memorable randarts
 

Every so often people ask if anyone has seen a randart with certain properties. Here is a weapon with all 3 *slays and all 5 brands.

a) The Battle Axe 'Gunion' (4d8) (+16,+20) [+3] (+6) (charging)
+6 charisma, infravision.
+30% to searching.
Slays orcs.
*Slays* dragons, demons, undead.
Branded with acid, lightning, flames, frost, venom.
Provides resistance to acid, fire, sound.
Cannot be harmed by acid, electricity, fire, cold.
Sustains wisdom, charisma.
Slows your metabolism. Prevents paralysis. Grants telepathy.

When activated, it attempts to magically enhance a weapon's to-dam
bonus.

It's pretty underwhelming overall, but the slay orc saves it. :D

edit: Oh, and how could I miss the slow digestion! Seriously, though... nice find.

And 4d8 dice to boot. So that's an average of 37 dice damage/blow before crits are taken into consideration, when using the weakest of the available slays. Yeegh.

It's too bad that it had slay orc instead of slay giant. I think that Atlas and Kronos are the only two monsters who are susceptible to an x3 attack it attacks normally.

I think this is the highest dice randart I have ever seen. It does more damage vs other than my 6d5 slay evil weapon did vs evil.

I got a slight upgrade against that one dice-wise in my last ironman game - no fancy slays, but who cares :) :
Edit: As can be seen I had a +3 attacks artifact as well (one of the randomized rings of power), so after that I felt like buying a lottery ticket!

This one is from FAAngband 1.1.5.
Of course, I found it with a mage ... at least he's an elf, so he can make some use of it ;)

While not being artifact of any kind I have found few enormously powerful Buckland slings. (+20,+24) (+2) which means x4 modifier, two extra shots and +2 to DEX. That makes any character a clvl 40+ ranger with very good extra might (+1) bow.

I don't think I have seen anything that beats that in artifact weapons even all weapons included. Even with weakened additive brand modifiers that still makes something like 700 points of damage / turn.

My dwarf rogue just found this around 1300':

The Lance of Nurethiel (4d8) (+12,+13) (+4 DEX/Tunneling)

Slay trolls
*Slay* dragons
Lightning brand
Blessed

My damage/round went from about 105 vs. evil to about 300 vs anything not resistant to electricity. Now if only I had sources of free action and see invisible...

I've just found this:
I guess that's about as far as RNG can go in creating ultimate weapon. Combined with +3 blows Palantir it's just plain scary.

That is astoundingly good - Bladeturner-derived for sure. Which version are you playing? In the newer nightlies it should have had quite a power increment from all those slays, which makes it a little surprising that there was still enough power for two immunities ...

Pre-r2000, so latest restrictions don't apply. I've started this game almost two month ago and didn't want to change Angband binaries in the middle of it.

Ah, good. I'm pretty confident that such a gross weapon would not occur now then!

Would not occur at all, or the probability is vastly lower?

I doubt that it could occur at all now, because that combination of powers should have such a high rating that it can't be generated from any standart, even Bladeturner.

I found a new randart, it's not awesome due to its stats, but its overwhelming calculated artifact power. I was going through the generated artifact.spo for a while, and checking out the artifacts above 250-300 power. Of course there are the big ones like Grond and MICOM with powers over 10,000, and The One Ring at 50k some.

There was one artifact however, with a power of 4294967205... it was supremely terrible. (I'll post the stats when I'm on my laptop.)

(I know the actual power is -91, I'm assuming it's being cast as an unsigned int ;) )

Yep, that's a %u in the print line which should be a %d. Will fix this.

Not a huge deal, unless someone wanted to make a parser or something.

I did find a great randart though, +9 speed boots with telepathy. Absolutely amazing since it allowed for major equipment reshuffles :)

Very nice - telepathy is rare on boots.

Now that's a pretty nice hat...

Obviously, it's the sustain charisma that I anticipate being most useful to my half-troll warrior.

In ToME...

- The Cloak of Arwen. Surprisingly, it was cursed.

- Various items "of Moron", usually with horrible curses, have turned up several times.

- When I was messing with TFork, I once found a randart meteor hammer with all three *slays* and several brands. It was so stupidly effective that I was convinced to nerf chain weapons majorly.

I thought I'd mentioned this one already here, but apparently I haven't. So let's fix that.

... Wow. :eek:

Okay, this has to be my favourite pair of gauntlets ever. To make it even better, rBlind and rConf just happened to be my two remaining gaping resistance holes.

