No kidding. +12 stealth in item that aggravates. Cursed indeed. I wish you could remove that kind of curses with remove curse.

BTW FAangband have special remove_contradictory () function to avoid such stuff.

I wonder where Nick got that from :-)

the Steel Helm of Carfin [9,+16]: Cannot be harmed by acid, electricity, fire, cold


Havent had any of these before.

IMO that is borderlining a bug. Artifacts should have something to make them special. This does not have anything.

Well there are bad artifacts, too; so having zero value ones isnt horrible, as long as they are rare enough.

I wonder how much value the generator gives AC. Its probably impossible to get right, because the value of AC changes during the game, and similarly, of weight. Maybe assigning weight a negative value would be a good idea.

This helmet was junk for me when I found it: early in the game and already at speed -1 from weight, I wasnt going to add more load for a bit of AC. If it had been a leather cap +16, I might have equipped it till something better turned up (like a hat of infravision).

For the lategame weight is all but irrelevant (you go from speed 23 to 22 or so, who cares), but a small negative value adjustment shouldnt break the system there.

Another option is to assign AC a value of zero. As long as the distribution of AC for the artifacts remains the same, youll end up with between 200 and 300 AC for the end kit anyway and the difference between the 2 is negligable.

IMO in order to become an artifact object needs to have something special. Something that makes people of the realm remember and recognize the thing.

And having high AC isn´t special in this sense, I take it, while having, say, fire resistance is. That means assigning no value to AC like suggested above would solve.
One could also require "at least 2 properties for each artifact"; I wonder if it would still be possible to get an AC only helm with extra weight or so.

Well, there is Glaive of Pain which has nothing but insane damage (and now later pFear). Maybe if AC bonus would be higher than +20 which is unattainable with enchant item scrolls/spells it could qualify. At +16 however it is just barely better than ordinary steel helmet which someone had enchanted a lot. Only special features that thing had was ignore acid and immune to manastorm destruction (automatic from being artifact). Not even AC was exceptional.

BTW we need mithril helmets. Guards of the Citadel in Denethors court had those, so they should be rather common item (or at least possible base item meaning rarer than shallow helmets items, but more common than egos later).

Helmets are now:

Hard Leather Cap
Metal Cap
Iron Helm
and
Steel Helm

None of those ignore elements (acid).
(+ four crowns with base 0 AC)

Yeah, the Glaive of pain only has lots and lots of damage, but higher damage dice count for a lot, and honestly, +30 is insane. Damage is useful, unlike AC, which is not useful for much. It is handy against mobs of monsters with attacks that do HP damage, as opposed to inventory damage or character damage. Actually, the subsection of those monsters you fight hand-to-hand.

For an objects AC to be interesting, it would have to give at least 50 more AC than I would reasonably expect, since the Glaive has about 10 or so more damage than I would reasonably expect on an artifact. If the helm gave 60-80 AC or so, it would be an interesting object.

I agree about mithril helms, feels fairly natural. I can't think of anything else that is mentioned to be mithril, but gauntlets would qualify, too.