Critical Hits with Mage

[Old Coach]

So...
I am down in depths of about 55 when I find the Great Hammer of Aule.
I am getting tired of having to avoid anything with elemental resistance because I am playing a mage with no way to damage such critters (no artifact book of battle spells yet). I teleport into a hallway between a mature and ancient multihued dragons, asleep.
hmmm.
hmmm.
I decide to just try the hammer, even though I would only get one swing per round instead of 2.5-ish. I had been using turmoril for the elemental immunity.
1 swing, dead mature dragon.
Hmmm.
I swing at the ancient.
Dead in two swings, but fleeing and nearly dead after 1.
Hmmm.

I then went on a killing spree and took some quick stats.
out of 40 swings, 33 were *GREAT* hits, 3 were great, 1 was superb, and 3 were regular.

This seems like too many crit hits for a mage.
I was wearing an amulet of weapon mastery at the time. I traded it for an amulet of trickery, and this toned it down somewhat. I wanted to switch back and forth to see how much it helped the crit process, but a lightning dragon sparked it when I dropped it.

Now, I went from not being able to touch anything with a weapon, including Ringil, to being able to three shot Great Wurms of Law with the Hammer of Aule. This with a Mage of strength 18/40 and dex 18/80.

I am not sure if this is solely a product of the weapon. It is heavy, does 18d1 damage (yowsa!!) and has massive finess and power bonuses. Is the crit system still being optimized? Everthing seemed to be working the way I expected, that is, my mage was an invalid in combat but could occasionally get lucky and stab something, until I picked up the hammer and amulet, oh, and gloves cambeleg. Now I barely use spells except for utility.

[Derakon]

Hm, that's probably not right. Aule gets +210 to prowess at a 90% multiplier. Assuming you get another +100 from your character that means you're doing 18 * (3.1 * .9 + 4) = 122.22 base damage per blow against dragons (the +4 is the "kill dragon" additional multiplier). *GREAT* hits multiply that by 4 and then add 20 more damage, so we're talking 530 damage/blow here.

The critical hit chance clearly still needs work. Currently it's given by
(applied finesse ^ 2 + applied prowess ^ 2) / 2500 + 1. Your applied finesse should be basically zero because of Aulë's pathetic finesse multiplier, but your applied prowess (that is, prowess * .9) should be around 280, which means your crit chance is around 31%. That should result in regular crits, but you'd have to pass that chance five times in a row to get a *GREAT* crit, at odds of about .3%. So either you're getting a lot more prowess from somewhere (obviously I don't have a character dump to look at) or the crit generator's getting stuck somehow.

[Old Coach]

I don't have access to that computer until monday. I'll take a look at it and figure out what other bonuses I had. The Gloves Cambeleg and the amulet of weapon mastery were also bumping up finesse and power.

[Old Coach]

I picked up another amulet of weapon mastery.
Now, my base prowess is 52. Hammer gives 210, ring gives 20, amulet gives 50, cammithrim gives 50, for a total (I guess) of 382. The character screen only shows the 52 for my lvl 50 mage. Prowess is 117 (base) plus 290, so finesse is almost negligible in the crit algorithm.
So, crit chance = 49%. Still too low to get all those *Great* hits. It seems like every hit I get against a dragon is *GREAT*. Could the 4x multiplier for the slay be used in the crit chance?

Also, The current system for determining a crit heavily favors the weapons that are heavily weighted towards either prowess or finesse, but against the weapons that are more balanced. Not sure if this is desired, but I like it.

[Derakon]

The "finesse" displayed on the right-hand side of your character sheet is just the skill bonus you get from your class, level, and race. The compounded value is shown under "Fight" or "Melee" in the center column.

For crit calculations, use your applied prowess, which is prowess multiplied by your weapon's heft, which is .9 for Aule. That gives (382 * .9) = 343 as the value that gets squared in the crit calculations, giving a crit chance of 47% from prowess alone.

I agree that it's not the base crit chance that's screwy but rather the fact that you're getting super-crits all the time. Dunno what's going on there unless my knowledge of the crit code is out of date -- I'm still looking at the code as of the last time I loaded it onto my laptop back in early January.

[Scatha]

I agree that it's not the base crit chance that's screwy but rather the fact that you're getting super-crits all the time. Dunno what's going on there unless my knowledge of the crit code is out of date.

From your description earlier about it needing to pass the same check five times, and the numbers Old Coach reports, it sounds like that base chance has somehow (I offer no explanations of how this might have happened) managed to get up close to 100% (certainly above 90%), so it's very easy for it to keep on passing the check until the end. Of course this isn't the only way to get that result, but it seems like it would be a natural way for it to have occurred.

[Old Coach]

Something strange must be going on with the script because it is almost always a *Great* hit, and never a *SUPERB* hit. why always pass five times but never 6? Or, is SUPERB no longer in the script?
Perhaps the RNG is getting primed by the same input?

[Derakon]

Okay, that's a bug -- the *SUPERB* crit is impossible because crit supercharging stops after the power level hits 4, while that crit is power level 5. So that should be fixed.