I had a pair of sandals with +8 speed, and activate for CCW. It was memorable because when I found them, I figured I could crack a Vault I found at dlvl 35. I cracked it, and figured that Great wyrm of thunder won't breathe if I step back to teleport it and the queen ant behind it.

I ended up with -258 hp? I forgot the golden rule, if it can go wrong, it will.

Aique is apparently the elven word for 'Norris'.

Yah that happens when the ~700-800 power item ("Bladeturner") becomes a weapon. I had this:

The Mace of Disruption of Ostolwar (9d8) (+13,+11) [+5] (+2)
+2 strength, wisdom, charisma, attack speed.
+10% to searching.
Slays evil creatures, undead, giants.
*Slays* dragons, demons, undead.
Provides immunity to lightning.
Provides resistance to light, chaos.
Cannot be harmed by acid, electricity, fire, cold.
Sustains constitution, charisma.
Speeds regeneration. Grants the ability to see invisible things.


When activated, it raises your dexterity at the expense of a rando
m attribute.
Takes 1755 to 3375 turns to recharge at your current speed.
Your chance of success is 78.5%

Combat info:
10 blows/round.
This weapon benefits from one or more off-weapon brands or slays.
Average damage/hit: 176.1 vs. evil creatures, 229.6 vs. undead,
229.6 vs. giants, 229.6 vs. dragons, 336.5 vs. dragons, 336.5 vs.
demons, 336.5 vs. undead, and 122.7 vs. others.

Wow, 10 blows a round. Is that the max or can it go even higher?

The theoretical maximum would probably be 6 native blows for a warrior, and +3 blows on every item. In practice this won't happen; 10 is ludicrously high.

10 blows itself is not so ludicrous, except that one happens to be MoD which is too heavy for 6 blows, so it is 5+2+3 = 10, instead of 6+2+3=11.

You can get 9 blows with standard artifacts too: 6 from warrior, 2 from weapon and one from shield. I have currently MoD of Fury +2 which reaches 8.2 blows (fractional blows in nightlies). I have seen several lighter +2 blows weapons but none of them has reached the same damage...yet.

What makes that randart enormously powerful is that 9d8 dice combined with *slay* for all three major groups. Basically 45d8 = 202.5 from dice alone against all major enemies + criticals + other boosts.

"He may carry a single good object," it says.
 

Most memorable thing about this particular weapon? The fact that it was dropped by Grishnakh the Hill Orc on dlevel 11. I believe I was using a Main Gauche (+3,+4) before I upgraded to this one.

Admittedly, I am playing one of the nightlies from just before the randart drops were toned down. But all the same... damn.

That is outstanding.

I also got an early ring of poison resistance and wand of teleport other in the same game. I am fully expecting to die of something really embarrassingly stupid before I make dlevel 20.

If you can beat my "killed by silver jelly" I'm surprised.

In T2 just now: the Ring of Ranarod, which grants +13 speed and attack speed. And this with a Melkor-worshipping Mindcrafter. Curse is already overpowered, but with 20 attacks per turn it's just plain bananas.

Yep, T2 randarts don't know what the word "balance" is. Amusingly enough, the only way to get that many extra attacks on a ring randart is to couple it with +speed, since +speed is the only modifier allowed to have such big bonuses.

<OT>
 

Melkor-worhsipping? Then what is the goal of the game? To kill your god?
I don't get it.

Pretty much, yep. You're angling for his position in the pantheon. Of course, he continues to power your spells even as you punch his face in...

T2 has this silly endgame plot where, if you destroy the One Ring, you can go into the Void after killing Morgoth and battle Melkor's true form there. So if you wield the one then presumably Melkor is still in charge, just with you as a proxy. What can I see, he's a schemer. :P

(Also there's this thing where you have to kill some kind of Lovecraftian evil spirit with an unpronounceable name to get the Flame Imperishable which lets you imbue an item with magical power to bypass Melkor's magical barriers, in the process giving you a weapon or armor of ridiculous power. If Tolkien were still alive, T2 would absolutely make him cry.)

This was pretty nice to have as a switch against dragons.

I'm having a quite lucky (3.1.2) game with regards to randarts right now, this one stands out in particular:

This one is also pretty nifty combined with a ring of acid:

Mine isn't a randart. SoS+2 to attacks is deadly with ring of acid.

This is the best artifact I've ever seen, let alone found:

The Mithril Plate Mail of Athorith (+11,+15) [60,+26] <+4>
Found lying on the floor at 3150 feet (level 63).

+4 strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution,
charisma, stealth, speed.
Provides immunity to fire, cold.
Provides resistance to acid, lightning, poison, light, dark,
sound, nether, disenchantment.
Provides protection from fear, blindness, confusion.
Cannot be harmed by acid, electricity, fire, cold.
Speeds regeneration. Prevents paralysis. Sustains your life
force. Grants telepathy.

