Rework Rings of Power

[draconisPW]

Currently, Rings of Power are overpowered randart rings with usually a crapload of stats and resistances, but with aggravation. Since aggravation is pretty much a death sentence when recalling/changing level, people tend just to collect them and put them in their house for display instead of being tempted to use them.

In the original story, Rings of Power were made by Sauron as temptation for men, elves and dwarves to ultimately control them. They were powerful, but in fact not THAT powerful. Except the One Ring. The elven rings were not tainted by Sauron and as such appear in Angband as powerful static arts without any penalty, while the One Ring is uberpowerful but permanently cursed with aggravation. I'd like to make regular Rings of Power dropped by Nazguls more close to the story. Here's my proposed changes:

• add aggravation curse as a choice for cursed rings (there are already 9 curses that can be chosen randomly for rings, this would give a 10th choice giving cursed ring only 10% chance of getting aggravation)
• remove aggravation from the base flags of Rings of Power
• reduce randart power for Rings of Power to make them less powerful
• add a random curse when generating Rings of Power
• add a turn timer for Rings of Power that is incremented when they are worn
• add a random curse up to 5 times when the timer reaches a certain value (this to portray the ring bearer being more and more consumed by the ring's power)

[igroglaz]

it's interesting idea. though I'm not completely agree with statement that "people tend just to collect them and put them in their house for display instead of being tempted to use them". At endgame you might consider to use them VS certain bosses on clean levels. You clear the level from everything except boss, then wear ring to fight with him.

anyway.

and I got another approach to it.. kinda roguelikish, with Nethackish spirit

1) make rings non-IDeble by any means except by wearing them 2) this way players will have to wear rings to ID them 3) make nazgul rings to be powerful (like they are now), but sticky for.. lets say ~+-1000 turns.. so you can not take them off for this time 4) make cursed turns count only inside of the dungeon (I did it with CD in Tangaria - cooldowns for skills restores only inside of the dungeon) 5) add your cool idea with adding a random curse up to 5 times during this time

this way it will be closer to LotR lore as people do not know which rings they find until it's too late :D in general *bands have too much ID cheeze than makes exploration not so roguelikish. So with this time detail we can make game more diverse

[igroglaz]

in general atm curses simply avoided by players. which feels pretty dull. we should give players taste of curses. so they will feel more different aspects of gameplay where they have to survive for certain time under the curse.

and people still will be motivated to ID rings like this - as it's always can be The One Ring... btw if we will add this system - we can make chance to get The One Ring 2x higher. I didn't find one ring in my life ever :D so with this taste of unknown we can give additional motivation...

[igroglaz]

Currently, Rings of Power are overpowered randart rings with usually a crapload of stats and resistances, but with aggravation. Since aggravation is pretty much a death sentence when recalling/changing level, people tend just to collect them and put them in their house for display instead of being tempted to use them.

considering estimation of the power of such rings it might be useful to analyze past dumps https://stat.tangaria.com/ it's not too many (I hope with 2nd chance we will have more high lvl chars soon), but still might be useful

[draconisPW]

Implemented in d991b3a in a much simpler version:

• artifact power on black rings of power reduced from 210-330 to 150-210
• no more AGGRAVATE flag on black rings of power, but a random permanent curse instead chosen from the nine curses available on rings from curse.txt
• every hour a player spends in a dungeon wearing a black ring of power, a new permanent curse is added up to two

[igroglaz]

@draconisPW how did you test nazgul rings? I failed to generate them via admin menu. And when I kill Nazgul with admin char - nothing drops (I suppose cause admin by default defeated all monsters). Is there way to get the rings fast?

[draconisPW]

Admin by default has killed all uniques so you have to edit monster.txt and give the drop to any regular monster. I did that with small kobold so any char could get one for testing.

[igroglaz]

it might be good to move worn increment to 1/second, as now it takes plenty of CPU (did it in T, seems to work) ` / Inform the client every second / if (!(turn.turn % cfg_fps)) { Send_turn(p, ht_div(&p->game_turn, cfg_fps), ht_div(&p->player_turn, 1), ht_div(&p->active_turn, 1));

        // moved up to save CPU and avoid big numbers
        /* Increment worn turn counter if inside a dungeon */
        if (p->wpos.depth > 0)
        {
            struct object *right = slot_object(p, slot_by_name(p, "right hand"));
            struct object *left = slot_object(p, slot_by_name(p, "left hand"));

            process_worn(p, right);
            process_worn(p, left);
        }
    }
}`

to do so we also simplify save to `wr_u16b(obj->worn_turn);`

in T I've redesigned RoP with custom curse and will write an article about it on T website

[draconisPW]

Sure, 1.6.1 isn't out yet so I can rewrite the savefiles with an integer (max worn_turn is 2 hours so 7200 seconds). This has the advantage of not calling the costly slot_by_name() function every turn.

[draconisPW]

Change implemented here: b65b788