User talk:Phol ende wodan/Balance issues

Gold

Regarding this: "Asmodeus and Baalzebub can also just camp on the downstairs until the player pays up"

• I really like this idea. --jonadab

To-hit formula

• I would very much like to see this rebalanced. Maybe both idea #1 and #2 could be used by introducing a die roll, ie. you would get 1dLuck + 1dXL to-hit instead of a flat value. I also really like idea #6 in Un, cockatrice corpses are OP anyway. --Red kangaroo (talk) 11:35, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

My suggestion would be that if cockatrice corpses are OP, nerf them specifically, I've never understood why c corpses being OP would mean that all unskilled or restricted weapons would similarly suck. Early game is difficult enough already. --Bluescreenofdeath (talk) 12:47, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

• Chris (talk): I've participated in a few discussions related to to-hit, but I don't think I've ever tried to clearly say what I think needs to be fixed about the system. To that end:
  • I don't think it's a problem that most mid-to-late game characters have a 100% hit rate against most enemies. The character is expected to fight and kill many, many enemies over the course of the game; having an appreciable miss-rate opens the door to the possibility that the character could unexpectedly lose a fight against what ought to have been a nonthreatening enemy, simply because the RNG said "nope, you miss five times in a row this time, have a nice death."
  • I do think it's a problem that the player can completely ignore to-hit penalties. This contributes to Grayswandir being the best weapon for pretty much all characters, and to two-weapon fighting being optimal for any character that can use it. The to-hit penalties associated with using these at unskilled or basic are simply overwhelmed by the huge bonuses from luck and experience level, failing to reduce the character's actual hit rate bellow 100%.
  • This suggests that it might be possible to make the current combat system work simply by reducing the magnitude of the large "guaranteed" bonuses until they add up to about +20 (sufficient to hit AC 0 100% of the time, which leaves negative ACs available for enemies that are meant to be unusually dangerous due to low AC/elevated miss chance.
    • I would say the bonuses that need to be looked at are level (+14 minimum), luck (+13), and weapon enchantment (+7), which together add up to +34 minimum, or between 1.5x and 2x too high (depending on actual level reached). dNethack and other variants reduce luck to 1d13 (+7 average), which helps but is not sufficient. It is probable that the bonus from level should also be reduced, and possibly also the bonus from weapon enchantment.
  • Chris (talk) 18:06, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

Energy regeneration

• dtsund proposed, in his Class Overhaul writeup (which was intended to make roles more distinct from each other) that wisdom should be the major determining factor in energy regeneration, and should be about as difficult to exercise or increase as intelligence.
• Some variants have changed the formula in various ways to attempt to improve it, just posting here as potential ideas
  • dNetHack
    • +1/turn with energy regeneration
    • +XL per 30 turns (+1/turn at XL30)
    • +1/2 Wis per 30 turns (rounded down)
    • -5 per 30 turns
    • At this point, a minimum cap of 1 per 30 turns is applied, so low-level characters with low Wisdom don't experience zero or negative energy regen.
    • After the cap is applied, some roles receive bonus power.
      • Wizards: +10 per 30 turns
      • Healer or Priest: +6 per 30 turns
      • Valkyrie or Monk: +3 per 30 turns
    • A wizard wearing a Cornuthaum receives bonus power equal to the cornuthaum's enchantment per 30 turns. In the case of a negatively enchanted cornuthaum, this "bonus" is of course negative.
    • A character suffering from a healing rate penalty (for example, an elf wearing iron next to their skin) suffers the same penalty to energy regeneration (for example, an elf suffers a penalty equal to 1/2 XL per 30 turns per piece of iron next to the skin).
    • A character under the effects of a protection spell suffers a penalty to energy regeneration equal to 10 + 2xProtection per 30 turns.
    • At this point, a minimum cap of 1 per 30 turns is again applied, so characters with many penalties don't experience zero or negative energy regen.
  • FIQhack
    • +1/turn with energy regeneration
    • +3XL/100 per turn
    • +3Wis/100 per turn if your Wisdom is more than 3
    • +33/100 per turn as a Wizard
  • Fourk (Unless you're a Sylph which uses vanilla formula with assumed energy regeneration)
    • Regenerates N energy every M turns (similar to how vanilla does it).
    • M: 25 with 11 or less Wisdom, otherwise 25 / (Wis - 10). Result is halved with energy regeneration.
    • N: 1 + (XL/3), doubled with energy regeneration (It's slightly less due to using rne, but will almost always have this outcome after XL10).

