Item design: I like it.

[seebs]

I just wanted to say:

I have been playing Angband since a long time ago. And some time back, I started up an old game, and I found a new kind of amulet. Trickery. And I was amazed, because suddenly the amulet slot wasn't stupid anymore. I've been playing a -dev angband a bunch (recent enough to have no Charisma anymore), and I've been finding the most amazing items.

A lot of them, I don't want. I don't want a ring of the mouse with -5 damage, but... It's conceivable to me that I might. The ring of the dog would actually be sort of cool if I were on a different build. The ring of open wounds? Brilliant. I love the idea of an item which impairs hit point recovery, but which I might actually want. Ring of digging? Yes, please!

I am a little sad about the elemental brand rings being gone, although I see why they had to go from a balance perspective. I have notions of proposing a weak elemental brand which, say, adds a fixed level of typed damage (like 1d6-2d6 or something) regardless of weapon damage dice. But even without that, I still think things like combined ring stats are interesting and worthwhile.

Equipment choices in a roguelike are often trivial. Angband's doing a really nice job, from my point of view, of providing genuinely interesting trade-offs and choices.

[Pete Mack]

Amulet of trickery has been around since forever. They are a very deep (dl 70) and fairly uncommon item, which is probably why you didn't see it before.

But I agree, they are a very nice amulet (along with Weaponmastery, ESP, Elessar).

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Pete Mack

Amulet of trickery has been around since forever.

Duh, you made me feel old. I was planning to write that Trickery is new addition. It's part of the JLE patch (I think) that got incorporated into game in 3.x series. None of the 2.x series have it.

[seebs]

3.x is "new" to me.