User talk:Tjr

Welcome!

Well, I see that you've been around for almost a year now, but I still wish you welcome to Wikihack! :) —ZeroOne (talk / @) 00:37, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Apparently people do read your user page :)

Yes Tjr, thanks for the warm welcome! Sps153 01:15, February 5, 2010 (UTC)

Eyes of the Overworld, role difficulty

Re wishing for the Eyes of the Overworld: I agree that for Wizards the Eyes of the Overworld is probably a bad wish. The spells are better. However, for non-spellcasting roles, the Eyes of the Overworld are great. Your standard Valkyrie is not very likely to be able to cast magic mapping reliably, nor are they likely to succeed in writing one with a magic marker as you suggest (only Wizards can reliably write unknown spells).

Re Tourists: Wizards start with force bolt, which is a huge advantage over Tourists. Wizards can cast level 1 spells while wearing metal armor. There are quite a few useful level 1 spells, including sleep, healing, and light; also, Wizards are nearly guaranteed to read level 1 spellbooks successfully once you test for BUC. Wizards, even with zero luck, can usually successfully write unknown level 1 spellbooks with a magic marker. None of the above are things that Tourists can do. Finally, Wizards have lots of other minor advantages (cloak of magic resistance, guaranteed Magicbane, among others). Tourists have relatively few advantages; the only important ones are the expensive camera and the extra food. I would say that Wizards are quite a bit easier than Tourists.

djao 10:42, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

True, a valkyrie won't profit from those three spells. She won't raise them to skilled level, either. As this is my personal page, I can say I care about spellcasters.

Tourists:

• Early game wizards can't actually cast force bolt. In my experience, force bolt is a boon for beginners and the first few rounds. But once my wizard is snugly protected by iron armor, he can't even cast it. Let alone regenerate the energy. Daggers and Elbereth are the way to go. I find a tourist's darts are almost on par with force bolt.
• level 1 spells: The force bolt notes apply, and they are generally less useful that force bolt. Sleep ist great (if you get it); healing is only worthwile if you can rely on it - excludes armor. Why do people want light? I use it only to mark where I have already searched for the vibrating square.
• BUC test: spellbooks are only 3% chance cursed, so I don't even bother testing. As a non-wizard, I do BUC and price quotes.
• writing unknown: I didn't know that depended on the spell's level (and have never used it before mine's end). Thanks.
• cloak of magic resistance: I consider that a major advantage. How do other roles get by?
• MagicBane: writing Elbereth with your finger is doable. Always verify, and don't depend on instant success. Instead, block monsters' paths with E-squares early enough not to get into an emergency. In the later game, a tourist can simpliy wish for Magicbane and benefit from its curse catching function.
• the expensive camera negates Elbereth. I consider it a disadvantage.

In conclusion, the playing style early game wizard limitations caused me to develop also fits tourists. I can't see why people say tourists are so much harder.

Early game Wizards can cast force bolt and everything else, provided that they avoid certain armor. It sounds like you prefer to wear armor and lose the ability to cast spells. That's fine, but not everybody plays that way, and certainly not many people always play every game that way (if you get lucky and get a very useful spell -- charm monster for example -- you're better off naked than spellless, and it only takes one magic marker). Wearing iron armor gives you at most 5 extra points of protection: +3 for mithril vs. studded leather, +1 for a dwarvish iron helm vs. an elven leather helm, and +1 for a large/elven shield vs. a small shield. The difference decreases to four points if you allow your Wizard to wear dwarvish iron helms (a single metal helmet by itself isn't fatal to a Wizard's spellcasting chances). Whether this amount of AC is worth losing your spells is at least debatable.

A few points to set the record straight:

1. The chance of succeeding to write a spell does not directly depend on the spell's level, but the number of charges required certainly depends on the spell's level. If you don't know how many charges your marker has, then you might run out of charges trying to write a high level spell. You'll almost never run out of charges writing a level 1 spell.
2. Magicbane is useful as an Elbereth-writer, but it's also a much better weapon than anything a Tourist can easily get. Thrown daggers are nice but require some enchantment before they work as well as Magicbane.
3. If nothing else, the expensive camera works against monsters that ignore Elbereth. I'm thinking about werecreatures and elves here.
4. Light lets you see monsters before they appear next to you. Very useful especially if you are relying on thrown daggers. Elven Wizards don't need it as much, because they have infravision, but if you're going to count infravision then Tourists are even harder, since Tourists never have infravision.
5. Finally, the wiki of course has to take all roles into consideration, not just Wizards, so of course Wizard-specific advice will occasionally disagree with the wiki.

djao 16:54, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

All this applies to a wizard before the quest (by far the most lethal stage of the game):

