ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

When I play a berserker, after a modest period of time there is a sudden dramatic drop of my to-hit value (into the -20ish range) despite bringing strength as high as possible and increasing weapon-specific and general fighting abilities as much as possible. Is this due to a non-zero fatigue? If so, what can be done to forestall this effect? If not, is this a bug?

You mean your "attack" in the character sheet ?
That is weird, does it happen when you increase some stat or talent or just randomly ?

It occurs, as I said, apparently randomly; it has happened after I went down a flight of stairs, but it can happen in the middle of a level as well.

I put it here rather than in "bugs" in case this was some kind of intentional behavior, but there were no messages that announced it. I just suddenly was almost never able to hit anything. Original weapon and armor and in the starting dungeon. Even after activating the Berserker talent my to-hit on the character sheet would be around -15. This happened with dwarf berserkers and I *think* dunadan as well.

I have also noticed this a couple times. I was playing a plain old fighter. I didn't report it because I thought it was something I'd done. It does make getting to level five harder though!

Were you attacked by a monster using Sunder Arms ?

As far as I'm concerned, probably not since I have had this happen in characters who only fought monsters from the beginning dungeon and never met any extremely outlandish monsters. Maybe I have though, if that's a common attack. I don't know if I would know. I could have easily missed it if it scrolled by in a fight.

Pretty sure sunder's not very common, at best. I've had my mem-edited bugger clear out everything up to th'third set of quests and have yet to run in to anything firing it off. Stunning blow, yeah, but not sunder. 'Course, I make darn sure anything that could be using it dies before it hits me, but that's a different discussion.

Anyway, the only other thing I've seen that could be messing with to-hit is possibly shield wall, but it only drops things by 10. Mysterious 20+ point drop definitely sounds buggy. I've got a skelezerker going now, so I'll keep an eye out. Would the stdout.txt thing speak up if something wonky started going on?

Worth posting it if you see it.

The trouble here being you might not see the drop immediately. Which could mean large posts!

I went back and played it again and I think I was mistaken about how it happens; every time you activate berserker your to-hit decreases permanently. Usually about 5. So after doing it a few times it becomes unplayable. Back to trying archers I guess.

I was noticing that many of my berserkers tended to miss a lot, but I thought it was just due to the general imbalance of the system. It might also explain why my berserkers got to higher levels when they didn't berserk much or at all and concentrated killing stuff the vanilla way, putting points into armor, health, and passive combat. I was wondering if I should try to spare points to raise dexterity.

I did notice that the numbers on the skill screen showed that learning higher levels of berserking was very much a questionable endeavour, as the negatives climbed faster than the positives, although I'm not sure how much that really matters in the game math.

Moved to Bugs.

Found and fixed!
Well spotted!