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An ideal solution would be to remove all grindable counters from infinite levels. Nobody would grind in Abyss or Pan if you didn't make progress toward some in-game goal by doing so. If you get a wrath counter that would have decremented your wrath in these locations, simply don't decrement your wra...

No, it doesn't work quite that well. The monster delay isn't even an intentional feature; it just happens to work like that because monsters are generated with zero energy and only act when they accumulate enough. But monsters that want to follow you through a stairwell need to start following you p...

Obviously we need to have buffs in the game that only provide a benefit when the player is standing in a one-tile-wide corridor or has already lured a monster far away from any potential complicating monsters. That's exactly the situation where the player needs a defense boost, and definitely the ta...

How about instead of a mostly-static maze of one-tile-wide passages, labyrinths basically just copy the Abyss code with fewer terrain types and a weaker monster set? Probably slow down the terrain changes as well. Escape hatches back to the main dungeon replace Abyss exits, and when you get enough e...

Tree burning is almost completely useless tactically. If you start a chain reaction, you want to walk away and wait for it to burn out rather than approaching it, and the most significant impact it has is that it removes a few (almost invariably non-threatening) monsters that would have otherwise pr...

It is an enormous amount of smite-targeted direct damage, but you have to kite with it unless you have some way to set up a turkey shoot, like killing monsters across deep water or carting around a hostile rat. The cloud will spend one turn heavily poisoning your target and then disappear, so you ju...

Pan is generally easier, but when I go into Hell I know that I have to rush through six levels per branch and find an item in the seventh, and I will have made progress. If I go to Pan, I may randomly find myself slogging through fifty or sixty levels without finding what I'm looking for or even mak...

nethack mechanics tier list SS: writing down the unidentified descriptions of items in case a mind flayer attacks you S: elbereth A: using helm of opposite alignment swapping to carry cross-aligned quest artifacts B: jousting C: wresting one last wish from a wand D: whatever that supposedly abusabl...

I'm on board with removing poison magic entirely. If a few of the spells are worth saving, and that's a rather large 'if', they can be assigned to hexes instead, which is where pretty much every other status effect is already. Kiting should probably not be the core mechanic behind an entire starting...

Slow attunement on gaining xp from +0AC to a maximum that is dependent on weapon skill.

Or remove, either way.

How do wandering monsters travel? I assume it isn't just drunkard's walking, but rather doing something like continually autoexploring? As I understand it, they pick a random accessible tile somewhere on the dungeon level, and then they attempt to path to it. Choke points will get frequent travel f...

Instead of returning existing, it would be better if all ammo mulched on every shot, and monsters had infinite ammo that doesn't affect the amount of ammo they were going to drop.

Perhaps it would be worth changing +X equipment to charge with xp? So you start off with a useless ring, or perhaps even a mildly harmful -2 ring, and as you gain xp with it equipped it attunes to you and slowly reaches the maximum bonus for that ring type. A slaying ring might start as -2, for inst...

I'm pretty sure that vault is nemelex_the_gamble. Only one of those two side vaults is accessible, chosen at random, and you don't find out which until you try it out. You got the bad result. If you do find a way into the one you aren't supposed to be in, it is a bug that you should report.

Change poison to deal percentile-based damage, like torment. The specific percentage can be lower. Or not, whatever. The poison status would have a few turns of delay after you get afflicted before you get the damage, and then it either clears up or you get another random delay before you get more d...

The deity as written so far is almost completely useless. Nullifying the casting penalty for wearing armor has a very similar effect as both Vehumet's wizardry for qualifying spells and Ashenzari's bonus to magic skills and armour skill, but is much worse at the job in almost all cases before the la...

It's to stop you from scumming hell effect monsters for xp and items, and generally discourage spending time in hell branches. Not that it does a very good job of that, since ghouls (and other undead with infinite rot curing) are basically unaffected... Given that there is no productive reason to a...

Just roll the penalty for having a mushroom die into the original cost for making the mushroom in the first place. Essentially, assume they all die. This is effectively no change from the status quo, because under normal circumstances pretty much all of them do in fact die, but that way you aren't e...

Shutting off friendly fire is more of a quality-of-life sort of thing. It makes having an ally less annoying, which is preferable regardless of what impact it has on character power. Perpetual irritation should not be the sort of penalty applied to compensate for a particular upgrade's strength.

There probably are too many bolt spells that have no meaningful differences other than the spell skills that you train to be able to use them. Magma has shorter range and requires more new xp investment compared to most of the others, but it's open to question whether this means that magma should be...

You probably got it all. Sometimes your loot rolls are just garbage. In this case, I would not complain about two items that are actually useful, because often I roll a pile of items that are either never useful by that point in the game or are only useful to a completely different character.

Let it work like straight-up torment, only on a delay of a few turns. If it would for some reason inconvenience you to lose half your hit points, then you can use the consumable to clear the status effect and avoid the damage. Outside of battle, tap 5 to handle it. In a challenging battle, it could ...

Curse blowguns are boring and should be removed regardless of whether curses in general are reformed.

This extends to all cursed items that don't do anything but add a small negative to a hidden number. A -1 weapon is probably impossible to make interesting even in contrived corner cases.

Just remove the scroll. It exists to make curses irrelevant, and it does that job incredibly effectively. Curses should time out through either tiles explored or xp gained, because either of these conditions force you to play with the cursed item rather than just paying a consumable tax. Ideally cur...

Perhaps someone might explain why rPois doesn't have 3 pips like rF and rC and why/if that's still a good idea. RPois doesn't have three pips because each pip would be far too weak. You can't use one copy of one of the most common consumables in the game to completely undo fire or cold damage, and ...

