Wait, what? According to the manual unresisted elemental damage equals 1 extra damage die added to the roll, which matches my experience ingame? Did you do some code diving or something?

Yes, you are right; unresisted poison (or fire or cold) gets an extra die in melee, so in that sense you get (some) protection (by not taking extra damage). But poison protection does not halve the damage, and multiple layers of protection do not stack. You can still get hit for 20 or 30 points of poison, even wearing double poison protection.

Whatever - just chalk it up to me whining ...

The way the game thinks about the damage is that it is "mixed" damage i.e. if a Balrog hits you with a flaming whip, you're taking damage both from being hit and being burned. This is analogous to the way branded weapons work.

I agree that poison presents differently: you take all the damage as poison damage, not partial immediate damage and partial poison damage. This is somewhat easier for the player as some of the damage that should be done immediately is pushed into the future but it clouds representation of it as mixed damage and makes it look like more of it should have been resisted.

In terms of enemies that poison the player, I would be inclined to say that werewolves are definitely mixed damage, but spiders and serpents could possibly be represented as having more pure poison damage. I note though that sword spiders do not poison players but pack quite a punch so I am not sure of the consistency here.

I'm very glad to hear this, and appreciate how open-minded you have been here.


So it is actually Shadow Cloaks which are the special case here - the Shadow Cloak base item has the stealth built into it, and so it doesn't have a special bonus. If you take a Mithril Corslet of Resilience or a Longsword of the Feanorians you can decrease the special bonus there also.

21 Smithing is quite an investment so I don't think a 4d3 warhammer is necessarily too good.

This is on my list to look into, but thanks for adding precision to the report.

Morgoth himself will get tougher the more Sils you have and be positioned closer to you on the escape, but the 3-sil curse is the same as always.

Yes, it adds a lot of damage against highly armoured enemies and the front-loading of damage can kill an enemy without response, but you are effectively committing up front to making two attacks instead of one. This requires different risk management. Most of the time you want to Smite but doing so at the wrong moment can kill you.

I am happy with the skill though precisely because it changes the experience of play. For me the flagship skill of Sil is Flanking, precisely because taking it has such an impact on how the player approaches melee; my hope with Smite was that it would add a new tool yielding a dimension of fresh challenges.

I just finished a high-smith, 50K, no-artifacts run on Angband Live, and thought I'd give a few thoughts:

The Smithing game is a bit different, and a bit less powerful. Since the only +Smith items available are +Grace items, and you can only make so many of those, I had to invest a lot more points in the skill. A 16 point investment can yield 27 smithing skill, which seems like a good compromise number; I could make a lot of good stuff, but within limits. And the occasional enchanted forge can help. I assume serially quaffing Grace potions can also temporarily increase your Smithing - I didn't try this.

A regular (not 50K) character seems like it would be hard to run as a high Smith. Sure, you ultimately get another 25K experience points, but you don't pass 50K until pretty late in the game, and so have a lot less time to hunt for forges in the "fully buffed" state.

The "final form" of Morgoth is very hard. It was pretty frustrating to get him down to two stars, but then only barely be able to finish the job. It seems like the power jump is too much. I used a poison branded glaive as my weapon of choice; what do other people find effective against Morgoth?

I was surprised to find that the "infinite arrow production" bug is still in the game i.e. have 80 arrows in the first quiver slot, and 70 arrows in the second quiver slot. Now drop the 70 arrows directly onto the floor. 19 arrows get added to the first quiver slot from the group being dropped, bringing the first quiver slot up to 99, but nevertheless 70 arrows (not 51) hit the floor.

Song of Delvings seems to be inconsistent. Despite my earlier reports, it does seem to work ok in the lower-left corner. But it doesn't always find traps and/or staircases. I don't quite understand the conditions that cause this. But it does seem to be pretty good at locating forges at a distance.

I think you are right that Vengeance would have helped, though perhaps I should increase Morgoth's power a little more smoothly. I am impressed that you managed the kill with a 50K character at all.

Morgoth is balanced with two goals: that kills should be rare and much harder than three sil victories and that the fight should be relatively short and brutal to avoid player frustration.

I too thought this had been squashed though it was some time ago it was last brought up, and I have a hazy recollection that the replication may have been different for the last instance. Is this reliable every time?

Thanks to your earlier post I looked into it and found a quite embarrassing bug caused by a typo misplacing an x for a y. This is fixed in my master branch and will be sorted for release. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

Yes, it seems to be consistent.

I stumbled over this by accident, and then tested it to be sure I understood the conditions. It seems to happen when the arrows in the second slot are dropped on the floor; the arrows in the first slot are less than 99, but are increased to 99; and there are still some arrows left over that hit the floor. Under these conditions, the arrows that get added to the first quiver slot are not subtracted from the arrows that hit the floor.

Here's an underhanded trick that occurred to me after I finished the game: If you know Masterpiece, you can begin Smithing something that takes 3 more skill than you have. But you also sing Delvings (or anything else you know), and carefully arrange for your voice to give out just before the piece is finished. This interrupts the smithing just before the end. Now you quaff a Grace potion, and finish the piece. This allows you to stretch your supply of Grace potions, using one one per piece, rather than needing to serially quaff a bunch of them the whole time. Note that I didn't actually try this so I don't know that it actually works.

Note that I think you *should* be allowed to boost your Smithing by quaffing Grace potions for the (full) duration of the work, I just think the thing described above is somewhat out of bounds. Note that it's not just singing; anything that interrupts you will do the trick- your light going out for example. I don't have a good answer to this. It's niche enough that it could just be ignored for now.

Also - is the 900' forge now not a guaranteed thing? I've had a couple of runs that didn't have a forge when I entered 900' for the first time. OTOH, I have been consistently finding a forge at 300'. What's the truth about guaranteed forges in the latest version?

Also - looking at the code, and thinking back on it, despite my whining on the topic I believe the main problem I was having with Morgoth's "final form" is that when he went to 30 evasion I just wasn't able to hit often enough, despite the "balanced" re-rolls. I think the solution to that, at least for that particular character, would have been to gather even more healing potions, and to make two +3 Accuracy rings, rather than the Evasion rings. I'd still miss a lot, and get pummeled even harder, but I think it would be enough to tip the scales.