Fun with a Late game Mage

[Grotug]

Part 1: https://youtu.be/nFFTB5WLJIY
Part 2: https://youtu.be/nFFTB5WLJIY#t=10m42s

In the above linked two-part video my Mage takes out multiple deep undead uniques with mana bolt, and then sorts through the drops to find two uber-launchers, one X7 crossbow after dispatching Fegwath and a X6 branded long bow after taking out a bunch of other deep Undead uniques.

[Grotug]

Got frustrated with my mage game since I keep leaving good levels inadvertently. So I decided to try Hobbit Rogue:

How do you get started as a rogue? You throw a sheet-ton of bolts for the first 7 levels, until you find a crossbow:

https://youtube.com/video/hTN7Qq31CfY

[Pete Mack]

@Grotug--
I usually use flasks of oil, but work very hard to preserve ammo. (You only get a dozen shots or so, but they do 3x more damage.) Hopefully will find some magical ammo along the way to replace the oil.

[Estie]

Also, can buy wand of mm. My dwarf rogues dig out nodes and buy out anything that can damage from afar, oil, wands or launchers/ammo.

[Grotug]

I like bolts because I can take 120 of them into the dungeon for a fraction of the cost of mm and they do the same amount of damage as pebbles shot from a sling. And since Hobbit Rogue has some of the highest throwing to-hit in the game, I figure it's a great, cheap way to capitalize on that skill set. If you watch my video you'll see how well it worked out for me. I find flasks of oil may do 3X damage, but they cost six times as much, are much heavier and have a 100% breaking chance compared to bolts which are relatively light and only have a 25% breaking chance.

[Estie]

So now I watched your video and it confirmed what I suspected - youre clearing levels, playing that rogue like a warrior.
There is nothing wrong with that, mind you, and for the purpose throwing bolts is a brilliant idea, but its not the most efficient way to go about killing Morgoth.

Wand charges may be expensive, but you dont use them on icky things, you use them on Bullroarer and afterwards discard the wand and equip the enchanted launcher he dropped.

[Pete Mack]

What @Estie says, except oil is cheaper than -MM. (Even oil + ?Bless is cheaper.) Bullroarer is a huge target of opportunity if you get lucky enough to find him at CL 2 or 3 (or even 1.)

[Nick]

Originally Posted by Grotug

I like bolts because I can take 120 of them into the dungeon for a fraction of the cost of mm and they do the same amount of damage as pebbles shot from a sling. And since Hobbit Rogue has some of the highest throwing to-hit in the game, I figure it's a great, cheap way to capitalize on that skill set.

I nearly put the THROWING flag on pebbles and shots, but thought it made them too powerful - I may have to revisit that, because an iron shot really should be better to throw than a crossbow bolt.

[Philip]

My long post on this topic got lost for some reason, but a quick summary will be better anyway.

Some very bad maths suggests that a 0.4 lb rock is somewhat heavier than a baseball, so if thrown at the same speed (which it likely will be, since the limiting factor is not strength but the speed of the hand at the moment the object leaves it), it will probably hit somewhat harder. It also has somewhat less than 1/2 the impact surface of a baseball, means the impact is less distributed (in general a good thing at the scale we're working with here). It will however be smaller, which is actually something of a challenge - to throw effectively and accurately you would probably want your whole hand to be holding the object, but the rock is only roughly 1.3 times the volume of a US standard large egg. Certainly throwable, but perhaps pushing this criterion a bit. Ultimately, getting hit by this will hurt more than a baseball (though presumably less than a baseball thrown by an expert pitcher, because they will still be throwing faster than anyone without training, and kinetic energy rises quadratically with velocity).

With this in mind, the rounded pebble seems like a decent candidate for the THROWING flag. While it wouldn't let the thrower use their strength particularly effectively (such that even weak throwers would likely prefer a larger, heavier rock both for ease of throwing and for effective use of their maximum kinetic energy potential), it would fly far enough and be aimable. It would also distinguish rounded pebble beyond simply "bad sling ammo". The rounded pebble is also the closest to when Bilbo uses rocks against the Mirkwood spiders, which is one of the few canonical uses of throwing weapons in the canon (off the top of my head, a young Glaurung is driven back by thrown darts one time?).

Not entirely convinced with the iron shot. If we assume it is also spherical (which seems reasonable, and is more or less entirely necessary for it to be throwable at all, since otherwise we would expect the shot to rotate around its own axis while in flight, and lose a lot of effectiveness) then the 0.5 lb iron shot has a volume of under 30 ml. WolframAlpha helpfully informs us this is somewhat smaller than a typical icecube. Throwable, sure, but accurately and effectively as a weapon? Not sure. You'd probably want something bigger.

Of course, you can't actually throw arrows or bolts, really. Even if you tried to use them as tiny javelins and somehow managed to throw them straight, it would do nothing or next to nothing because its velocity is limited by your throwing speed, so its energy is dependent on its mass, which is quite low, compared to even the lighter sorts of javelins that are actually used (for sport or formerly for combat). I would consider outright banning throwing these.

If we want decent early game throwing options, some cheap dedicated throwing weapons in stores would be helpful. Throwing daggers, darts, javelins, etc.

[Pete Mack]

Note: Rounded pebbles are bad sling ammo only in the early game. By the time you get to +9 to_dam combined ammo + sling, the difference in damage between a pebble and a shot is 10%. Meantime, the pebble weighs 20% less, so you can carry 10% more effective ammo without being slowed. Later in the game, the difference is more like 15% more ammo and 5% less effective (marginally fewer criticals, but less than 5% nominal difference.) And you really will be carrying a *lot* of ammo, if you are lucky enough to find a +2 Buckland. Of course in 4.2, Buckland was nerfed to unusability, so this no longer applies. (As you cannot do better than +1 shot/per turn, there's no point to using one, since sling ammo sucks in comparison to arrows and bolts--that's the real difference, not pebbles vs. shot.)

Yes, I am bitter about this. I am also bitter about rogue getting so badly nerfed that the class description is a lie: he is no longer capable of fighting his way out of a tight spot with -1 STR, -2 CON AND -2 hit dice from the original description back in the day. AND he lost almost all the buffing. All the class has is detect objects.