This is why the appropriate solution to charms is to rework each of them to only be useful to cast while in combat, where the opportunity cost matters. I consider this the worst possible solution. I don't want to spend turns 'powering up' at the beginning of every single combat in the game. That is...

How does upheaval scale with invo, though? I currently have ~10 levels in invo and I'm wondering if I should keep investing in the skill. More invocations increases the damage and gives you a greater chance of getting more area covered. If there's a meaningful point of diminishing returns beyond th...

Qazlal was an objectively bad choice for you, but you should probably spend some xp on invocations so you can actually use her active abilities effectively. You already have enough piety to spam a large-AoE nuke for 3mp, which will outdamage anything you can do with your magic. As it is, most of wha...

In my experience, people who rail against political correctness are usually just dicks who want to be nasty to other people without getting called on it.

OP's post is good, and fixing the name of this particular artefact is probably overdue.

That's not my experience at all. When I run through the post-endgame, I usually have a rough time with either one because I'm just a little bit short of the xp investment to kill everything fast and recover before I need to kill everything fast again. After I clear all of either Hell or Pan, I am no...

Do the people who don't like the idea of the Pan/Hell roulette also have an issue with the Lair branch roulette? I mean, I remember when that went in, and it certainly did feel at the time like I would be missing out if I didn't get to go to Shoals in some games. There was certainly some suggestion ...

A monster that dies every time it spawns is a punk, even if the devteam writes a bunch of flavor text in its description trying to make it sound awesome. The Pan and Hell Lords are way cooler optional bosses if most players choose to avoid them whenever possible. If you force players to kill them, t...

True, Tornado is risky while Poison isn't. That may also be the reason why a lot of softie casters do not use Tornado even in extended because the other lvl 9 damage spells (Firestorm/Glaciate/Shatter/Dragon's Call) are safer to use. So if Poison Magic got a hypothetical level 9 spell that is risky...

Is it really a problem that a challenge book start exists? Calling VM a 'challenge book start' is quite a bit of a stretch. The problem is that the mechanics of the entire poison skill revolve around kiting monsters around with DoT status effects, which is a problematic mechanic that has bad effect...

It exists, and it's called Agony. Quite good. Doesn't use air skill, though, and it doesn't have short range, either.

Part of the problem is that every level of a Ziggurat consists of a pile of densely-packed garbage monsters. Once the player has farmed xp enough, there's no legitimate way for most monsters to be a threat, and Makhleb transforms these garbage monsters into a resource. Remove the xp farming before t...

Play a melee character, mostly normally. Keep invocations at around whatever level you train your weapon skill, and whenever you see a monster that you don't want to fight just make it go away. Sometimes you may need to repeat the invocation a couple times to make it work, but you have full-LOS rang...

What if teleportation wands were more common, but they stacked in your inventory with your other existing source of consumable teleportation rather than taking up a new inventory slot for every 3-9 uses that generate?

I agree that Duvessa that should be able to use her power-up multiple times, as the status quo is exploitable. The flavor argument seems irrelevant, and if they are determined to not be dangerous enough they can be bumped up a level. Perhaps they should path to each other when wandering so they aren...

Hell hounds are demonic and immune to fear, unless something has changed recently without my knowledge. Definitely pop a teleport and do whatever seems likely to mitigate damage until it fires off, fitting in a magic mapping if you get a spare turn. Odds are pretty good you'll end up somewhere bette...

The best necromancy spells work on the nastiest monster in the game and on no other monster. That is, the player. It's amazing to see how people suggest getting level 8 spell (Born's Revivification) in 3 rune game without casting it ever or dual school level 8 spell (Death's Door) in 3 rune game wh...

The best necromancy spells work on the nastiest monster in the game and on no other monster. That is, the player. Just use whatever crap you have handy for your pain brand. If you have a quick blade, then yeah, use that, but waiting for the best hypothetical weapon is almost certainly worse than sta...

Best solution is to remove wands of haste/teleportation/heal wounds, and adjust spawns of other consumables accordingly. It isn't like there's any useful and desirable difference between the wand version of the consumable and the potion/scroll version.

Saying that Necromutation is bad is like saying Fire Storm or Silence is bad. Sure, there are some characters for whom this is true but there are some characters where it is optimal to go for those spells. Almost (?) nobody is crying about Fire Storm or Silence being a trap while we do have a taver...

First off, you might not be aware that your Acid Magic idea is already on the Won't Do list. This is because it has already been suggested umpteen times, and the game does not actually need yet another flavor of generic elemental blasts that deal direct damage and are reduced by some resistance. It ...

I think you are over emphasizing the DOT features. Venom bolt does significant up front damage and just happens to poison as well. The main reason to switch over to acid is resistances/immunities. This is born out by poison arrow which explicitly has a portion of it being unresistable. There is no ...

Assuming you're making at least a half-baked attempt to play well and try to win, the good book backgrounds are generally better than the majority of melee backgrounds. Being able to kill things effectively from outside of melee range is extremely good, and that's hard to come by in the pre-Temple p...

I'm curious to know, 5 years on, what came of these matters. (Consumable rPois, lootless Lair branch ends.) I mean, clearly spider eggs did not make it into the game, but why is that? Was something else done instead? I found the thread while looking for info about branch-ends, having fought an epic...

The suggestion seems pretty unlikely to be controversial, so I assume the only reason it might not be implemented is the fact that somebody actually has to physically code a patch to implement it. Maybe it'll catch the eye of a member of the devteam this time, or if you know how you could probably m...

If your distortion ghost successfully banishes a player, it will be destroyed if that character dies in the Abyss. Ghosts only get to persist to kill additional players if their victim dies on the same level as the ghost. AK builds are not especially efficient for griefing compared to select book ba...

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