Amy's comments and thoughts

Since there are so many things that I felt I had to comment, I made an entire page for them: User:Bluescreenofdeath/Balance_issues_comment - nothing of what I say in there is an absolute "must do" or "must not do" or anything, it's just my thoughts and everyone is free to use them or ignore them, I just wanted to write them down :) --Bluescreenofdeath (talk) 12:10, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Junk scrolls and potions

Make potions more powerful and situationally useful - a potion of restore ability might not be worth diluting if a unicorn horn can't fix your ability scores, for instance

• potion of see invisible -> potion of sight
  • In addition to its current effects, it also cures blindness.
  • When blessed, it also cures hallucination.
  • It could also provide temporary immunity to blindness.
  • Also, if permanent intrinsic see invisible was removed, then a blessed potion of sight could act as a long-duration temporary see invisible source.
• potion of object detection
  • When non-cursed, it also detects artifacts.
• potion of booze
  • Quaffing heals for a small amount and gives a decent amount of nutrition (dnethack)
• potion of invisibility
  • Is mostly reliant on whatever changes happen to invisibility in general.
  • If permanent intrinsic invisibility were removed, then a blessed potion of invisibility could act as a long-duration temporary invisibility source.
• potion of monster detection
  • All BUCs grant temporary intrinsic monster detection
  • BUC then affects the duration of the effect (with uncursed being equivalent to current blessed duration)
• potion of confusion
  • If casting a forgotten spell is unable to confuse the player, other sources of confusion (like the potion) become more useful.
• potion of speed
  • Quaffing exercises dexterity.
  • Maybe: quaffing cures stoning, like a potion of acid.
  • For variants that have the slow status effect, it should cure that.
• potion of levitation
  • The player is warned when their levitation is running out, so it becomes safer to use a potion to cross bodies of water.

Wishes

• Possibly notably, while D&D has do-anything wishes, it has nothing like the wand of wishes.
  • Item-granted wishes typically come in packs of at most three: in the form of a Ring of Three Wishes or a Luckblade (which also has three gems representing three wishes it can grant). It is fairly common for such an item to be given out with one or more wishes already having been used by its previous owners.
  • Scrolls of (one) wish are also possible.
  • Finally, there are Candles of Invocation, which were probably not intended to grant wishes, but which have become known as a wish item since they can be used to summon a genie or similar being that can be made to grant one or more wishes to the summoner (In versions where the players are able to summon something able to grant more than one wish, an infinite loop is technically possible since one of the wishes can be used to create a new Candle of Invocation, and the other wishes used to do useful things. Of course, most Dungeon Masters would not allow this).
  • Wizards in D&D can also learn to cast Wish normally, but there are various mechanisms in place intended to prevent them from overusing the spell (how successful and/or fun these mechanisms are is a different question). --Chris (talk) 21:15, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

• About the idea of spreading out the castle wishes: personally, I think one of vanilla's main problems is the importance of reflection and magic resistance. In the later parts of the game, you pretty much need them. Reflection to protect your wands and rings from destruction and ward off death rays and disintegration beams, MR for death rays and touches of death. It's already bad enough if the game provides neither before you reach the castle, because then you have to go in and hope that no random lieutenant has a wand of death, or farm somewhere else hoping to get one of those two all-important properties. And that's assuming there are no purple liches on the castle who can teleport and instantly use touch of death. If there are, a player without MR may well have to genocide them, which requires a scroll that is also far from guaranteed to be available by that point. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that there should be at least a reliable way for the player to get reflection/MR, preferably both, or alternately to make them less essential. Which means having at least two wishes guaranteed by the castle if the essentiallity of the properties is not corrected somehow; the remaining wishes could then be spread out as you detailed, maybe one in Vlad's, one in Rodney's Tower, maybe one in the sanctum or even in the planes? Also, the question is, do we want to balance the late game by making wishes so rare that the player is guaranteed to have some holes in their setup (i.e. have to decide whether they want speed boots, gauntlets of power, a can of grease, or another magic marker)? Because if wishes are rare, it comes down to luck whether the player gets those rare items since the # of wishes isn't enough to get all of them. On the other hand, those base items being as rare as they are, they are probably high priority wishing targets; if the items were more common, the player would need less wishes altogether to fill out their gaps... Could probably write an entire essay about the balance of "# of wishes versus rarity of highly desirable base items". --Bluescreenofdeath (talk) 09:11, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

Startscumming

• Startscumming is a sign of imbalance in the early game. Good luck with the starting equipment can make a dramatic difference, far outweighing skill.
  • Make it so certain excessively powerful items can't be generated as starting equipment
  • More generally, set minimum dungeon levels for many items to be randomly generated. If it can't be generated on level one, players can't start with it.
  • One option would be to base this off the base price in shops - divide by 25 and round up to get the minimum level, so rings of slow digestion, with base price 200, won't be generated until the player reaches dungeon level 8, or deeper.

Artifact clothes

• Another nice idea, but you'll need a quite a lot. If Merlin's Hat is clearly the best hat for spellcasters they'll all end up wearing it, so you'll want 2-5 artifact hats for spellcasters, 2-5 artifact hats for melee characters, and the same for every other clothes slot. Carandol (talk) 20:59, 25 November 2017 (UTC)