Stupid Angband Questions

[Ighalli]

Originally Posted by Nick

Given I'm currently going through a rework of classes, what do people think about having two arcane classes, one with powerful spells and one which primarily uses devices, and gets spells to enhance that?

The new rogue already has this. The rework of recharging makes it so reliable, cheap, and fast to charge items that I've maybe lost 2 items to recharging in the entire play through up to 5000', and I was using them fairly extensively. I think that people complaining about the firepower of the new mage are not understanding just how insanely OP recharging is right now (even with the bugfix which makes it *possible* to fail).

Edit: Although come to think of it, the bug makes you always get only 3 charges per casting, so maybe people felt it was underwhelming and gave up on it.

[Moving Pictures]

.... is there no booze in the dungeon?

I pondered playing Perry, the portly, perma-pickled priest, and trying to do a humorous diary type writeup but realized I've never seen any liquor apart from the town.

Given the cesspool of vice, violence and mayhem that is Angband, I find it hard to think the dungeon is dry.

And I mean, those frost giants and orcs, all jammed together in room, like, man, at some point you know they wanna party. They'd be brewing their own, using slime mold juice, if nothing else.

Surely Morgoth isn't a prohibitionist?

[Pete Mack]

Offish liquor exists in certain variants.

[Drokk]

Hey! So.

I've just picked up the game for the first time in a while; i've never been that amazing of a player but I've ascended in DCSS and played roguelikes for years so I know basic strategy.

Playing a human warrior for fun, I've been diving fairly steadily. I'm level 30 on DL 40.

I feel like a switch got flicked on level 38 which was the dungeon's collective "fuck this guy up" switch.

Unsure what I should be doing differently; I have almost five blows with an artifact rapier which out damages every other artifact I've found so far, so it can't be my damage. Got a lamellar armor of resistance, and some other good stuff.

I guess this is the stage of the game where I need to be running from things more consistently, but I feel like the largest issue I'm having is my current equipment lacking certain resistances (electricity/nexus being the two main ones). The deeper I dive the better the odds become of better loot, so rather than climbing back up or staying at the same place I'm scurrying around looking for armor (or uniques that I can plausibly kill) and taking stairs whenever I see them.

Is that what a good early midgame strategy is? The dungeon became a very scary place very quickly.

[Derakon]

You're at the point where warriors are probably at their comparative weakest. The game is starting to generate nastier monsters that you don't have the ability to detect with anything better than your eyes, so you'll have a tendency to blunder into threats you didn't know were there.

Fortunately, teleportation is still a pretty reliable escape at this point in the game, so the #1 recommendation is to carry a few Staves of Teleport and use them whenever you encounter something that you don't think you can safely deal with. Then get off the level.

You're going to want to get electricity resistance fairly soon, since the damage cap on it (like the other "basic four" elements, acid/fire/cold) is 1600 unresisted and there are some enemies that can sling around large amounts of electrical damage. Nexus is less of an issue damage-wise, it's the side-effects there that you need to watch out for. But I'd just try to avoid nexus hounds, and kill nexus vortices with a bow before they can do anything. There's few other sources of nexus damage in the game.

If you want more specific advice, post a character dump on the ladder (Ladder tab at the top of the page; make a dump from the 'C' screen).

[Drokk]

Thanks for the reply, I'll post a character dump.

Its my first time pushing into the actual midgame, so Nexus is new to me.

Quicker dumb question:

Is plasma an extension of fire damage? Or is it something different entirely?

Edit:
Here's a link to my char dump!

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=21577

[Derakon]

Plasma is a special element, which is unresistable; the only things you can do to take less plasma damage are to avoid being attacked and to weaken enemies that attack with it (breath damage scales with the current HP of the user). In practice it acts like a combination of electricity and sound, in that it destroys things that are vulnerable to electricity, and stuns you. However, resistance to electricity and sound do not protect you from plasma.

Similarly there's water, ice, mana, gravity, and a few other elements that I'm forgetting right now. Mana has a big damage cap and no side-effects, the others (including plasma) have fairly low damage caps but various nasty side effects. Watch out for gravity in particular.

