I threw a (+5, +3) spear at a yellow kobold and it knocked half his health off, but the spear broke. Shouldn't thrown weapons have a pretty small chance of breaking? What if instead they maybe lost some damage every half a dozen throws or so? Seems to me a spear should be good for at least a few dozen throws before breaking. Do the to-hit and dam stats affect throwing?

Throwing is pretty terrible in Vanilla. The to-hit and to-dam do affect the throw, but there's no multiplier, so you basically get a single melee blow (except affected by your base throwing skill instead of your base melee skill), and then as you noted there's the chance of the weapon breaking.

Throwing could certainly be tweaked, but if it's going to be viable then it really just has to be overhauled. Realistically if you want to kill things from range, use a launcher or spells/devices.

There's a tag for throwing weapons (you see it on the Thancs) though I'm not sure what it actually does. Still that's a starting pt if you are just after a minor tweak.

... didnt know weapons could break.

Not that i would even use throw ...


I suspect that throw is the way it is to stop people from throwing MoDs and GoPs at mobs. I mean, you still can, but the damage is nowhere near what you get with melee.

With THROWING weapons you get 2x damage. In some variants (and in older angband versions) there is also WELL_BALANCED flag, which gets another factor of two. In any case, i never throw anything except flasks of oil for damage, and arrows and bolts for ID.

Throwing slaying ammo is wierdly effective though obviously weaker then the launcher.

I will go through then at some point (hopefully soon), file the ones that are clear bugs or needed changes, test those that are unclear, and explain why the remainder are not problems.

At least, that's the plan :)

In the early game, I find throwing pebbles or iron shots is reasonably effective until one finds a launcher. This is especially true with the more fragile race/class combos, as they necessitate fighting from a distance at the very start.

Recently I've taken to buying bolts (1d5) at the start of my Rogue characters for throwing since bolts do the most damage of any average ammos. Heavier than arrows but lighter than iron shots.

But flasks of oil do more (as do wands of magic missile.) If you need to do damage early, generally you want to do it fast. I've taken Bullroarer with oil more than once, at CL 1 or 2. Using thrown bolts would probably use up all my ?PD.