Hound advice

[SSK]

I am totally unused to the new (to me) pack monster behaviour. In conjunction with (IMHO overpowered) certain hounds, this has led to badness.

How do you generally deal with the baddies--Gravity, Inertia, **TIME**, Aether, and others you can think of (maybe chaos, nether)?

Obviously banishment is a thought, but what if you don't have a renewable source of banishment? Anyone have special corridors/patterns you carve out to lure them out one by one so they can't breathe on you?

[buzzkill]

It you can't deal with them easily, it's often better to aviod.

[Chud]

My first choice is usually to avoid them if at all possible. They don't drop anything and they're too dangerous for what they're worth.

You can turn off the now-default "smarter in groups" behavior if you want - it's a birth option, I believe.

Otherwise, I sometimes have luck standing just outside a room where they hide and targeting ball spells on empty floor spaces at the very edge of my vision, assuming I'll get a piece of any that are just out of sight. One plus of the "smarter" behavior is that they generally let you retreat and rest as often as you like without interference.

[Derakon]

Avoid them.

If you must fight them, then be able to kill one in a single round of combat (or at least, in a single turn for them -- if you're twice as fast then two rounds of combat is okay). Then just lurk two spaces into a room:

###Z###
#@Z...#
#.....#
#######

You don't want to be standing right at the room entrance because then they get a chance to breathe on you.

If they're already in a room, then hitting them with ball spells when they're not in LOS also works.

Also, if you're feeling cocky, then let your HP fall below 50% -- they'll chase you no matter what you do then, so you can do the standard lure-around-a-corner trick. Of course, your margin for error is much smaller, so I don't really recommend this.

[SSK]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Avoid them.

If you must fight them, then be able to kill one in a single round of combat (or at least, in a single turn for them -- if you're twice as fast then two rounds of combat is okay). Then just lurk two spaces into a room:

###Z###
#@Z...#
#.....#
#######

You don't want to be standing right at the room entrance because then they get a chance to breathe on you.

If they're already in a room, then hitting them with ball spells when they're not in LOS also works.

Also, if you're feeling cocky, then let your HP fall below 50% -- they'll chase you no matter what you do then, so you can do the standard lure-around-a-corner trick. Of course, your margin for error is much smaller, so I don't really recommend this.

Thanks this is helpful. But I don't think I can play for a while. I am so exasperated at just dying again with a character that had found Eonwe and Durin--as I just said in another thread--it is just totally unfair for the program to tell me that teleport other spell is a beam, and then it is just a bolt. All these damned changes and the descriptions are not keeping up. I feel like i have to test everything first on harmless monsters to know what is true.

The monsters are not "aggravated" but I sure am.

[Chud]

It is unfair, I agree, but on the other hand it is a work in progress, never advertised to be ready for general release. That's not much consolation and I do understand the feeling though... still, it could also happen that you go to read a scroll and the game promptly scribbles nonesense all over your save file and then crashes with a big matrix-style green hex dump. Would that be better? Well, okay, that's not very likely, but the point of course is that the nightlies are never advertised as ready-for-release-robust.

I've never won the game, and I have a character in good position to do so now in 3.2.0... I took a break from that to play around with the current nightly just because I know I will be very annoyed to die in the mainline release with my promising character at this point. It'll probably happen anyway, and I imagine I'll be just as annoyed as I anticipate. I do understand the feeling.

[Max Stats]

Here's another possibility, but it may be considered an exploitation by some:

What if the hounds are in a room and you are in the hallway?

         # #
         # #
     ##### #
     #  @  # 
     # #####
     # #
###### #####
#   ZZZ    #
#  ZZZZZ   #
#   ZZZ    #
############

The trick here is to stand around the corner, and then dig yourself a "room".

         # #
     ##*** # 
     #  @  #  * = Dig Here
     # #**##
     # #

Once you have cleared the squares around yourself, the hounds will think you are in a room and flow to you.

         # #
      #### #
     ##    #
     #  @  # 
     #Z#  ##
     #Z####
######Z#####
#   ZZZ    #
#    ZZZ   #
#    ZZ    #
############

Does this seem like fair game? If not, I think the way to stop it is to mark squares in the dungeon as "room" squares when the dungeon is created and have monsters base their decision to chase the player on whether the player is standing on one of these squares.

I have mentioned in a past thread about the possibility of allowing the "aggravate monster" attribute to draw out "smart" monsters into corridors. This could give a beneficial side effect to aggravating equipment, and it makes sense that a monster that is aggravated might lose its self-restraint and come charging after the player. How does this sound? That would give players an acceptable method to deal with this, but with some cost to doing so.

[konijn_]

Originally Posted by SSK

I am totally unused to the new (to me) pack monster behaviour. In conjunction with (IMHO overpowered) certain hounds, this has led to badness.

How do you generally deal with the baddies--Gravity, Inertia, **TIME**, Aether, and others you can think of (maybe chaos, nether)?

Obviously banishment is a thought, but what if you don't have a renewable source of banishment? Anyone have special corridors/patterns you carve out to lure them out one by one so they can't breathe on you?

Try wearing a ring of aggravation, the pack monster AI gets turned off then and they will follow you everywhere. Of course you also wake up the rest of the monsters around you and everybody will be hasted.

T.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by konijn_

Try wearing a ring of aggravation, the pack monster AI gets turned off then and they will follow you everywhere. Of course you also wake up the rest of the monsters around you and everybody will be hasted.

T.

Not currently true in Vanilla, not to mention that rings of aggravation don't exist right now.

[Max Stats]

While we are talking about the smart pack behavior, I have thought for awhile that the same behavior should be given to humanoid pack monsters (orcs, trolls) but only if they are escorts of a leader (orc captain, troll chieftain, or unique). The idea is that the leader gives them tactical direction, like a general, but when they are leaderless groups they just run around like they do now trying to smash things.