On 16.02.2025 22:39, hackemslashem wrote:
On 2/15/25 11:48 AM, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
Playing a Valkyrie in NerfHack; the well known good +3 small shield
can even be trained, and my Valkyrie can become Master with shield
proficiency. She's meanwhile at Expert and half way to Master.
The co-aligned altar in mine-town provided me with the guaranteed
Mjollnir. - Alas, the shield prevents me wielding Mjollnir since
it's a two-handed weapon. So I continued sacrificing and got the
Origin, an artifact quarterstaff, which is also two-handed.
So I wasted skill slots for my shield. Or need to waste yet more
skill slots on Mjollnir (and abandon the shield); provided that I
can increase experience enough to get the slots in the first place.
Yet another thing that annoys me in NerfHack. Still counting...
And the list gets longer and longer... :-(
Interesting you bring this up, in the upcoming 2.2, I've ported bracers
in which will let you carry forward that shield skill. Since they occupy
the shield slot, you can still use two-handed weapons with them.
Well, that might affect a later-game character but not initially when
it matters most. And mind that without the (initially) outstanding +3
shield you lose an important amount of AC.
(There's a more fundamental issue here, but I don't start on that.)
There are a couple of different kinds and some magic varieties too.
My impression is that there's very little magic early on; altars for
example are scarce, and if you make it to the mine-town there's just
a chance that it's co-aligned, mostly it's not. I don't want to speak
about non-existing random bags of holding given that there's even the
ordinary sacks to be considered a lucky finding. And why talk about
magic in the first place if there's not even price-ID'ing possible
for the more mundane magic items (scrolls, potions, rings).
Well - don't keep your complaints to yourself, I'll only be able to
address them if reported! :)
To be honest, I'm reluctant to give you feed-back. The reason is that
in NerfHack there's some basic design decisions you made that I find
to be absolutely bad, and since they're so fundamentally I'm positive
that there's no chance to get them changed, given that you deviated
so fundamentally from Vanilla and other variants.
Even in the early game there's so many character statuses negatively
affected in many new ways and with their duration absurdly increased!
But that is by far not the only place where balance got drastically
unbalanced. - But I better stop here.
So I intend to just occasionally post some and only specific things.
But thanks for your offer.
Janis
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