Whatever happened to 'restore artifact'?

[Gram]

In a new game I'd gone a long time without getting any armor improvements, stuck holding onto a suboptimal defender weapon to try to deal with it, when finally a vault gave me several decent items and the shield of Celegorm. I was very pleased and relieved. But very shortly afterwards I bumped into a low-level caster (gnome mage, I think) who managed to summon a disenchanter bat. Poof, -2 on my new artifact shield, impossible to do anything about before or repair or replace afterwards.

That stinks. That's not "a challenge" or anything, that's just stupid.

Looking around I found others complaining about artifact disenchantment and found that at one point someone acted on others' suggestions and added a scroll of 'restore artifact'. I guess that never got pulled into trunk? Why not?

[Bimbul]

I have been able to re-enchant artefacts after they got disenchanted with scrolls of enchant armour/weapon

Chance is low but it can happen.

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Bimbul

I have been able to re-enchant artefacts after they got disenchanted with scrolls of enchant armour/weapon

Chance is low but it can happen.

Only up to +15. After that it wont happen and it starts to get a lot harder after around +10.

[Bimbul]

Sure but +10. +10 isn't desperately bad.

This is just the game for me. Horrible stuff happens. You're descending into the pits of Angband not Wookey Hole. Find another shield

[Derakon]

There was a brief period in which there were scrolls that would undo disenchantment damage. They got removed shortly thereafter because they make disenchantment completely toothless. Angband is a game in which your gear gets damaged; this sounds mean but you really should just learn to cope. If a disenchanter bat gets summoned, stay away from it and kill it from a distance.

[Estie]

The thing is that it is a bad kind of tooth. Early on, it is completely harmless (basically just avoid meleeing the Mim clan), but once I have a piece of endgame gear, I raise the "disenchant matters now" flag and really run from every bat. Bat becomes more dangerous than Mim, betrayer of Turin.

But instead of a new "restore srtifact scroll", I would rather see the chance of successfully enchanting be based on the initial value of the artifact, not the (+0,+0) state. So if Ringil gets disenchanted from +25 to +24, you read enchant weapon to damage with the same chance of success as currently Ringil +14 -> +15.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Originally Posted by Estie

The thing is that it is a bad kind of tooth. Early on, it is completely harmless (basically just avoid meleeing the Mim clan), but once I have a piece of endgame gear, I raise the "disenchant matters now" flag and really run from every bat. Bat becomes more dangerous than Mim, betrayer of Turin.

But instead of a new "restore srtifact scroll", I would rather see the chance of successfully enchanting be based on the initial value of the artifact, not the (+0,+0) state. So if Ringil gets disenchanted from +25 to +24, you read enchant weapon to damage with the same chance of success as currently Ringil +14 -> +15.

I like this idea a whole lot!!!

[krugar]

Originally Posted by Estie

The thing is that it is a bad kind of tooth. Early on, it is completely harmless (basically just avoid meleeing the Mim clan), but once I have a piece of endgame gear, I raise the "disenchant matters now" flag and really run from every bat. Bat becomes more dangerous than Mim, betrayer of Turin.

Which, in the face of it, they are.

It's not that disenchant isn't a bummer. It's a royal pain. But the mechanism is perfect as yet another means for tactical thinking in the late game. Late Game = I better shape up, or die in many and inventive ways; including that of a bum pushing his trolley of junk.

Disenchant becomes just yet another dimension to the late game we should be aware of. And if I allow my ringil to go all the way from an awesome piece of hardware to something that makes me ashamed of, I should blame my playstyle, not the game. We have seen many, many, examples of endgames where the equipment was well taken care of.

Originally Posted by Estie

But instead of a new "restore srtifact scroll", I would rather see the chance of successfully enchanting be based on the initial value of the artifact, not the (+0,+0) state. So if Ringil gets disenchanted from +25 to +24, you read enchant weapon to damage with the same chance of success as currently Ringil +14 -> +15.