When activated, it heals 500 hit points, heals cut damage, and
cures stunning.
Takes 342 to 420 turns to recharge at your current speed.
Your chance of success is 97.0%

Bah, it lacks see invisible. ;-P

Seriously, that is pretty much perfect randart. Immunities to fire and cold, basic4 + poison + confusion + sound + disenchantment + blindness + telepathy + FA + regen + healing activation + stat-bonuses + speed + combat bonuses.

It really lacks only see-inv from main features. Maybe rChaos could count as another.

Yeah, that's ridiculous. About as no-brainer an artifact as you can get. What's it based off of? I don't think even the Rings of Power get rated that highly.

The immunities are great, but you can get the rest covered with egos, especially now that you can find chaos DSM of permanence. I'm not impressed. Here is a pair of randarts from my wife's current game that have finalized my decision to consider randarts as desrving of being in the cheat options list.

I'd take this elfstone in preference to fizzix's randart.

Even BalanceDSM of permanence doesn't come close to that one. +4 to all stats and speed? Combat bonuses? Telepathy + confusion & blindness resists? Healing activation with 97% success?

*slay* undead is great from lightsource, but does it really compete with that armor? All those from single source frees up so many slots for free tweaking any way you want that I doubt that I would even think using that lightsource instead of that.

I'm with Timo here. Both artifacts are gamebreakers at some level, but the body armor gives way more versatility than the lightsource does. Besides, ISTR thata off-weapon brands/slays have been made much harder to get in the nightlies, so your examples shouldn't happen any more. At the very least, of the randarts I've found with off-weapon slays, both were for trolls and had nothing else useful on them...

When I finish, I'll definitely generate spoilers. I'm curious to see if the power rating got borked somehow. Unfortunately, that won't actually tell you what it's based off of...

Best randart gauntlets ever?

Out of idle curiosity what is the highest possible handgear-inflicted spellcasting penalty?

All of your MP, caused by the handgear in question massing several hundred pounds. :)

(The penalty from having non-agile handgear is a fixed cut in your MP of, if I recall correctly, 25%)

Well, it has ESP, but I would trade that to Cambeleg or Fingolfin any day.

Make it a cloak and then it probably would be close to best I have seen.

Is this copy & paste? It says "metablism" not "metabolism".

It can seem like more, because the weight penalty is applied after the 25% penalty. So if you have 40 mana reduced 20 by weight to 20, then the 25% drop of 10 seems like a drop of 50%. I have had mana drop to 0 from putting on gloves, playing some int-challenged race as a rogue or ranger.

Nah, I copied it out from the 'I' screen. Hence the typo. :D I haven't made a character dump of this guy yet because the last few times I've posted one to the ladder saying "Looks promising..." it has ended very badly immediately after. I'm trying to avoid tempting the RNG this time.

...and now you are screwed. RNG reads these forums you know.

Well, I don't know, is +4 to all stats packed with some pretty good combat bonuses better than immunity and ESP? :-)
That's from 3.1.2+ nightlies, though.

I wonder why the RNG bothered to make it an artifact at all.

These are more worth the effort:
The representations of the elven rings are very poor though, no ESP at all, no speed.
I haven't found any artifact with ESP, so I stick with a weapon of gondolin as swap.

Oh well, shortly after posting this I found the one ring (first time ever before killing Morgoth) and killed Morgoth first time with randarts and also with my lowest turn count so far. :)
http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11291

)Thorin++ randart
 

What do you say about this one? Ín standart games I usually end up with Thorin but considering the randomness of randarts this recent randart find made me quite happy. No stat bonus but rPoi, rDis, pConf and +1 shots compensates well.

My only complaint is a bit of grumpiness - when activated it does Enchant Armour but the message is always "The large Metal Shield of Nardan glows in anger!"

Also I've found lot's of usable rConf items.
It's weapons I don't get this time - I'm still using a 2d5 lucern hammer of extra attacks and x4 +11,+23 long bow.

(Nightly angband-r6b79843c6b)

/Mathias

Checking the randart spoiler after my last char died, and found this interesting combo:
Ouch. Incidentally, there was also a helm with +1 shooting speed in the set. I thought that in more recent versions getting +2 shots from a non-shooter was impossible, but... this is ra42bd6-whatever, the nightly from April 14.

Interesting - thanks for the report. I'll have to check. I won't be "fixing" randarts for a while though, because I'm working on a complete rewrite.