• armor: I wear everything to lower armor class, and gradually replace it with spellcasting armor as I find it. (I love the minetown watch for that...) It's just a heuristic based on experience: I survive in iron armor, but I often don't if I wait for non-iron stuff to turn up. Most givers of advice seem to agree.
• Magicbane: IIRC, an athame does as much damage as a dagger. So, if you patiently collect all daggers you find in the mines, you usually will have at least a +3 one to wield, while Magicbane still is at +0. As long as it doesn't corrode, a simple dagger is technically better in the early game.
• Firing is what makes daggers really great: At expert level, it's 1d3 per round. You can't fire Magicbane (or any other athame) in stacks. Also, they are a ranged attack: you attack before monsters even scratch you. In this phase of the game, daggers are definitely better. (Later, the still do more damage if you have gauntlets of power - they just aren't convenient.)
• camera: By the time werecreatures and elves turn up, my wizard usually already has spellcasting armor. Anyway, elves are slow - no need to kill them. Werecreatures are rather vulnurable in animal form, just run and wait. And: fire daggers or attack spells. The camera is really great for the Riders on the Astral plane, but that's out of scope.
• Light just doesn't cut it in the mines. Your magical energy doesn't regenerate fast enough, not even for wizards. My approach is to try and find a lamp, maybe doing Sokoban first, or if I have infravision, I will just risk it. Scrolls of magic mapping come in handy, too.
• Wizard-specific advice: My point is, a lot of it applies to tourists, too. That's why I am saying they aren't much harder than wizards. Tourists and Wizards should definitely not be on opposing ends of the difficulty scale. Of course, the picture changes in mid-game, but by then you already have a good chance of ascending anyway.

Magicbane

(This is getting long, so I'll keep it short.) Magicbane at +0 with basic skill inflicts an average of 7.66 points of damage per hit, compared to 2.5 points for a dagger. (Source: artifacts spoiler.) At expert skill, the numbers are: +0 Magicbane: 9.66 average, +0 dagger: 4.5 average. At expert skill, thrown +0 daggers average 9 points of damage per firing, assuming all your daggers hit; this is less than Magicbane's 9.66 average. Magicbane also has a greater chance to hit, since it has an artifact to-hit bonus, whereas regular daggers do not. Altogether, I find Magicbane clearly superior to thrown daggers or any wielded normal dagger less than +5. Of course ranged attacks have other advantages, and Magicbane has other advantages too -- I'm just talking about damage here. djao 21:27, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

OK, I'll do some testing next time round, to see why it always "felt" better. Tjr 02:29, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Would thrown Magicbane break or disappear? Alysdexia 18:42, March 18, 2010 (UTC)

No. Usually, I have a stack of ordinary daggers readied, though, because multishot is the real advantage to firing stuff. -Tjr 18:54, March 18, 2010 (UTC)

Redirects

Hi There. I noticed a few requests for redirects to be set up. Any registered user can create them, just use #REDIRECT[[page]] to set one up. Note there is no space between REDIRECT and the brackets, and that you can't preview the page, it prints as if it is saved with nowiki tags. The redirect WILL be created when you save, however. -- Kalon 23:04, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

This definitely needs to be documented better. Tjr 23:09, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Separate message window for NAO

Re. the separate message window as per Nao#criticisms: Unless you'll code some small patch for it, I'm not going to do that. I believe the change would be a bit more involved than two or three lines of code. Not to mention the tty code is... grody. --paxed 08:53, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Statistics on article views

I noticed you requested statistics on page views on your user page... Special:Top/most_visited lists the most visited articles — unfortunately without any numbers, though. Special:WikiaStats#articles lists the most edited articles, with exact numbers. I hope this helps. —ZeroOne (talk / @) 17:32, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

How to paste

Thank you for your kind help! And sorry for the inconveniece earlier, as I was a bit irritated by the repeated "Elbereth" typing. I probably abused my anomynity too much :P Sadly as I'm using Windows, Ctrl+V doesn't work for paste since Ctrl+V is teleport between levels (debug mode only). Do you happen to know any way around it?

Thanks again for your kindness!

I'm on OS X, so I can only guess. Perhaps you can paste using the menus of your terminal window application (e.g. putty) if you are using an ascii art version. Some people use macro recorder applications, I guess it is for the paste-impaired.

You can also ask in in rgrn, on the Forum:Watercooler, or at Wikihack:Ask_an_expert. In any case, if you do find a solution, please update the paste page. Tjr 01:59, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Re: UnNethack interface wish

I've added the curses GUI by Karl Garrison to the UnNetHack source code repository. If the terminal is large enough it uses a message area like the tiles interface does. But it is at the moment in a different branch and will stay there till after the release of 3.5.2 (which will be somewhat after the devnull tournament). I want to keep savefile and bones compatibility for the next release and the curses GUI unfortunately. But I'm pretty sure that soon after the release of 3.5.2 the curses GUI will be available on the public server. --bhaak 09:18, September 7, 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. I'll give it a try once I'm less swamped in real-life work (at the latest in October). -Tjr 16:33, September 7, 2009 (UTC)

Wikihack skin

I've been working on this for quite a while - it's nice on the eyes, and has a NetHack theme. I've also put lots of attention to detail in it. It's available at User:Zapwire/monaco.css - then paste it into User:Tjr/monaco.css - I personally think it should be the default skin, but you can be the judge. (Yes I posted this on the community portal, but no one seems to care.) --Zapwire (talk/blog/edits) 15:20, February 5, 2010 (UTC)

This type of thing always takes an insane amount of effort, and I am a quite bad judge of art. That said, I tried it out, and it turned the background color brown. I don't know if that's what you intended. Personally, I like the wiki to be as clear as possible - both visually and in writing style. -Tjr 16:07, February 5, 2010 (UTC)

Really? Weird. It's supposed to be a yellow-ish scrollbook sorta brown (not very brown at all), with mainly grey and black, personally easy on the eyes than glaring white, plus it compliments the logo well. --Zapwire (talk/blog/edits) 17:36, February 5, 2010 (UTC)

Re: Featured Article

Thank you, Tjr. I appreciate you changing the featured article template to the new one. I don't mind other people selecting the FA once in a while. I just do it because no one else usually does. :)