[3.3.2] Advice on resistances please?

[Derakon]

It's more that I used to value equipment I found that had sound resistance, because it meant that I wouldn't get stunned or knocked out. Now I don't value it at all -- I'd much rather have protection from stunning. But sound resistance is miles more common than stun protection, since a) it shows up hardcoded on several artifacts, and b) it's a random high resistance, which is much more likely to show up on useful gear than a random ability like stun protection. IIRC random abilities are limited to Defender (useless), Holy Avenger / Gondolin (rarely useful), Lothlorien (potentially amazing), and "Magi (usually superceded for non-arcane casters). Getting a useful ability on one of these is unlikely to be enough to make it worth using compared to its competition, especially where melee weapons are concerned.

Not to mention random abilities are horribly diluted by crap like slow digestion, featherfall, or redundant sources of see invisible or free action.

I mean, if you look at the old regime, where high elements also offered status protection, the only elements you weren't necessarily ecstatic to get resistance to were light and darkness. Meanwhile even back then, random abilities were almost always pointless since the only one you cared about was Telepathy, which statistically speaking would never show up. Nowadays we've nerfed the hell out of the high resistances to the extent that people very rarely care about any of them much. We've stuffed a few more useful abilities into the "random ability" rubric, but the odds are that you'll still not get one you want.

Speaking as a player who typically goes for randarts, I assume at the start of the game that I will not find a usable item with blindness or confusion protection until the endgame, if then. They simply don't show up. Certainly the game's playable like that, but it does get a bit tedious having to avoid every nightmare, etc. you encounter, every single game.

This is turning kind of ranty, I guess. Here's my suggestion for how to fix things: replace "random ability" with "random protection" (that is, pConf, pBlind, pHalluc, pStun, FA, and Hold Life) and then shove the lot together with "random high resist". So Elvenkind is as likely to get pBlind as it is rNether. This has the interesting property of always granting you some form of status protection -- either every consequence of a specific element is countered, or a specific consequence is countered from all elements. It does also remove the small chance of finding a telepathy Lothlorien bow, I grant, which is a bit sad. But you never could have found such an absurdly amazing bow back in the day anyway, so be glad you have what you do! More relevantly, this change would make those protections much more common -- and much more likely to be on gear that you would otherwise be interested in using, too.

It also means that you'll never find Slow Digestion or Featherfall on an item that wouldn't automatically have it. Boo hoo.

[fizzix]

I have a very different suggestion to the pblind/pconf problem. Let saving throw also work for melee attacks. If a nightmare had only a 25% chance of confusing on each hit instead of a 100% chance, then a reasonably strong character might take one on in melee.

I do think that the resistances need to be looked at a bit both for 3.5 and v4. I also think that sound should be changed to something like rforce and it should provide resistance to sound and prevent stunning from plasma, sound, force and gravity, but not melee. Then having both rsound and pstun are a bit redundant even though they are slightly different. That's ok though. Of course this goes against Timo's entire reason for splitting them in the first place...

removing slow digestion and feather fall from the abilities list would also be a step forward. Or at least make the abilities level dependent so that they can't show up below dlevel 40 or so.

[Magnate]

I rather like both those suggestions. Certainly, making the monster attack procs trigger less than 100% would be a great change in its own right. (Yes, it would make the game easier, but richer tactically with more options for combat.) But I also like Derakon's suggestion of "random protection" - this is trivial to implement in v4 as the affix Of Dweomercraft can just be R:PROT instead of R:MISC | PROT. (I think we'd need to change FA and HL to PROT instead of MISC too.)