Report Batch #17
 

Balcmeg: Maybe it's just that I'm used to it from other variants, but Balcmeg feels like he should have an orc escort; certainly his flavor text makes it feel like he should have a band of orcs under him.


Ammo Prices: While your recent adjustment somewhat addressed the problem, ammo is still worth a lot more than it probably should be; I'd put the divisor at x1.5 to x2 of what it is now, maybe even more. As it is, a good stack of baseline ego ammo still sells for 15k plus, a lot more than most non-ammo egos you'll find early on.


Shop Restocking: As I'm currently taking my time getting to the dungeon, I can confirm and am stressing that shops do not shuffle/restock their inventory while the player is wandering the world map, whether in town or the wilderness; they only shuffle/restock when you're in the dungeons.

Tried to use Paladin's Single Combat against a hill giant, after I killed it I was stuck on Arena 55. Attempting to get out by recalling home made the game crash; I did find myself back in Belegost on resumption, but now I cannot recall out of Belegost, I get "nothing happens" when I try. (Edit: I managed to recall from Thargelion 11 and that fixed the recalling out of Belegost, but now Glaurung's refusing to generate on Nargothrond 55.)

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Lesser bugs:
- another double-the bug: "You no longer have the the Artifact of Namesake"
- bad pluralization on "the mangy-looking leper has 1 hit points"
- I was able to recognize a sword on the ground as the Sword of Idril while blind, even though I couldn't see its dice or bonuses
- if you're standing next to both a normal trap and a monster trap, the D disarm command automatically attempts to disarm the normal trap (if the monster trap is a modified one you can use + to disarm it, but if it's a basic trap, you are left with no way to disarm it)
- Rhukath got stuck in a short disconnected corridor on Eriador 6 (a wilderness plain), the corridor did have the stairs to Eriador 4 in it but was otherwise surrounded by permarock. (A similar thing happened to me too, not sure what kind of level that was on.)

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RFE: give trap manipulation its own dedicated command, rather than being stuck with the general-purpose + key. Using + for trap manipulation can complicate normal use of +, and it's also not explained anywhere in the help that + is the trap-manipulation command in the first place.

Black Market Giveaways
 

Not sure if it's specifically the Black Market or if it can occur in other stores too, but it's possible for objects with zero value (according to the game) to be available in stores.


Attachment 1885


EDIT: Also, after buying the valueless lantern I was able to sell it for a profit at the general store.

Shapechange RFE
 

Give bearform and any other logical shapechange candidates a digging bonus.

Report Batch #18
 

Quarterstaves: Flavor text makes the lack of a two-handing preferred/required rune conspicuous.

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RFE that you'd probably get the gist of from the following:
[09:13] MITZE: There was a "vault" with a few egos objects in it
[09:13] MITZE: although it was really more of a clearing with few or no enemies
[09:13] MITZE: Chest in the middle
[09:13] MITZE: Maybe it was supposed to be a picnic?
[09:14] wobbly: were there ants?
[09:14] MITZE: I do not think so
[09:14] wobbly: probably not then
[09:14] MITZE: Wait is that a thing?
[09:14] MITZE: I thought you were making a joke there
[09:14] wobbly: yes it was a joke. ants at picnics
[09:15] MITZE: (and if it isn't a thing it should be)
[09:15] wobbly: chest full of honey cakes
[09:15] MITZE: vault/special room for plains regions that's just a square clearing with food guarded by ants
[09:16] MITZE: I think I saw a thing on the Git for themed chests
[09:16] MITZE: if it were possible to do in a non-hacky way I'd say make the chest have more food in it

Balance review: petty-dwarf paladin. I picked this combo as one that would wash out the taste of the cheese, and also because petty-dwarf mage requires a lot of care and patience at the start due to super-low HP so I shuffled petty-dwarf here.

