slay -- so your damage is 1.48 to 1.51 per shot, before crits. Of course, this rounds down. The reason you're able to kill the mold in as few as 20 shots is that crits give some flat damage increases (e.g. if a hit does X damage, then a "good" hit does 1.5X + 10 damage).

Something like this would be better:

damage = (dice roll) * (prowess + (slay multiplier)) / 100

All that's needed is to change this line:

    result.dmg += o_ptr->to_prowess + j_ptr->to_prowess;

with this:

    multiplier += o_ptr->to_prowess + j_ptr->to_prowess;

[Old Coach]

I think ranged combat might be broken. I am running a ranger again and trying to progress enough to get some levels and see if I can start damaging things with a bow. Right now at DL 3 I found a short bow (+10,+10), and can empty 25 arrows into a large brown snake without doing any damage. The arrows hit, but they just don't do any damage.

As it is, I have had to crawl through levels poking at things with my dagger until gaining enough levels to cast magic missile. I'll send a report when I find some magic arrows or use different ranged weapons.

Edit:
Ah ha. I see this has already been addressed.

I also should say that I like the new system and I think it has much promise. IT is more robust than the old system and looks like it will be tunable for good balance among the classes.

[Magnate]

To my knowledge, slays are still just damage amplification for the moment. They add to the damage multiplier you get from Prowess; thus:

#blows = finesse * weapon balance
damage/blow = (dice roll) * (prowess * weapon heft + slay)

These numbers don't take crits into account. Balance and heft are the weapon's finesse and prowess multipliers, respectively.

Disenchanter molds have average HP of 72, which means (given the quoted 20 shots to kill) you're doing on average about 3 damage/shot. Looking at the missile attack code (attack.c's make_ranged_shot function), damage, barring crits, appears to be determined as follows:

damage = ((dice roll) + prowess) * (slay multiplier) / 100

Which appears to basically render the die roll completely pointless because of the division by 100. In your case, you have a total +147 to prowess, a maximum die roll of 4, and no slay -- so your damage is 1.48 to 1.51 per shot, before crits. Of course, this rounds down. The reason you're able to kill the mold in as few as 20 shots is that crits give some flat damage increases (e.g. if a hit does X damage, then a "good" hit does 1.5X + 10 damage).

Something like this would be better:

damage = (dice roll) * (prowess + (slay multiplier)) / 100

All that's needed is to change this line:

    result.dmg += o_ptr->to_prowess + j_ptr->to_prowess;

with this:

    multiplier += o_ptr->to_prowess + j_ptr->to_prowess;

I've actually changed this slightly during my half-finished work on fixing the pricing errors resulting from the new combat system.

In V, slays multiply only dice damage, and +dam (from any source) is added afterwards.

In v4, +dam no longer exists as such, because those plusses add to prowess, which determines the multiplier for your dice damage. So if we left things alone, slays and brands would multiply total damage:

damroll * prowess_mult * slay_mult

Instead, the slay mult is added to the prowess mult:

damroll * (prowess_mult + slay_mult)

This has the advantage of allowing different treatment of physical and slay/brand damage with respect to monster armour (or resists, or whatever).

In general, the new system will mean that slays and brands on their own are less significant than in V (25-100% extra damage instead of 100-400%) ... but they'll stack if you get the same affix more than once.

To fix missile combat, I think we need to remove the launcher multiplier, since it is now confusing with the new mechanics. We should use balance and heft (which would be called draw when referring to launchers) to determine number of shots and damage multiplier in the same way, but using the missile combat skill instead of the melee combat skill.

This will need some recalibrating, because the damage dice of ammo does not vary according to the launcher, so we don't want slings and shortbows giving too many shots because their heft/draw is smaller and balance larger.

We probably also need to derive the prowess multipler from DEX as well as STR for missiles, otherwise warriors will be better archers than rangers. (There are other solutions though, such as having separate crits for missile which rely more on dex.)

I'd welcome some more detailed discussion on this, because I don't yet have a perfectly clear idea of how best to adapt missiles to the new system.

[Rivendell]

I have a rogue running through v4, and I noticed on my character sheet that my prowess modifier for "Shoot" is +0.

Fight: (+185, +90)
Melee: (+185, +90)
Shoot: (+165, +0)

Is this correct?

[Magnate]

I have a rogue running through v4, and I noticed on my character sheet that my prowess modifier for "Shoot" is +0.

Fight: (+185, +90)
Melee: (+185, +90)
Shoot: (+165, +0)

Is this correct?

It is at the moment, yes - ranged combat currently uses the launcher mult instead of the prowess/heft calculation, so prowess is irrelevant for ranged purposes. This will change as soon as we've settled on an initial implementation of Derakon's system for ranged combat.

[Delos]

Probably duplicate, or off topic, but as a mage, I have extremely high problems to kill Smeagol even when I am level 9.
My old and trusty technique (shoot a volley of arrows he picks rather choosing to hit me) is obsolete as I can fire 10 arrows and still get no damage.
If I find an extraordinary bow or crossbow, the best thing I can do is to buy it or throw it. It will deal more damage than any arrows I can shoot.
Bleh.

[Magnate]

Probably duplicate, or off topic, but as a mage, I have extremely high problems to kill Smeagol even when I am level 9.
My old and trusty technique (shoot a volley of arrows he picks rather choosing to hit me) is obsolete as I can fire 10 arrows and still get no damage.
If I find an extraordinary bow or crossbow, the best thing I can do is to buy it or throw it. It will deal more damage than any arrows I can shoot.
Bleh.

Yes, sorry - archery is currently broken in v4. Will be fixed RSN ...