Dead character feedback

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Of course it doesn't have to be a sword. Some other possible names for finesse weapons:

Handaxe
Kukri
Light Hammer
Light Mace
Sickle

[saarn]

A weapon that always deals the same damage no matter what should be something like a taser, where it doesn't matter where you hit the enemy or how "hard" you hit them because the only thing that matters is that you hit them at all.

Fair point. I was partially hoping that the critical system might add enough randomness to compensate. It feels like the alternatives are:

* make early finesse weapons look a bit more like balance weapons
* make the mid-level finesse weapon a bit beefier (bump from 5d1 to 4d2)
* put +D back in (so the mid level weapon might be 2d2+2 and daggers might be 1d2 +1).

I don't have a strong sense of which of these is better-- I can see pros/cons for each.

[saarn]

Yeah, maybe Foil is a bad name.

To me, Colichemarde sounds too exotic. I've never heard that word before.

How about Thinsword? It's a fictional word with no historical baggage.

Not sure I buy the objection-- Angband has Zweihanders, Lochaber Axes, Tulwars, and Caestus which probably aren't part of normal vocabulary either. Epee is a bit more common and I believe they existed as actual dueling weapons for a while, so that could be a reasonable option.

Or just a Dueling Sword (pretty clear what that is, but doesn't sound nearly as cool).

[Derakon]

Epee sounds good to me.

I do suspect that the total damage on finesse weapons needs to be bumped up. 4d2 would be fine for a mid-range finesse weapon.

[saarn]

Attaching modified object.txt based on feedback thus far.

I'm playing with a 4d2 epee now, and it feels pretty good (I can fight snagas effectively with a lvl 10 character but I'm not splatting them), except that for hill orcs, almost every blow does no damage.

Armor rating for hill orcs is 6, so each blow will do on average (1*(8-6) + 4*(7-6))/16) = 6/16 points of damage. At about 2.5 blows per round the average dent I put in them will be roughly 1. Against an Uruk with armor 10, I would do exactly 0 damage per round. You can't really choose not to fight orcs, so this is where I was going by suggesting that finesse have a roll for avoiding or reducing armor with relatively high odds of success since the armor bonus is effectively by the number of blows.

The alternatives I could see would be to make finesse boost crits, or to make finesse weapons really powerful, but I could see both of those leading to some weird behavior by warriors. I could also imagine just making the armor bonus be applied per round of combat rather than per blow dealt. That doesn't really make logical sense but I could see it being a reasonable game mechanic.

[Derakon]

We're still figuring out what reasonable numbers for absorption are. Initially the baseline absorption for all monsters was 1, which was really quite hard on young finesse characters (those values are now 0).

It sounds like the numbers need another pass. Feel free to go through and tweak them to what you think is reasonable.

[saarn]

I don't have a feel for how the mid - end game damage works yet, but I'm thinking that maybe capping armor at Dlvl /5 would work ok. Morgoth's armor is only 10, though Sauron's is 20. This would bring Uruk armor down to 4 which would still mean that a finesse character would do about half damage. You would still need some sort of magic or very good weapon to dent a Mature dragon (8 armor) or an ancient one (9). I can probably put this together by sometime tomorrow and we can see, but you're clearly a better player than I am, so if you see something that's going to break because of this (like maybe finesse characters start to do 20 per blow because of good egos around dlvl 50 and this would needlessly nerf deeper mobs) I'd love to know.

From some brief scanning, it looks like the most armored monster is Glaurung with 40 at Dlvl79. This would cap his armor at 20.

[Derakon]

If I had better ideas of how the armor would work out, I'd probably have mentioned them already. It's a complicated issue that depends on a lot of factors, so it's just going to take some tweaking and playtesting.

Remember though that it's expected that finesse characters have trouble with certain opponents because of their high absorption. Just like my last prowess character was tearing his hair out every time he encountered phase spiders. So don't nerf everything. Particularly the golems should be borderline impossible to take down -- and if finesse characters react to uruks the same way prowess characters react to phase spiders, that's probably a good thing (that is, a doable, but difficult challenge).

[saarn]

rejiggered monster armor

I rebalanced the monsters based on the following:

in general, monsters should have no more than max(4,dlvl /4 armor)

golems may have dlvl/2 armor and must have at least dlvl/4 armor
people and humanoids must have at least dlvl/20 armor (no way anyone is hat
deep without some sort of armor).
dragons, giants, and trolls have dlvl/10 min armor or at least 3 (things like baby multi-hued dragons were unarmored which seemed whacky).

hill orcs are now tough but possible to kill with an epee, and I can kill about 1 uruk with a rapier before being in trouble at Clvl 13.

Clay golem takes a beating, but is killable, iron golem is totally untouchable which is how I remember him.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Epee is a bit more common and I believe they existed as actual dueling weapons for a while, so that could be a reasonable option.

Epee is perfect! One definition: "A rapier with a three-sided blade and a sharpened tip (when used in the sport of fencing, there is a guard over the tip)."

In Wikipedia it was called Épée, which looked a bit too fancy to me.

[Magnate]

Thanks for your efforts - I've pushed both your dice changes and your monster changes to v4 so that they can be tested more widely. It's just building now.

[saarn]

Cool! I have been playing for about 15 years and this is the first time I've been in the game :-).

I've played a few thieves as finesse fighters (low int/str, high dex/con) and at least for the first 20 dungeon levels things feel good to me. Depending on feedback I'd be happy to share the manipulation scripts I made. One thing I should point out is that I didn't touch artifacts, so they probably still need attention. I could port my dice balancing script to support the artifacts file, but I don't think I'm a good enough player to do the playtesting on them.

Edit: and I introduced a typo (grrr). Description for epee says "an etremely sharp point".

[saarn]

Wow, stuff gets very scary past DLVL30, almost like a step function.

I had FA, rShards, 4 basic resists, see invisible, a sweet artifact weapon (main gauche of Maedhros), staff of teleport, and I still got pounded at DLVL 35.

I don't remember things being that evil before. Yikes.