User talk:Phol ende wodan/Balance issues

Nutrition

With regard to this: "There should be enough food around for a player to have some leeway in backtracking a bit - returning to a stash, returning to Minetown, etc. But eventually, the player's available food should run out, and they should have to go deeper."

• Consider whether the relative quantity of monsters generated when a level is generated, versus later as you explore, is perhaps not balanced correctly. Currently, wandering around cleared levels you encounter almost as many monsters as exploring new territory (barring things like special rooms). Monsters that often have inventory and/or leave corpses. --jonadab

Regarding this: "Idea #9: monsters besides Famine who specifically destroy food or cause hunger."

• Consider locusts: monsters that A) will eat anything commestible and B) multiply when they do so. Bonus points if they get into containers and inventories. --jonadab

Gehennom Items

• A radical proposal would be to sharply limit the generation of 'magical' items outside gehennom, and greatly increase magical item generation inside. Under this proposal, the player would need to explore gehennom to gather the components of their ascension kit. Preferably, it would not be advantageous for the player to wish up an entire asc kit using the castle wand prior to exploring gehennom. --Chris (talk)
  • A related proposal would be to give each demon lord an ascension-kit item. Players that need a specific item could challenge the demon lord guarding it; otherwise, the demon lords could be bypassed. --Chris (talk) 15:55, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

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)

• To summarize here what we talked about on freenode: The root of the problem seems to be that nethack was based on 1e/2e D&D's AC system, in which ACs are limited (barring exceptional outliers) to the range -10 - +10 and clustered around +2 - +9. This range worked well in a system where to-hit bonuses were limited to a maximum of +9 from level, +5 from weapon enchantment, +3 from strength, and +3 from skill (and in which the actual bonuses were typically much lower than these maximums). This range of ACs does not work as well in nethack's system, in which applicable bonuses can include +14 at minimum from level, +13 from luck, +7 from weapon enchantment, +3 from strength, +4 or more from dexterity, and +3 from skill. --Chris (talk)
  • To summarize the flip side of the discussion: nethack does not have the same desired balance point that D&D had. Specifically, because the nethack character is expected to single-handedly fight and kill many more monsters at one time than a D&D character was, nethack characters should be able to hit their opponents much more easily than a comparable D&D character could.--Chris (talk) 04:29, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
• Another note: in 1e/2e D&D, a character in non-magical plate mail and wielding a shield had AC 0 (helm, gloves, boots, and cloak were not counted as armor). In nethack, a character in similar armor has AC -4 (+7 from plate, +2 from shield, +2 from dwarvish iron helm, +1 from gloves, +2 from shoes, and +0 from dwarvish cloak). This difference becomes far more pronounced at high levels, since each piece of armor in nethack can be enchanted for up to +5 additional AC per body slot, whereas in D&D only the armor and shield were available for holding magical armor, and getting +5 in both was far from certain. --Chris (talk) 04:29, 7 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
    • +2XL/60 per turn (+1 at XL30)
    • +Wis/60 per turn
    • +20/60 per turn as a Wizard, +12/60 per turn as a Healer/Priest, +6/60 per turn as a Valkyrie/Monk
    • -5/60 per turn (Minimum cap is 1/30 per turn overall so it can't go negative)
  • FIQhack
    • +1/turn with energy regeneration
    • +XL/33 per turn
    • +Wis/33 per turn if your Wisdom is more than 3
    • +10/30 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).

Ascension kit degeneracy

• dnethack adds a second property to several of the dragon scale colors, which may help them to compete a little better against silver and gray. For example, yellow provides acid resistance and petrification resistance.

• dtsund proposed, and Fourk will implement in 4.3.0.5, a system wherein dragon scale mail is not a distinct type of armor; rather, dragon scales (which are now worn in the cloak slot and provide no AC, only properties) can be enchanted onto the underlying body armor, whatever it might be, producing e.g. silver-scaled dwarven mithril, black-scaled crystal plate, or cetera. This reintroduces the pre-DSM tradeoffs between weight, AC, and spellcasting being hampered by metal.

Regarding ascension kit worthy body armors, maybe there could be three groups of armor based on what they do best, and the player can then has to pick one that best complements his or her ascension kit:

• Best AC: plate mails. Buff all plate mails to give very large bonuses to AC, balanced by them being heavy. Crystal plate mail is a caster-friendly AC booster. This should be very much worth it for some players.

• Best MC: mithril-coats. With the 3.6.0 changes to MC, it becomes very valuable. Giving both mithril-coats MC 3 and making them even lighter than they are now, but probably cutting their AC down a bit would make them valuable even to end-game and force the player to decide if plate mail + cloak of protection, or mithril-coat and any other cloak is the way to go.

• Best intrinsics: dragon scale mails. They already give nice intrinsics, so change them to make it their shtick. Instead of being simply the best, nerf their AC and maybe even increase weight, but give them more intrinsics as dNet does. Again, this makes them easily distinguished, but finally gets rid or always choosing GDSM/SDSM in the end, because sometimes you will want better AC/MC.

Skill slots

• As with to-hit/AC, nethack's skill system is strongly based on 1st and 2nd edition D&D, specifically the weapon proficiency system. However, nethack makes several changes, the net effect of which is to throw off the balance of that system. D&D characters received 1-4 weapon-proficiency-points (mages get 1, fighters get 4, others fall in between) which they must spend during character creation (and subject to rules forcing the player to spread the points out among multiple weapon types). After creation, characters receive additional points at a rate of 1-per-3-to-6-levels (mages get them slowest, fighters get them fastest), which they can spend according to rules that more-or-less resemble nethack's. The net effect, then, is that skill points are in much shorter supply in D&D than they are in nethack. --Chris (talk)
• In D&D most characters want both a ranged attack and a melee attack, so they need to spend proficiency slots accordingly. In nethack most characters are happy to pick one or the other.--Chris (talk)
• In D&D some enemies resist certain types of damage (ie, bludgeoning or slashing damage). It can therefore pay to be proficient in multiple types of weapons, so that you can use whatever is most effective against any given foe (though in most cases I don't think this mechanic is heavily used). In nethack damage types are listed, but totally unused. --Chris (talk) 16:28, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

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)