The Quarterstaff of Drondin (1d9) (+13,+10) (+11)
Dropped by Draebor, the Imp at 3150 feet (level 63).

+11 speed.
Provides resistance to confusion.
Cannot be harmed by acid, electricity, fire, cold.


A priests wet dream, and hence only to be found by non-priests. My paladin had no use for it, alas.

I posted about another amazing weapon on the acquirement thread, since that is where it came from. But this is better, even with a slight damage drop vs evil. The crossbow is also special, but no extra shots to compete with the weapon damage, and +13 speed artifact boots aren't bad either.
http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11324
________
2Bestpussy4U

+3 blows big-dice huge to_dam, branded with all elements + slay evil and kill dragons and demons???? That's insane weapon, though it does aggravate and IIRC that other one you had didn't.

Nothing in vanilla angband weapons comes close to that. What is it based on? Massive iron crown of Morgoth?? I'd say randarts are broken again.

He's playing 3.2.0, and it's not the randart generator that's broken, it's the object power algorithm not attaching enough weight to extra blows or to multiple brands, slays or resists. This unfortunately means that very good artifact armours can turn into over-powerful randart weapons, and I presume it was based on Bladeturner, since that's the most powerful standart.

I am confident that such a weapon would now rate as far more powerful than Bladeturner, and thus can no longer be generated.

Everytime something uber-powerful shows up, there's supposition on it's "origin", any reason not to include it for players to see?

I am playing the latest nightly from Apr. 17th. Started a fresh character after downloading. So everything there is from the latest and greatest...

Note the weak acid brand, which is relatively new in the nightlies. I don't mind it being weakened, but the message "you weakly corrode..." is just silly. And to have it on something that also slays evil is fairly useless, as it is now exactly the same damage as slay evil.

Aggravate is on this weapon and was not on the other, but the tradeoffs are more than worthwhile. Its not like I'm sneaking around the dungeon avoiding stuff with either weapon.
________
WEB SHOWS

Not at all. I'll add it to the spoiler.

That's troubling on two counts. First, your ladder dump says "3.2.0" - I presume you're playing on Windows, and the autobuilder script isn't picking up the git hash properly. Second, the issue of Bladeturner turning into sick weapons is obviously not solved. Please could you post or send me the randart.log file for this game?Suggestions for improvement always welcome. I couldn't think of a synonym for corrode at the time.But not all non-acid-resistant creatures are evil, so it's not useless at all in that particular context.Indeed. That weapon is way too powerful, and should not be possible even from Bladeturner. That's why I need to see the log file to work out where the bug is. I have a suspicion that it's not counting the multiple resists/brands/slays properly.

Etch? Dissolve?

Unfortunately, burn and melt don't work quite right.

That's what revealed to me that this is new(ish) nightly edition. Also angle brackets around PVAL were a giveaway.

Magnate, I PM'd you a download link for the save and randart.log. This is all on Mac OS X. I would have reported it in a lot more detail, but I wasn't thinking of this in terms of a bug.

Quick glance through the log, this item went through a BUNCH of iterations. At the point when three blows were added it went from Power 151 to Power -2818, which is definitely a problem. Every now and then an iteration would make the power positive again, at which point it was rejected as too powerful. The final power is listed as -145, after 200 tries, with a mean of 227 and a variance of 15507. I think we have a rollover bug in the power calculations somewhere.
________
CALIFORNIA MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARY

Yep - took me about five seconds to work it out once I saw the log: it got an inhibited power, and then had a load of subsequent calculations performed in its inhibited rating, which caused the overflow - and ended up leaving it with a legal rating!

The fix is reasonably simple - we just exit the function as soon as we apply INHIBIT_POWER.

Thanks for sending me the log. The fix should be in tomorrow's nightly.

So my prayers have been heard:

The Great Hammer of Epheleme (8d1) (+11,+5) (+9)
Dropped by a Novice priest at 2650 feet (level 53).

+9 wisdom, speed.
Slays animals.
Cannot be harmed by acid, electricity, fire, cold.
Grants the ability to see invisible things.

Combat info:
1.1 blows/round.
With an additional 2 strength and 0 dex you would get 1.3 blows
With an additional 0 strength and 2 dex you would get 1.3 blows
Average damage/round: 36.2 vs. animals, and 26 vs. others.

Radius 1 light.

Yep. My _priest_ found this, unbelievably isnt it.

Nice - that's a really cool piece of jewelry in your weapon slot. I just hope you are planning on killing *everything* with spells ...

Given his current stats are insufficient to get more than 1.1 blows with that thing, he's probably neglecting melee anyway...

