New stat drain model rocks

[MattB]

I like it. But what about low-level characters? Maybe stat potions would have to start appearing from the off to counter it. Maybe the first attack on a stat would be temporary, but if it got drained again in the next few hundred turns then that point of draining would be permanent.

Why not just make stat-drain monsters incredibly rare below statgain territory?
Never liked them red animals anyway.

[MattB]

* Mushrooms of Vigor can be removed as they are now "junk".

But I've always imagined my @ finding them *really* tasty.

[takkaria]

If you want a serious suggestion for what to do with stat drains, I'll put my suggestion out there again: make drains severe, stacking, and limited in duration. So when you get stung by a Giant Red Scorpion, you don't lose 1 point of STR until it gets restored or you level up; instead you lose 5 points for 20 turns (or whatever). This has the following advantages:

* Drainers are still dangerous. In fact, if anything they're even more dangerous in the immediate sense because they make your character much weaker in the current fight.
* No getting stuck with a "useless" character; if you aren't killed in the immediate fight, then you'll be back to fighting trim in a short time. Thus, no need to scum for restoratives.
* Draining attacks can be given to more monsters / monsters with draining attacks can be made more threatening.
* Mushrooms of Vigor can be removed as they are now "junk".

Yeah, that does make a lot of sense now that you write out the advantages in bullet points.

[AnonymousHero]

If you want a serious suggestion for what to do with stat drains, I'll put my suggestion out there again: make drains severe, stacking, and limited in duration. So when you get stung by a Giant Red Scorpion, you don't lose 1 point of STR until it gets restored or you level up; instead you lose 5 points for 20 turns (or whatever). This has the following advantages:

* Drainers are still dangerous. In fact, if anything they're even more dangerous in the immediate sense because they make your character much weaker in the current fight.
* No getting stuck with a "useless" character; if you aren't killed in the immediate fight, then you'll be back to fighting trim in a short time. Thus, no need to scum for restoratives.
* Draining attacks can be given to more monsters / monsters with draining attacks can be made more threatening.
* Mushrooms of Vigor can be removed as they are now "junk".

I can vouch for this model as being excellent in BG no-reload play with Sword Coast Stratagems (SCS) vampires . Of course in that game, stat drain can actually be fatal in itself (stat < 0 means you die), but many stat drainers would effectively be fatal in Angband without an explicit ability to drain below 3.

The only thing to be wary of is having a "restoration timer" that's too long. In earlier versions of SCS it was 24 hours, which effectively meant that you have to fully rest three times to get rid of it. (And you did so even if it meant the extreme tedium of going to find an inn or some safe wilderness.)

[eMeM]

Well that's not a bad idea. I wouldn't like to fight Morgoth without sustained CON with big drains. That would be lethal.. That's good because with permanent stat drains Augmentation would only mean few more turns wasted on restoring and healing but it wouldn't change much.

Other problem with stat draining is it affects melee chars more than those who stay away and shoot from distance.

[takkaria]

I can vouch for this model as being excellent in BG no-reload play with Sword Coast Stratagems (SCS) vampires . Of course in that game, stat drain can actually be fatal in itself (stat < 0 means you die), but many stat drainers would effectively be fatal in Angband without an explicit ability to drain below 3.

The only thing to be wary of is having a "restoration timer" that's too long. In earlier versions of SCS it was 24 hours, which effectively meant that you have to fully rest three times to get rid of it. (And you did so even if it meant the extreme tedium of going to find an inn or some safe wilderness.)

This has got me thinking about separating out the intensity and duration timers for effects other than stat drain. e.g. if you're mildly poisoned for 100 turns by one attack and then again for another 100 turns a few turns later, it seems to make sense that the duration would just get reset to 100 but mild+mild would turn into 'moderate'.

[Derakon]

This has got me thinking about separating out the intensity and duration timers for effects other than stat drain. e.g. if you're mildly poisoned for 100 turns by one attack and then again for another 100 turns a few turns later, it seems to make sense that the duration would just get reset to 100 but mild+mild would turn into 'moderate'.

Pyrel has the freedom to maintain multiple independent timers for each effect; it may well be worth trying to replicate that in Angband. It's pretty much a prerequisite for the temporary-stat-drain approach IMO.