[buzzkill]

I picked up another amulet of weapon mastery.
Now, my base prowess is 52. Hammer gives 210, ring gives 20, amulet gives 50, cammithrim gives 50, for a total (I guess) of 382.

Aside from the critical hit problem, these huge boosts just seem unnatural to me (seeing them in print). Base prowess of 52 is then increased over 700% by equipment. Does anyone think that limiting the top-end of 'to hit' boosts would benefit game play? What if a mage's enhanced prowess couldn't exceed 200% of his natural prowess, a half-caster 300%, a warriors 400%? It would certainly make a mage more mage-like. I'm talking V too, not just v4.

The way it's sits right now, it sounds more like the equipment is wielding the mage rather than the other way around.

[Derakon]

I will continue to maintain that Angband mages ought to be able to kick ass when they need to. Subverting the standard mage tropes is a good thing. Mages should generally prefer to use spells, and the fact that Aule is being so effective here is a bug, but I'm not about to modify the game so that mages never want to use melee. If they find bloody awesome weapons, and Aule is one of those, then they should be interested in using them, and not just as "stat sticks".

[buzzkill]

I will continue to maintain that Angband mages ought to be able to kick ass when they need to. Subverting the standard mage tropes is a good thing. Mages should generally prefer to use spells, and the fact that Aule is being so effective here is a bug, but I'm not about to modify the game so that mages never want to use melee. If they find bloody awesome weapons, and Aule is one of those, then they should be interested in using them, and not just as "stat sticks".

...and I don't necessarily disagree with you on this, maybe my numbers were a bit to strict, but limiting (for example) a mage to a substantially lesser degree of combat prowess than, let's say, an similarly equipped fighter seems like a good idea in theory. I'll defer though, as you know more about the numbers than I.

[Derakon]

The mage's finesse and prowess skills are the worst in the game; IIRC the mage tops out at level 50 with maybe 60-80 of each. Compare warriors which are more around 300 and you should have some idea of the spread. My initial goal was for melee classes to get 1/3rd of their FIN/PRO from gear, 1/3rd from stats, and 1/3rd from class, for reference. Everyone gets the same benefits from stats and equipment, which means that the mage can be at worst around 1/2 the skill of the warrior (considering mage stat caps on STR and DEX aren't so great either).

[buzzkill]

The mage's finesse and prowess skills are the worst in the game; IIRC the mage tops out at level 50 with maybe 60-80 of each. Compare warriors which are more around 300 and you should have some idea of the spread. My initial goal was for melee classes to get 1/3rd of their FIN/PRO from gear, 1/3rd from stats, and 1/3rd from class, for reference. Everyone gets the same benefits from stats and equipment, which means that the mage can be at worst around 1/2 the skill of the warrior (considering mage stat caps on STR and DEX aren't so great either).

... which means, given the above kit, the status-quo mage gets a ~700% boost and the warrior a mere ~100%. Doesn't seem odd to you that a warrior's gear be so much more beneficial to a mage? (and again I'm not talking v4 specifically, just generally, assuming these principals hold true throughout V and variants).

[Derakon]

... which means, given the above kit, the status-quo mage gets a ~700% boost and the warrior a mere ~100%. Doesn't seem odd to you that a warrior's gear be so much more beneficial to a mage? (and again I'm not talking v4 specifically, just generally, assuming these principals hold true throughout V and variants).

What matters is not how much better they are at melee with the equipment vs. without it, but whether or not melee is useful to the character. Utility depends on fixed, not relative, values -- things like how much damage they can deal and how many HP they have.

So yes, a mage's ability to perform in combat depends overwhelmingly more on their gear than a warrior's. Read that as the warrior being able to be effective even when armed with a stick, while the mage requires powerful magical artifacts if they want the target of their aggression to even notice them. The warrior will still value those powerful magical artifacts because more is better; they just don't need them as much. Which is good, because melee is the warrior's primary means of dealing damage, while the mage can always fall back on spellcasting.

If you did have a multiplier in there that meant that warriors got more "relative value" out of powerful gear than mages did (that is, the proportional increase in their FIN/PRO stats was higher), then you'd either end up with overpowered warriors ("this weapon that makes melee barely feasible for mages turns me into a godslaying beast!") or mages that will never ever want to engage in melee ("well, this weapon would be awesome, but I only get half its bonuses, so why bother?").

[buzzkill]

<sinp>... or mages that will never ever want to engage in melee ("well, this weapon would be awesome, but I only get half its bonuses, so why bother?").

He would bother because a 100% boost to combat, while possibly not earth-shattering and while only 50% of the weapons full capability in more skilled hands, is better than nothing... or he could bother to find some more magely to wield instead. Are there any mage-centric weapons?

Magic books, even the really good ones, are 1000% useless to warriors, regardless of an uber-magely kit or not. Why shouldn't an occasional awesome weapon be nearly as useless to a full caster? I see your PoV, I just like mine better. This may be one of those "agree to disagree" moments.

Maybe my scale needs to be inverted (numbers made up, may not be accurate)

Full-fighter = natural 400, enhanced ~800, unlimited
Half-caster  = natural 250, enhanced up to ~500, 200% max
Full-caster  = natural  75, enhanced up to ~300, 400% max