This was an extremely strong @, possibly even stronger than the druid. However, @ was also super-lucky with equipment, and while the druid also had decent luck with equipment, I think it matters more on paladin. A druid can get by with a crappy kit since they can rely on spells for damage, meaning the weapon slot's open for statsticks and it doesn't make any difference if they never find a true killer weapon. Resists and speed are also less important for druids due to loscheese and eagle-form repositioning (plus they get Haste Self and Resist Poison as spells, and a statstick weapon makes it easier to compensate for weaknesses elsewhere), and sustains and even Hold Life are wholly unnecessary. A paladin, on the other hand, could be left quite mediocre if they never find a good weapon, and a melee build means they have to be prepared to take a hit and suffer all kinds of attacks even if they pick their fights carefully.

Consequently, paladins would presumably be hurt more than druids by a generic loot nerf, while druids would obviously be hurt more by a loscheese nerf. I think this is good and more evidence that both are needed :)

Paladin mana costs are very high compared to a lot of other classes. I don't think this is necessarily bad, in that the SP requirements for many other classes are super-low, and clearly paladin doesn't suffer too badly if I won the combo on my first attempt and ended up being really OP. Nevertheless, it felt a bit weird that even though I allocated more points to WIS at birth than the default allocation did, I was still very frequently in situations where I couldn't use prayers at all at the time I nominally got them since the mana cost exceeded my max SP. (It's true I had -3 WIS from petty-dwarf, but that just cancelled out the extra birth WIS.) The not-really-availability of such prayers is not a disaster, and somewhat delicate to fix since lowering the mana cost would make paladin even stronger while increasing the prayer level would also affect failrates (and might discourage even larger investments in WIS); so I'm not sure what the best solution to this is, or whether one is needed at all. I did use many of the more expensive prayers very sparingly due to the cost.

Since Single Combat is super-buggy right now I only used it that once, so I cannot say how its normal availability would affect the balance. Glaurung bugged out of the game as a result of that one cast, so I had to kill Ungoliant for the other speciality instead, can confirm my observation from the previous time that she did not drop her unlight cloak. Morgoth also again failed to drop his artifacts.

The device skill damage-increase display is buggy; the actual damage calculation in cmd-obj.c is boost percentage = (device skill - device level) / 2, but obj-info.c has boost percentage = (device skill - device level), causing the boost to be wrongly displayed as twice its actual size.

(I do think cmd-obj.c has this right and obj-info.c wrong - the damage from offensive devices certainly doesn't need to be boosted any further. If the original intention was that the boosts should actually be as large as displayed, the base damage for most devices should be adjusted downwards accordingly.)

Report Batch #19
 

Stealing, Monsters, and Drops:
For the record, considerations over current pickpocketing's lack of usefulness:
[21:29] MITZE: I have not really found a good use for pickpocketing
[21:30] MITZE: I guess maybe stealing from the exceptional dropper uniques?
[21:30] MITZE: but those are either easy to kill or things you want to kill anyway
[21:30] MITZE: for specialties or so morgy don't summon them
[21:31] Nick: I maybe there need to be monsters with good drops, but super hard to kill - like if living dungeons had good drops
[21:31] MITZE: ugh those things
[21:32] MITZE: I already learned not to fight them
[21:32] Nick: Exactly


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Vaults: Again for the record, I feel that they're a little too common, wilderness or no.


(Coated) Shield Ego: Doesn't seem to spawn with its fire vulnerability.


Spellcasting/Armor Weight: Extremely minor, but the effects and message of wearing too much armor weight don't seem to come into effect until 1.0 lb after the weight restriction i.e. at 36.0 lbs for a rogue when their limit is 35.0 lbs. I understand that this is probably due how the penalties are calculated and that the message only appears once there is a penalty, but it seems disingenuous to me for the message to not happen at soon as you reach the threshold or cross over it by the slightest bit.

The automatic digger selection needs a lot of improvement. I had 3 weapons (a cutlass that digs magma in 50 turns, a quarterstaff that digs magma in 33 turns and a whip that digs magma in 400 turns) and it was clearly autoswitching to the whip, which wasn't even my equipped weapon.

Art Flavor Text
 

I think that whatever fix you implemented to make randarts not have their description consist of just their object power score made standarts not have their flavor text; looking at standarts I have they definitely have descriptions in the art edit files but not in-game.