T+0: hit with drain attack: -5 STR for 20 turns.
T+10 (STR - 5): hit with drain attack: -5 STR for another 20 rounds.
T+15 (STR - 10): kill drainer
T+20: First timer times out; STR now -5
T+30: Second timer times out; STR now normal.

If you have a single duration, then stacking drains gets really nasty (you're stuck at -10 STR until T+30, when both drains time out simultaneously). If you have a single severity, then any drain after the first has no effect on your stats, which isn't very interesting.

I think that every timed effect in Angband can be implemented as a stat modifier. So you can just maintain a linked list where each element in the list is a struct with (duration, reference to stat, modifier to apply to stat) entries. Then when you calculate the player's stats each turn, you go down the list, applying modifiers as you go, and removing entries that have timed out.

This gets a bit unpleasant when it comes to display; you have to iterate over the entire list to find out how badly the player is cut for purposes of displaying wound status, for example. In practice, there's never going to be more than 10-20 active timers at a time, realistically, so performance-wise it shouldn't be an issue. You might want to check out procUtil.addTimeredStat in Pyrel for an example of how to consolidate timers when appropriate.

[kaypy]

The other way to deal with it would be to have the effect fade in proportion to the remaining duration

So

t=0/Str0 Hit by -5str for 20 turns (4 turns to recover a point)
t=4/Str-5 recover 1 Str, now -4Str for 16 turns (4tr)
t=8/Str-4 recover 1 Str, now -3Str for 12 turns (4tr)
t=10/Str-3 Hit again, now -8Str for 30 turns (3.75tr)
t=14/Str-8 recover 1 Str, now -7Str for 26 turns (3.71tr)
t=18/Str-7 recover 1 Str, now -6Str for 22 turns (3.66tr)
t=22/Str-6 recover 1 Str, now -5Str for 18 turns (3.6tr)
t=26/Str-5 recover 1 Str, now -4Str for 14 turns (3.5tr)
t=30/Str-4 recover 1 Str, now -3Str for 10 turns (3.3tr)
t=34/Str-3 recover 1 Str, now -2Str for 6 turns (3tr)
t=37/Str-2 recover 1 Str, now -1Str for 3 turns (3tr)
t=40/Str-1 recover 1 Str, now OK

It gets painful if you have eg an attack for -5str for 20 turns and an attack for -1str for 200 turns though...

[DaviddesJ]

A system of stat drain that generally wears off sounds good to me. It still means that the "optimal" way to play is to scum level 3 until you have all of the Mushrooms of Vigor that you will ever need, though.

[fishjie]

Hi guys, bumping this thread because I am a new player here trying to figure out how to deal with stat drain. so I did a search. So it sounds like the only way to deal with this is either:

- lose one level from a xp drainer monster, regain that level, and then use a potion to restore lost xp
- farm mushrooms of vigor on level 3

I'm playing angband v 3.3.2
are there still mushrooms of vigor on level 3? What is an easy way to find/detect if they are on the level? So far I've found zero.

And I agree with the posters who say that this is a terrible user experience. The first few times, I just sucked it up and gained a new level. Now I'm level 28 and I don't really want to do that. Apparently in the older versions you could just buy potions in the store to restore drained stats, that is a vastly superior design than the current system, which I consider an anti fun regression. And if I indeed can farm mushrooms of vigor on level 3, then its not challenging either, just tedious.

[Tibarius]

re: mushrooms of vigor

in later Levels are rods of restoration available, at least in vanilla 3.5.1, store 1 in your home and all you Need to solve this Problem is to recall to town

[Raajaton]

Stat gain potions also restore drained stats. For example, drinking a potion of strength will restore any drained points of strength. If you're level 28, chances are you're at or near stat gain levels where these potions will start dropping. They are also occasionally available at the Black Market.

[Derakon]

Much of the goal of the "new" system is to make monsters that drain stats much more frightening. As long as your stats don't get seriously badly drained (like -5 or more), you should still be able to carry on at your normal exploration depth. Be more careful next time! If a monster hits you and drains a stat, then create some space (Phase Door is your friend) and kill them from a distance. The only monsters that can drain stats from a distance are Time Vortices, Time Hounds, and (incredibly rarely, since they have so many other breath weapons) Aether Vortices/Hounds.

