A few of my (least) favorite things

[Atarlost]

Right, but PCs that low end are no longer particularly common. Color is marked as (slow) at least up to V 2.7.9 and I think multihued shimmering is still marked as slow. These are basically legacy options that would only be used with a bare bones compilation. Since ToME doesn't support bare bones compilations anymore (because of LUA) the ability to disable a lot of the (slow) options is becoming pointless. Besides, I would suspect the speed loss from turning on autocentering would be offset by a prorpcessor option to compile in the stuff currently outsourced to LUA. (V had this in 3.0.0 when LUA first came on the scene and may still have it.)

[Lord Dimwit]

One addenda to this thread...

I never had much trouble with druj until I (in a fit of masochism or something) turned on the 'monsters exploit player's weaknesses' option.

I got a Princess quest to kill some eye druj in Mordor, and I charged right in, having been able to handle every previous quest with ease. Now, one of the 11 druj in the room seems to notice that I'm not resistant to Nether, and suddenly all 11 druj are doing nothing but casting Nether Balls at me. Ouch. I had to teleport away immediately.

I don't know what the moral of the story is, but it might have something to do with 'don't undervalue resistances when fighting big spellcasters.'

Yeesh.

[Tachyon]

The big problem is skull druj. They can't help but exploit player weaknesses - their only ball attack is water ball, and it's what they use most often.

[Phoig]

Water hounds, water hounds, water hounds. Did I mention water hounds? I have sorcerors farming Sky Drakes & Wyrms of Power (tho being good causes some grief with Eru if I whack a bunch of them - usually they get locked away to spare my Peity) with minimum grief as long as I'm at maximum attention & tport often. Demon farming is fun too tho both can get a bit out of hand on occasion (my best sorceror had an issue on a special level that took me 2 8-hour days one weekend to sort out... ) Word of Recall (worx on special levels!), Stone Prison, Strike ("Get back you!") & Manathrust with judicious use of Noxious Cloud to drive away the dross monsters. But water hounds - pack running beasts with an irresistable breath attack. Nice. I don't like getting hit with water balls from anyone (druj, water demons, etc.) but the hounds' sheer numbers can be devastating. Water demons come close because I've never seen them *except* in packs but they're inattentive so I can usually sneak up on them & whack them while they're snoozing. Hounds? Nope. Never snuck up on one yet.[/b]

[Atarlost]

Zephyr hounds are NEVER generated asleep.

[zasvid]

Fortunately they are quite rare. They were my greatest pain in Vanilla. Two packs of *too* powerful Z's per level were driving me mad. Then I found ToME

Back to topic: when I was fighting with Maeglin I got an impression that master mindcrafters summon uniques. If they do they're my top hit. But maybe Maeglin summoned so many uniques that I *thought* they are summoned, but they only managed to push in my LOS. Whatever.

And I don't understand why people hate Hrus? All my encounters with Hru gave me much experience with little danger (but long shooting).

[Tachyon]

RARE? You think water hounds are RARE? They've popped up all the time in HMa when I've played Lost Souls, and there are a lot of them in Angband The only chars that they don't give much trouble are mindcrafters, because of mindwave + char armor + adren channeling + psy drain, and symbiotes, because of heal symbiote + life share + (by the time you get to Angband) at least 1000 extra HPs. And even symbiotes have trouble, thanks to the stunning. (Mindcrafters don't have to worry about stunning, because adren channeling cures it. This should be listed in the docs.)

[Lord Dimwit]

And I don't understand why people hate Hrus? All my encounters with Hru gave me much experience with little danger (but long shooting).

You're right--a Hru has no distance attacks, and some elementary strategy can take them out, if you're good at distance attacks yourself.

I think that people dislike them because they often appear in giant pits and such, and also tunnel through walls, so you often wind up fighting several of them at once. Also a Hru can kill a weaker character in one round (unlucky teleport).

[Atarlost]

Hrus do not block themselves off from you with summons the way grand master mystics do, and have a similarly dangerous chance of stunning you badly, and when they do so it's from an earthquake and thus instantaneous.

[Tachyon]

Hmmm... other nasty monsters:

Plasma hounds. Not many HPs, and not too powerful in melee, but I reallly hate that stupid breath weapon.

Deathmolds. Yes, they are easy for anyone with the slightest magical ability, but they have insane melee power. If you somehow end up next ot one, it can be really annoying.

Storms of Unmagic: a lot of HPs, powerful breath weapon, powerful melee. Probably the nastiest vortex, even if it's not supposed to be.

[Xandor Tik'Roth]

I recently ran into a Variant something or other, and this dude ended up summoning about 20 Random Number Generators right beside me! This happened on lvl 10 of the Barrow-Downs (is this unusual?)

Luckily, I had debuged all my armor and weapons into randarts, and I had a Dark Sword (+21, +24) (This is what the program gave me) doing additional damage from poison, cold and acid (I think).

BTW, I only used the debug commands to try to beat the game. And no, I have no intention of posting a character dump if it isn't done naturally without help from the debug.

But man, those things suck!!!!!

[Stof]

Right, but PCs that low end are no longer particularly common. Color is marked as (slow) at least up to V 2.7.9 and I think multihued shimmering is still marked as slow. These are basically legacy options that would only be used with a bare bones compilation. Since ToME doesn't support bare bones compilations anymore (because of LUA) the ability to disable a lot of the (slow) options is becoming pointless. Besides, I would suspect the speed loss from turning on autocentering would be offset by a prorpcessor option to compile in the stuff currently outsourced to LUA. (V had this in 3.0.0 when LUA first came on the scene and may still have it.)

Well, (slow) in that situation as got much more to do with network than CPU or graphic card. Imagin running a fullscreen X11 tome with "Always center" through a ssh connection on a 28K modem ?

[Lord Dimwit]

I recently ran into a Variant something or other, and this dude ended up summoning about 20 Random Number Generators right beside me! This happened on lvl 10 of the Barrow-Downs (is this unusual?)

No, that's not unusual. You're thinking of the Variant Maintainer, who starts showing up at around 450-500 feet. All that he does is breathe confusion, summon RNG, and summon software bugs. He spells almost certain doom for low-level characters.

However, he's a joke monster, and most people play with joke monsters off (usually after they get killed by the Variant Maintainer a couple of times).

[Xandor Tik'Roth]

Well, it's kind of impossible for my character to get killed by these things. I have a clvl 14, and I've rigged a bunch of randarts to give me every resistance in the book, immunity to cold and electricity, and +25 speed. I've also got a Power DSM.

I know I massively cheated, but I don't even count on beating the game with this character. I just thought that it was unusual that something this powerful could start appearing that early.

[Lionors]

...is exactly why I turned joke monsters off.

By the way, is Moldoux a joke monster? I haven't seen him in the few games I've played since turning them off.