Relative strength of randarts?

[Chud]

It could well just be me, but it *seems* to me that randart items in general tend to not be as good as the standard artifact set. I guess that maybe shouldn't be surprising, since the standard artifacts have been "designed" deliberately to some extent, but does that sound like other people's experiences too?

So far I've got an artifact cloak that's a cloak of stealth plus resist fear, and a shield that's resist acid plus free action (not awful, but not exactly "wow"). There have been others that are similar, but those are the examples I remeber at the moment. :-)

[Derakon]

Most of the standarts are designed with some cohesive purpose in mind, so yeah, randarts are often not as useful. However, you occasionally get some combination that's really powerful -- for example, boots that boost both speed and a primary stat that happens to be useful for you (the mage with boots of +7 speed/INT), or a crossbow with a giant +to-dam, x5 multiplier, and +1 shot...

The really abusive combinations (off-weapon blows, shots, and brands, mostly) are gone, but randarts will still get you a decent kit by the end pretty reliably. That said, I've had several randart games where I've gone towards about 3000' without covering something important that would have shown up ages ago in a standart game.

[fizzix]

It's also notoriously difficult to get randart power to be approximately equal to standart power. If you look back in the archives you'll see plenty of people claiming that randarts were way too powerful. It's possible that the pendulum has swung the other way and that they're less powerful now. But I don't think they're *that* much weaker than artifacts.

Magnate has big plans for the randart code, although I'm not sure how much is just refactoring and preventing the silly, "not enough shields" messages.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by fizzix

Magnate has big plans for the randart code, although I'm not sure how much is just refactoring and preventing the silly, "not enough shields" messages.

Those have gone in the current 3.4-dev version (but nobody will have spotted that yet because it doesn't build on Windows ...).

I do have big plans but they've kind of gone beyond randarts to ego items. I'm going to start this to see if it works, and if it does then randarts will probably not change until 3.5.

[Thraalbee]

I'm only playing randart games now and am quite happy with 3.3 in regards of randarts (and the rest too, btw).

Instead of the balanced standart distribution of item types and powers you get a large variance for good and bad. My latest winner (http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11704) found five great artifact shooters but only one usable artifact melee weapon, and that one at dLvl 74. I also found at least 5x acid immunity items vs only one somewhat useful swap bow for cold immunity, one useless heavy weapon w lightning immunity and zero fire immunity.

Still, once you're down at L100 I don't think it is much easier or harder to win the game with randarts. That was not true in older versions in which you easily could end up scoring several thousand hp in damage per round through badly balanced weapons like the The Mattock 'Turth' (11d8) (+25,+40) [+55] +4 attack speed, Slays animals, orcs, trolls, giants; *Slays* dragons, demons, undead; Branded with lightning, flames, frost, venom; Provides immunity to lightning, cold; ...

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Thraalbeast

Still, once you're down at L100 I don't think it is much easier or harder to win the game with randarts. That was not true in older versions in which you easily could end up scoring several thousand hp in damage per round through badly balanced weapons like the The Mattock 'Turth' (11d8) (+25,+40) [+55] +4 attack speed, Slays animals, orcs, trolls, giants; *Slays* dragons, demons, undead; Branded with lightning, flames, frost, venom; Provides immunity to lightning, cold; ...

Please bear in mind that weapons like that have only ever occurred as a result of bugs in dev versions. I don't think any release version (x.y.z) has ever had randarts like that in. I think 3.1.2 probably had the worst randart balance, but it wasn't that bad.