Regarding your dump:
* Personally I would carry more Phase Door scrolls. Generally I try to enter the dungeon with 15 Phase Door and 5 Word of Recall. Phase Door + a good ranged weapon can make a lot of fights a lot safer.
* Why are you carrying a Summon Undead scroll?
* The shots in your quiver are just so much dead weight; get rid of them. There's a small chance you'll find a sling that makes good shots worth using, but it's not a big enough chance to stockpile non-ego ammo for.
* You should probably keep the Mushroom of Vigor in your home, so it can't get destroyed or accidentally eaten.
* You should be stockpiling Potions of Speed at home as well; you'll want them for the final fights. It's worth carrying 1 or 2 in inventory for use during normal play though, until you find a re-usable source of temporary speed.
* In my experience, flasks of oil and lanterns are both common enough that I don't need to carry spare oil in my inventory. Just top off when I find them in the dungeon -- and note that you can refill your lantern using another lantern.
* Your boots are redundant with your amulet -- sources of free action do not stack in Vanilla. Not that you really have better boots right now.
* If you didn't have that Telepathy hat, I'd tell you to carry Staves of Detect Evil. However, pretty much all evil enemies worth detecting are also brain-having -- all you really miss out on are stuff like skeletons and zombies.

On the whole, though, that looks pretty solid. You have a lot of areas you can improve, but none of them that I'd really expect you to have done by this point in the game.

[Drokk]

Thanks so much for the thorough tips! I really appreciate you taking the time.

Since I'm on a roll, here's another stupid question:

I hear speed is extremely important, and from a general rougelike knowledge standpoint I can understand why, but could I get a quick breakdown as to why?
I just found a +9 ring of speed, and swapped it out for my damage ring. Want to know if I made the right choice there. I feel like its an offensive defensive tradeoff, but I want to avoid getting double hit by beefier monsters.

The strength ring I mostly have to sustain strength, as my unfamiliarity with monsters leads me to getting drained frequently.

[Sideways]

Originally Posted by Drokk

Thanks so much for the thorough tips! I really appreciate you taking the time.

Since I'm on a roll, here's another stupid question:

I hear speed is extremely important, and from a general rougelike knowledge standpoint I can understand why, but could I get a quick breakdown as to why?
I just found a +9 ring of speed, and swapped it out for my damage ring. Want to know if I made the right choice there. I feel like its an offensive defensive tradeoff, but I want to avoid getting double hit by beefier monsters.

The strength ring I mostly have to sustain strength, as my unfamiliarity with monsters leads me to getting drained frequently.

A character with +10 speed does everything twice as fast as a character wtih +0 speed... so he does the same effective melee damage with 150 dam/round as the slower character would with 300 dam/round (because he gets twice as many rounds) but he's also effectively better at everything that isn't melee.

So speed is a really big thing, but only up to a point. +20 unhasted is usually "enough" - +30 hasted is enough not to get double-moved by any monster in the game, and speed is into diminishing returns territory by then anyway. Up to +26 it's 0.1x per point (so +26 is 1+2.6x = 3.6x speed), after that it gets a bit weird, but +26 hasted is all you really need anyway when you're not fighting Morgoth. (+26 hasted will do against Morgoth too at a pinch, but you might get insta-killed if you're unlucky with a double-move.)

So unless you already had heaps of speed without the +9 ring you almost certainly made the right choice.

[Philip]

First things first - Ring of Speed at dlvl 40 is very lucky, and you should definitely wear that ring. So long as you're getting extra blows from it, the ring of strength probably isn't much worse than the ring of damage anyway, so if it keeps you safer from STR drain that's worth it.

On a warrior I am fond of +30 unhasted. With bad saving throw and brain smash, and warriors being bad at getting reliably hasted, I find it convenient not to have to worry about it. The diminishing returns do get serious after a while, though.

The first reason speed is so important is that many monsters (including Sauron and Morgoth) have attacks capable of dealing over half your health in damage in one turn. If they get two consecutive turns on you, that means there's a chance you die. And any event where there is a chance you die, no matter how small, if it occurs enough times over a game, you will die. So you need to be faster than they are, if you're going to be fighting them.
The second reason is what Sideways mentioned. Multipliers that apply at the end of a calculation are extremely powerful.