Vigor mushrooms are now available in BM (Black Market) under ‘always’ flag. Their price increased x4 (200 -> 800), from 600 to 2400 gold. It’s temporary measure, having ‘always’ stuff in BM is wrong, such items should be semi-rare, but for now no other flags available (more are comming).
Next change is more important – Magic Mapping (MM) & Detection Monsters from items become nerfed – it’s radius heavely reduced.
Why MM is imba right now?
- MM removing huge part of one of the most important parts of roguelike genre – exploration. Especially at mid-end game when everyone could afford MM magic.
Beauty of exploration is based on lvls RNG. You _should_ never know what to expect after you turn a corner, what’s lay after you enter next door. You could have certain sneak peek (that’s why MM is still in the game, but with small radius), but you shouldn’t know too much. Playing without MM brings to the game new feelings – so players would try to search for hidden rooms, passages & etc. - It’s all came from Angband (which came from Moria.. ). As I wrote in previous post about shops’ rebalancing, Vanilla ‘Angband’ got limited stock refreshing in stores, so you can not buy 99 MM scrolls or bunch of staves at wish, so MM is kinda balanced there in compare to MAngband and PWMAngband. So having artifact with MM on activation in vanilla gives you real advantage; in online roguelikes you would rather be frustraded with such artifact property, cause of endless flow of MM util items. Having cheezy ‘MM on demand’ is wrong.
- And at the end.. Please note that almost all major RPG or even roguelikish-ARPG (Diablo, PoE etc) do not give player endless possibility to MM ‘at will’; exploration is one of the foundamental RPG mechanics.
This is experimental changes ™, for now ‘magic mapping‘ got restricted radius on scrolls, magic devices and artifacts. I didn’t touch magic from books yet, I suppose certain fragile magic classes should have bigger possibilities at MM (but still less than now) – it would come soon. For now, what’s changed:
activation.txt
name:DETECT_ALL
dice:11d11 -> 7d2
effect:DETECT_MONSTERS
dice:22d40 -> 7d2
effect:DETECT_TREASURES
dice:22d40 -> 11d2
name:DETECT_EVIL
dice:22d40 -> 8d2
name:DETECT_INVIS
dice:22d40 -> 9d2
name:MAPPING
dice:22d40 -> 7d2
object.txt
All kinds of Magic Mapping
dice:22d40 -> 7d2
Problem:
ENLIGHTENMENT. Potions and ‘A’ctivation which using effect:LIGHT_LEVEL. There is no way to restrict it’s radius in config files for this objects and I didn’t find this effect there. It would be great to make ‘Enlightment’ as enchanced, more powerful MM; but still restriced by certain radius. I’ll /rfe it at vanilla forums.
p.s.
Please don’t worry – this isn’t a final changes. Rebalancing the game is constant and eternal process, so if it wouldn’t fit game balance – stuff would be changed. And changed a lot of times 🙂 Would be glad to see your feedback!