Yes, with priest (and mage) I dont use melee for most of the game, instead relying purely on spells. To kill the big uniques, either of the 3 options (melee, archery, spells) works, but melee I find to be the least aggravating by far so I usually end up using it.

Back in the days when archery damage modifiers were multiplicative and x3 might and shots werent unheard of, I would sometimes opt for archery. After the changes though I never find myself tempted; imho archery needs to do more damage per round than melee to be competitive. I know that opinion differs, pointing to the fact that where the meleeing guy has incoming damage when the monsters attacks, the guy at range has none (the monster moves closer instead of damaging). However, I find it more inconvenient to phase and maintain ammo than to phase and heal up.

"Only a little acid to counter the soporific on the Emperor's blade"?

A.

With +9 wisdom you can afford to.

Ultimate weapon take 2?
 

Playing nightlies from April and then upgraded to May 5. REALLY enojoying the improvements to the game! Unfortunately I failed my quest just when the kit to kill M was complete and I was getting close.

I found several great weapons but look at this little toy below!
Gotta love randarts sometimes!

/Mathias

Based on Calris?? That's about 100 times more powerful than Calris. Randarts broken again in that version.

Maybe there are still overflows. That's what I assumed when I saw this. If anything could cause an overflow, it's +4 attacks.

I'm gonna guess that the cursed case of Calris caused calculation confusion.

Incidentally, the Palantir is unlikely to aggravate in randart games. Handy, that, if a bit cheesy, since it keeps its enlightenment activation.

An astute assessment about artifact allocation and appearance.

By looking at the "Based on..." it seems broken regarding the +attack speed evaluation. See another example below from same game.


Note: I started with nightly April 23 (r712c297ec6). Then copied character files to May 05 and continued with that version from which I produced the artifact.spo file.

Yes, savefiles created with the version Thraalbeast used to start the game may have randarts with unusual power. The newer development versions will not go back and change those randarts, but also should not generate such randarts for new games.

Randarts of unusual strength? I don't think they exist.

:attacked by giant mattock:

For what's chiefly memorable about this one, see: second line.

...This character is so doomed. If he makes it to dlevel 30 without the RNG orchestrating a humiliating death, I will be astonished.

If you are playing warrior, then that is RNG being cruel to you. You need to use better weapon soon, but not using that one with +4 STR, pConf, rPoison and ESP is a tough one.

memorably pathetic: (DaJAngband of course)

My first artifact in an iron man game:

I wonder if it was based off of Melkor or something.

Probably. The current randart generator isn't very good at making interesting-but-not-powerful artifacts. So you get dull and not powerful instead.

So I've been playing the v4 dev versions, where damage for the early game is so low I was pretty happy to be running around dlevel 12 with a +3 shovel that did 21 damage per round. Then Wormtongue dropped the first randart I've yet encountered in v4:

...Thanks, Wormie.

Ehh, it's only a factor of 8 increase in your damage against most opponents. That's balanced, right? :)

Well, it rather depends what it's based on, and what alloc_prob the randart generator gave it. It's way more powerful than a 'thanc, which account for about 80% of the artifacts v4 drops in the first ~20 dlevs. So I'd like to say it's a very nice, very rare drop - but it could be that the randart generator needs some tweaking to play nice with v4. Let's see how many other people have similar experiences with randarts.

I checked the artefact spoilers after I died (they have the same bug with missing information as the chardumps, incidentally) and this was the one:

So, yep, pretty lucky drop I'd say.

That's the only randart I've found so far in about twenty games - mostly dying around dlevel 20, twice making it down to around 40 - so I don't think there's too obvious a problem. (I do seem to be finding a surprising number of OOD consumables in the early levels, though, but that may just be the RNG messing with me of course.)

Hmmm. Yes that does sound pretty lucky - that was about 15 levels OOD, right? And a gen chance of 70 (scale of 1-1000) means it was probably the best/rarest artifact the generator could have picked at that point (unless something even deeper also passed an OOD check and made it into the allocation table).

I'm afraid I still can't reproduce your bug - spoilers and chardumps work fine for me.

Huh - maybe it's Windows specific? I'm on Win 7 64-bit. You'll be pleased to hear it's not a V4 problem, anyway: I just downloaded the latest Vanilla nightly (50c3f4b) to check, and yup, I get the same problem there. The last version of Vanilla I downloaded prior to that was bf11085, and the chardumps still work fine for me in that one.

Oh dear. It's likely to be a UTF8-related problem then. When the UTF8 change was first done there were quite a few problems with dumped files of all kinds, but most have been ironed out. As soon as one of the devs can reproduce it, we can start to sort it out.