How does breath attenuation work anymore?

[Pete Mack]

apparently it was changed quietly *again* somewhere along the line again, and my 227 hp mage died to an ancient green dragon from ~150' away and 9 stars. With single resist @8 stars it did 227+28 = 265 damage. Yet my crappy acid spray spell does essentially zero at that range.

BTW: mage attack spells really, utterly, completely, unnecessarily suck if you never find MB4 in a reasonable time. The only good one is harmless against a ton of monsters. The others do poor damage and break stuff on the floor.

[malcontent]

Seems to me if you had single resist, a full strength AGD should only be able to do 167 damage. But maybe I'm not calculating correctly. I know when we did the Blackguard competition with the nightly build I was toasted by something that should not have been able to toast me. What version are you playing?

[Nick]

From effects.c (last changed three years ago):

		 * - 30 degree regular breath  | full strength at 5 grids
		 * - 30 degree powerful breath | full strength at 9 grids
		 * - 20 degree regular breath  | full strength at 11 grids
		 * - 20 degree powerful breath | full strength at 17 grids
		 * where grids are measured from the breather. */

Ancient dragons breathe powerfully, and poison breath is a 30 degree cone, so it is full strength at 9 grids away. Attenuation falls off at 1/(1 + distance), so it probably should be 1/6 at 150' (assuming you mean 15 grids from monster to character). AGD has 1500 hit points, so raw breath power 500, single resist takes it to 187 at full strength and 31 if divided by 1/6.

If your numbers are correct, that's a pretty serious discrepancy.

[backwardsEric]

That comment doesn't seem to match the computed value for diameter_of_source for the 30 degree cases. diameter_of_source is initialized to 4, expanded to 6 for powerful breathers, and then multiplied by 2 for the 30 degree cone so it would be 12 for a powerful breath (full damage at a distance of 11) and 8 for a regular breath (full damage at a distance of 7). Also, the attenuation in project.c is diameter_of_source / (distance + 1) or 0.75 for the case in question. That calculation did change in May of 2020.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by backwardsEric

That comment doesn't seem to match the computed value for diameter_of_source for the 30 degree cases. diameter_of_source is initialized to 4, expanded to 6 for powerful breathers, and then multiplied by 2 for the 30 degree cone so it would be 12 for a powerful breath (full damage at a distance of 11) and 8 for a regular breath (full damage at a distance of 7). Also, the attenuation in project.c is diameter_of_source / (distance + 1) or 0.75 for the case in question. That calculation did change in May of 2020.

OK. Did I get anything right?

[Selkie]

Originally Posted by Nick

OK. Did I get anything right?

I think you need five minutes on the naughty step

[backwardsEric]

The full damage distances for the 20 degree cone mentioned in the comment are correct - I didn't try to figure how the 30 degree ones came to be incorrect.

The conclusion that all the reported numbers don't match up remains true.
Assuming the ancient green dragon was at 1050 hit points (70% health; the minimum for 8 stars on the health bar) and 15 squares away gives a resisted damage of (((1050 / 3) * 12) / 16) / 3 = 87. Have to assume that there was no resistance (damage of 262) to get close to the reported damage of 265.

[DavidMedley]

Did you have a Steelskin amulet?

[Pete Mack]

My guess is I swapped in =digging instead of =rPois. That kind of thing is too common on a phone, and is part of the reason I only have a single win that way.

[Pete Mack]

So I won't have that problem *this* game. I enabled randarts as so many suggested, and the very first artifact i find:

b) The sling of Adolleth (×2) (+7,+26) <+1,+3> {??}
+3 strength
+1 light

You do not know the full extent of this item's powers.
Provides resistance to poison 
Slows you metabolism.  Speeds your regeneration.
 
Activates for Sleep Monsters

This is definitely easy(er) mode.