Let the grinding begin. Seriously, make no mistake, no matter how strong willed we are, if the enchant opportunity is given back to us, most of us won't just stand the idea of dropping a ringil for something less valuable and keep on with the game as intended. We will just keep on searching for that thing that in one shot will put it back to what it was when we first found it.

But without that opportunity, the game is telling us:

1. Loosing equipment is a part of it.
2. We should learn to avoid it.
3. We should maintain our replacements.
4. No store visit is a really *HARD* game mode. As it should.
5. Last but not least, not always you will find a ringil and you just lost yours. That is ok. The game isn't over. You've manage before with less.

[Gram]

Disenchanter bat got summoned into the square adjacent to me. Nothing I could do about it.

Sure, disenchantment isn't meant to be just a minor inconvenience. I am ok with feeling like I should either unequip stuff I care about or not melee disenchanting uniques. But giving disenchantment to weak, common monsters, having those be summoned by completely pathetically weak everyday monsters, and having the disenchantment be totally irreversible isn't part of an interesting challenge. It's just pissing on the player.

Artifacts are one of the reasons Angband is enjoyable enough to bother with at all. Rather than "oh hey, generic monster dropped a Generic Weapon of +0.5% Better Than Your Previous Weapon! Yeah, Progress Quest!" you have distinctive items (with a backstory) which can be game-changing. Totally irreversible damage to worthy items just drains the game of interest.

With fabulous non-artifact gear, no matter how wonderful and rare, there's a chance you'll find a replacement for your damaged stuff. Not so for artifacts.

Derakon, my first link was a game you had as a hobbit with most all your stuff (including Celegorm) getting disenchanted, where after pouring in well over a million turns you found that this was taking any fun out of the game and making it too boring to continue. I don't think that is a worthwhile challenge or good game design.

I had written something quite similar to what Estie beat me to the punch in saying:

If you don't think there should be an additional item- and I'd agree - then change the way enchant scrolls work. Say, for instance, that for artifacts that are below their default bonus, the chance of success were based on current bonus - max(0, artifact's default bonus - 10) rather than on current bonus. Then using enchant on an artifact that had been -1 disenchanted would have a 2.5% chance of success, on one that was -2 disenchanted you'd have a 15% chance of success, and so on, with a 100% chance of enchanting an artifact that'd been -10 or more disenchanted.

Estie's idea is the same thing with artifact's default bonus -15 rather than -10. I do think keeping people from enchanting >=+15 artifacts beyond their starting values is worth doing to maintain balance. But I don't like the idea of giving only a 1 in 2000 chance of regaining that last point of disenchantment, which is just tedium that invites people to play with macros or whatever; something worth doing that's easily repeatable should have a meaningful chance of success or none whatsoever. I guess that's already a problem with the current enchant scroll setup.

[Estie]

Originally Posted by krugar

Which, in the face of it, they are.

It's not that disenchant isn't a bummer. It's a royal pain. But the mechanism is perfect as yet another means for tactical thinking in the late game. Late Game = I better shape up, or die in many and inventive ways; including that of a bum pushing his trolley of junk.

Disenchant becomes just yet another dimension to the late game we should be aware of. And if I allow my ringil to go all the way from an awesome piece of hardware to something that makes me ashamed of, I should blame my playstyle, not the game. We have seen many, many, examples of endgames where the equipment was well taken care of.



Let the grinding begin. Seriously, make no mistake, no matter how strong willed we are, if the enchant opportunity is given back to us, most of us won't just stand the idea of dropping a ringil for something less valuable and keep on with the game as intended. We will just keep on searching for that thing that in one shot will put it back to what it was when we first found it.

But without that opportunity, the game is telling us:

1. Loosing equipment is a part of it.
2. We should learn to avoid it.
3. We should maintain our replacements.
4. No store visit is a really *HARD* game mode. As it should.
5. Last but not least, not always you will find a ringil and you just lost yours. That is ok. The game isn't over. You've manage before with less.

If bats are more dangerous than Mim, they should give more XP than Mim.
Grinding for enchant weapon scrolls is faster than grinding for a Ringil replacement.