If we sort the V list of uniques by level and divide in thirds, the likely candidates are

• 33: Mim; Lokkak; perhaps Bert, Bill, and Tom together; Lorgan; Kavlax if we want to be mean
• 66: The Balrog of Moria; Shelob; Saruman; The Mouth of Sauron; Thuringwethil; Glaurung

Saruman seems like the clear winner to me for the second third. None of the first third candidates is particularly thematic. Uvatha lurks a little deeper, and I could certainly see the first ringwraith as a decent first boss.

My main concern with minibosses is that they force the player to stop and power up enough to deal with them. My preferred style of play involves diving much deeper than I "should" be and then very carefully choosing my fights, which doesn't mesh well with being forced to stop and kill a specific powerful-for-his-depth enemy.

We had discussions of good ways to implement minibosses in other threads, though. Specifically this one, with my personal opinion.

I like both myshkin's and Derakon's ideas.

And I kept the diff for precisely this purpose, if you want it.

I had to google that:

Interesting!

At one point the algorithm I used was included in the Angband source - in init1.c

Which begs the question when that file was removed.

This combination really could work!

OK, how do we make each battle challenging then?

Maybe there should be some monsters, or some monster abilities, that wouldn't get any easier to defeat as you gain levels. That way even a level 50 character would face some real danger even on DL 1.

One idea, just to pick an example: Sanity score, which would depend only on race and class but not on character level. It would work just like hitpoints against some monster attacks.

Or divide hitpoints into endurance and life, with life points not increasing with levels. Usually life points would be reduced only after endurance is at zero. But some kind of attacks would reduce life points directly, like curse spells and poison.

It was removed circa 3.1.2, when all the text file parsing was replaced with a new system that lives solely in init2.c. Thanks for the reminder - I'll dig up the algorithm for fizzix as well, in case he's interested in seeing how the changes were derived.

Anything is useful. From what I gathered, the rebalancing mainly sorted out monsters in the first 40 levels, but there are some curious differences, like time hounds being moved up.

Hmm, that sounds similar to Steamband's Hitpoints/Woundpoints system... except in Steamband, I think WP did increase with levels, and also, it was possible to lose WP even if you had HP remaining; the chance of losing WP instead of HP from any given point of damage was simply WP / (HP + WP).