On Thursday, November 3, 2022 at 5:25:14 PM UTC-7, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
When I got aware that neither hitting with Serpent's Tongue
nor hitting with an ordinary weapon changed the proficiency
status or created the '#' limit mark (even after many many
hits) I continued the game in an ordinary way; two-weaponing
with the Serpent's Tongue and Vorpal Blade. [...]
When two-weaponing, each hit has a 50:50 chance to apply
training toward two-weapon or to the individual weapon (in
slash'em; nethack doesn't do things that way). So you would
need twice as many hits, on average, before the individual
weapon reached its next skill level than you would if you
just used that one weapon. Twice as many by that weapon,
that is; even more it you just observe general hits rather than
those for the specific weapon since half--probably more if
it has higher skill--would be done by the other weapon.
So if capped at basic, you would need on the order of 240
general hits to get the '#' marker for being unable to reach
skilled if you were using two-weapon combat rather than
just the weapon itself. Fewer hits overall if both weapons
used the same skill though, since a hit by either one could
perform training.
And hits need to dish out more than 1 point of damage in
order to accomplish training. So a 1..4 damage against
small, 1..3 against large dagger will do that either 75% or
67% of the time, which would raise the number of hits
needed for '#' to (4/3 or 3/2) times 240-ish. Note that
the greater-than-1 check takes place before the poison
bonus gets added and also before the artifact's double
damage gets added. However, weapon's enchantment
does get added before that check, so a +1 dagger should
deal a blow that performs training every time it hits.
Daggers you throw are probably at least +1 by mid-game
so training with them wouldn't be diluted by 1 point hits
(nor by two-weapon combat, and possibly increased by
multi-shot throwing depending on role).
I don't think you've encountered a bug, just the wimpyness
of a +0 weapon that hits for 1 HP damage and missed
opportunity for training purposes fairly often, then gets
bonuses that make it be more effective than most
weapons despite that lack of training.
PS: I'm playing slashem-0.0.7E7F3
That's the same as the source code I've got; I didn't think
that it was the final release. Maybe I'm confused by the
version I played for a while a bunch of years ago (around
2005). That was new when I got the binaries for it (early
2004) but by the time I unpacked it and played it, at least
one newer version had already come out.
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