Otherwise, it is recommended that you hoard every Mushroom of Restoring you find over the course of the game, saving them for times when you do get badly drained. Much like you'd hoard Potions of Speed or Healing.

I'm sorry you don't like the new system. The old system encouraged boring gameplay, with players returning to town the instant their character got damaged and refusing to return to the dungeon until they got "fixed". The dungeon is where the game is. The town is just a pit stop. You shouldn't want to spend time there.

[fishjie]

Much of the goal of the "new" system is to make monsters that drain stats much more frightening. As long as your stats don't get seriously badly drained (like -5 or more), you should still be able to carry on at your normal exploration depth. Be more careful next time! If a monster hits you and drains a stat, then create some space (Phase Door is your friend) and kill them from a distance. The only monsters that can drain stats from a distance are Time Vortices, Time Hounds, and (incredibly rarely, since they have so many other breath weapons) Aether Vortices/Hounds.

Otherwise, it is recommended that you hoard every Mushroom of Restoring you find over the course of the game, saving them for times when you do get badly drained. Much like you'd hoard Potions of Speed or Healing.

I'm sorry you don't like the new system. The old system encouraged boring gameplay, with players returning to town the instant their character got damaged and refusing to return to the dungeon until they got "fixed". The dungeon is where the game is. The town is just a pit stop. You shouldn't want to spend time there.

I just started playing this game a few weeks ago. The issue is I feel like I have no choice but to play even more safe and conservative than before.

Here's what I mean. My character a level 28 dunedain ranger just died at 1700 feet. Level 28 is the highest level I've gotten. And each time I got a stat drained past level 20, it would require more and more experience to gain a level just to get my stats back. Typically if I got stat drained by a shambling mound, mind flayer, or whatever, it would be a tough situation that would require using up lots of consumables just to recall out alive.

At that point I'd have fewer stats and be low on consumables, so recalling back down into the dungeon seemed far too risky. I would instead just take the stairs back down starting from 50 feet and essentially resetting. That way I could hopefully gain enough xp for a level and replenish my consumables. I feel like there was zero other option. I never found any potions of STR or INT at 1500 feet (I had sustain DEX from defender sword and CON from my race), never found any rods of restoration, and found two mushrooms of vigor total. And then lo and behold once I reached back down to 1000+ ft, I would inevitably get stat drained again and the entire tedious process would repeat itself. This was frustrating.

I felt like I could make zero progress and worse I had to keep using my defender long sword that I got early on because it sustained my DEX. I had other higher damage artifact weapons that I would keep in inventory to switch whenever I faced stuff that couldn't paralyze or drain my DEX. This ultimately proved my undoing when the master lich paralyzed me.

[AnonymousHero]

I just started playing this game a few weeks ago. The issue is I feel like I have no choice but to play even more safe and conservative than before.

(snip)

I felt like I could make zero progress and worse I had to keep using my defender long sword that I got early on because it sustained my DEX. I had other higher damage artifact weapons that I would keep in inventory to switch whenever I faced stuff that couldn't paralyze or drain my DEX. This ultimately proved my undoing when the master lich paralyzed me.

You're doing pretty well for a beginner. However, there a couple of things that are absolutely mandatory if you want to win:

• Carry lots of escapes (esp. Staff of Teleport early on is a non-obvious one since it can allow you to escape even if confused/blinded albeit with a penalty). When you have pConf and pBlind you can use Teleport Level scrolls or *Destruction* scrolls.
• Always have a permanent source of Free Action. (Priests with 100% saving throw may get by without, but I believe melee paralyzers may bypass saving throw?).
• Get rBase (basic four elements) and rPoison as soon as possible, and keep it permanently (if possible). It should probably be prioritized over pConf and pBlind -- but rPois is not criticial until you start encountering ancient dragons or thereabouts.

but most importantly: Learn when to RUN AWAY. Run away as soon as things start going wrong instead of trying to duke it out -- hence the advice to always try to have lots of means of escape. This applies when you get ambushed by a stat drainer (where you care about the stat) or a melee confuser (without pConf), etc. Especially with stat drain, the right thing to do is to escape immediately. With the right kinds of escape items you can almost always get away in time. (Only exception being insta-death to a breath/spell.)