Things I don't like about current V (long-ish)

[Antoine]

You can have percentile resists without stacking.

A.

[taptap]

Whatever you do to resists, 1/2 1/3 1/5 is a really odd sequence.

[Nick]

Longer answer.

Originally Posted by fizzix

Problem: Food is useless

Possible solution: Remove the hunger bar. Some current food items (rations of bread) disappear. Other food items (waybread, wine) can have buffing or healing effects. If desired, certain powerful food items can be "perishable", meaning that they cannot be carried between floors. This allows potentially powerful food items to be generated with the assumption that they'll be used on that floor and not hoarded.

I like the general idea, but it does kind of mean food becomes potions in a different form. Possible solutions would be to make all food perishable, or to make food have a slight slowing effect (so it's not really a battle item).

Originally Posted by fizzix

Problem: Resistances are unintuitive

Proposed solution: Each basic resistance class (fire, cold, elec, acid, poison) has 5 resistance levels. The damage reduction for each level is something like 1/2, 1/3, 1/5, 1/9, immunity. so 2 levels is the current "single resist" and 4 levels is the current "double resist." I'm not sure whether 5 levels = immunity is a good idea, or if we should cap it at four. I'm sort of thinking that immunity should just be immunity to pack damage + 1/9 damage reduction. Gear can have multiple levels of resist. For example, a shield of resist fire could have 2 levels, but a shield of resistance could have 1 level of each of the 4 base elements. Resistance spells can add one level of resistance. For the higher level "elements" (nether, chaos, nexus etc.) I propose that we drop the stupid variable resistance crap and make it a straight damage reduction + immunity to side effects. How much to reduce is undecided, and partially depends on whether we change the next problem.

This is pretty much exactly the Oangband resistance system, apart from numerical details. It is essentially an approximation to percentage resistances which stack by fractions of damage taken multiply. This is actually how the V base + poison temporary + permanent resistances stack.

Originally Posted by fizzix

Problem: Monster breaths are too powerful

Proposed solution: Breath damage reduces with distance to the player. It is no longer a ball effect, rather it's a ray with some max distance. Furthermore, monsters do not breathe if there's another monster in between themselves and the player that is not immune to the effect. Lastly, monsters that breathe something are no longer guaranteed immunity. Rather they get 2 resistance levels (1/3 damage), or 1 resistance level for higher elements. Monsters can also get the IM_XXXX flag which does guarantee immunity. This changes a lot of late game combat. It'll take some experimentation to decide whether it's an improvement or not. It might be worth considering nerfing some player ranged abilities to make sure a player can't just kite an enemy.

Again, this is close to the O, FA, NPP model (without the changes to monster immunity and fellow feeling for intervening monsters). I like it, not least because it means that ball spells and breaths are actually different things.

Originally Posted by fizzix

Problem: Player utility spells are too powerful

Proposed solution: If multiple sources of damage are fixed, then it seems a late level player can survive multiple high level monsters at once. Then we can impose stuff like monsters that resist teleport, or areas where teleport is not available. Destruction is more of a problem. I had a patch once which instead of removing monsters from the level, it pushed them outside the destruction zone. So it bought the player a few turns. I propose we bring something like this in the game and also give players negative status effects like heavy stun, confusion (ignore resist) which makes destruction also require consumable consumption. If this path is taken, you will no longer be able to remove monsters from the level short of banishment, so we will also need to limit/weaken undefeatable annoyance monsters (some uniques come to mind).

I like the direction of these ideas a lot. Note that O/FA make vaults immune to destruction, which is a pretty big nerf. The general idea of making zones where the rules change is one I've been playing with too, and it does open up many possibilities.

Originally Posted by fizzix

Problem: monsters behave boringly

Why is this a problem: Monsters with ranged attacks don't try to use them. There's no way to anticipate powerful attacks like breath spells. An optimized use of spells is out of the question, so some randomness is needed. Nevertheless we can improve on some things.

Proposed solution: Monsters prefer ranged attacks if available. Monsters that are given the RANGED flag do not advance towards @, if they choose not to attack a turn they retreat. If retreating puts them out of range, they stay still. We can steal more advanced monster behavior, like in Sil, but I don't think it's necessary. Let's just make the archer standing in a corridor to be a dangerous enemy that needs to be dealt with.

I don't necessarily agree that optimised use of spells is bad - there just needs to be a downside for the monster so they can't just spam their best spell. Most of the 4GAI variants (yes, yes, O, FA, S, NPP) do this with monster mana, which runs the risk of being just another monster health bar you need to exhaust if it's not handled carefully. Archers in these variants tend to be brutal, but in a balanced kind of way

[debo]

"N levels of resistance will reduce breath damage by 1/(Nth prime number)"

[Monkey Face]

My thought is that if resistances were to stack, there be a maximum short of immunity and that immunity be separately available from specific artifacts (at least for the basic resistances).

Unless it has changed in 3.5, I don't think teleport other is overpowered as long as it is not a beam and has no chance to become a beam. If I'm clearing a vault and there are only one or two monsters I can't handle, it's nice to send them to another part of the level and not have them come back after me right away.

[taptap]

Originally Posted by debo

"N levels of resistance will reduce breath damage by 1/(Nth prime number)"

yup, it continues with 1/9 though

[MattB]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Current Vanilla equipment optimization is an interesting problem: you want to cover as many "slots" as possible, as efficiently as possible -- i.e. with minimal redundancy, because redundant equipment could be better-spent on stat boosts or covering other slots.

If you introduce stacking resists, then it becomes basically impossible to "solve" the equipment optimization. On the one hand, this does mean that basically every item could potentially be useful (if you just want to eke out a little more resistance). On the other hand, "solved" characters are very satisfying, in part because they happen so rarely, and it seems a shame to take that potential away from the game.

I'm completely with Derakon here.
I was just trying to work out how to formulate my argument when I saw someone had already done it perfectly.

[Patashu]

Originally Posted by half

I agree that Sil's archers are on the edge. There used to be more of them and it was a bit too frustrating. They used to be a bit cleverer and that was also too frustrating, so they are basically pushing things as far as they can reasonably go.

Out of curiosity, in what ways were archers made dumber?

[donalde]

Originally Posted by fizzix

I actually really dislike percentile resists, although I like it for display purposes. The reasoning is that 15% resistance is very marginal and not something useful in any way. 50% is. Furthermore, I think it makes sense for resistances to not be a linear addition. Two pieces of resist material should not add up linearly, rather each one should have some diminishing returns. It becomes very difficult to both make single resisting items somewhat worthwhile, while ensuring that multiple of those items don't make it trivial.

How about nonlinear percentage resist? 1st gives say 48%, next item adds 24% on it, then 12% and final adds 6%, you end up 4 resistance pieces giving immunity to basic element, and 90% reduction to damage?

[dos350]

things i dont like:

treasure dtect doesnt show treasure like it used 2

neuter gender

new lvl feelings worse than old 1s

besides this its great game!