Treasure Trove Improvements

[Bim]

I really enjoy the treasure trove item hunt. Having to find a good item(s) and sacrifice it for the possibility of better treasure is a great mechanic.

However, there are three major problem areas:
1: The item you need to give is not related to your character, so you if you need a +5 great mace of foo and you're a conjurer, it's probably not a big gift.
2: If things need to be enchanted, that's normally not a problem either - by mid/late game most players will have found an artifact instead, or be able to find the needed weapon in a high enough +X to only need a few scrolls. This is compounded by scrolls working 100% of the time now.
3: Troves tend to be pretty useless once found. Possibly a few good potions/wands, and maybe a good armor bit, but usually they're pretty dull in comparison to most branch ends.

My suggestion:
1: Do an inverse acquirement to find something that the player would value at the time of trove spawn. If troves only generated past, say, level 10 most/all players would have found their 'niche'
2: more heavily weight towards high value consumables, tons of gold or artifacts of some sort (artifact gloves/cloak for instance, as most use those).
3: Make troves better. Run a few acquirement routines when entering, and possibly just up the loot in general.

Ideas?

[XuaXua]

Guaranteed 1 potion of xp.

[duvessa]

Your posts really make it sound like you are playing a completely different game than DCSS.

If things need to be enchanted, that's normally not a problem either - by mid/late game most players will have found an artifact instead

Artefact status by itself is strictly bad. Why would most of my characters use a weapon that cannot be enchanted or rebranded? Sure, it's possible for the best available weapon to be an artefact, but that is very rare "by mid/late game."

This is compounded by scrolls working 100% of the time now.

Enchanting weapons for troves is much more costly than it has ever been, since enchant weapon scrolls are much rarer and actually work on +7/+8 weapons now; getting a weapon from +8 to +9 used to cost on average twice as many scrolls as getting one from +0 to +4. Now it costs 1/4 as much. Unless your weapon is already +9 and you will never switch weapons again, weapon troves are much more expensive these days - especially since much fewer enchanted weapons generate now.

[XuaXua]

since enchant weapon scrolls are much rarer
much fewer enchanted weapons generate now.

These facts are not apparent to anyone not following git.

[Bim]

Duvessa, play some trunk and re-evaluate.

[and into]

Well I don't know about generation rates, but regarding artefacts, basically their properties are comparable to mutation roulette. You can get helpful things, but most of the helpful things are stuff you don't need, and the bad properties can be really bad. Unlike mutation roulette, obviously, finding artefacts simply happens, without input or cost from you, and you don't have to wear them (though yeah, stuff like Contam exists)—so when they generate with bad properties you just ignore and forget them.

Thus one tends mostly to remember that uncommon subset, of an already uncommon set of items, that by luck happened to have really good properties on them. But I'd wager the percentage of random artefacts that are simply better than a +0 unbranded version of the same is a good deal less than 50% (especially considering you can't enchant artefacts), and the percentage of artefacts that are better than the average glowing/runed version that didn't end up being cursed, is much lower. Add a "meaningfully" in front of that "better than" in the last sentence, and you are probably looking at something like 1 out of 10 of random artefacts generated. And that's being too generous, if anything.

______________

Anyway, I don't see how the current situation is a problem. There are no guarantees in DCSS; scrolls of acquirement, god gifts, troves, ice caves/volcanos/labyrinths/wizlabs, etc. will sometimes give you crap. Having there be a bit of risk (no guarantee of getting good stuff) makes the decision something of a gamble, yet at the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes you give up stuff for a trove that you don't care about at all and get awesome stuff in return. I like that spectrum, and I like that the usual conception of fairness, which is applied in most of other video games ("Tough monsters give better loot"; "trading in this useful item will get me something at least as useful in return"; etc.) goes through a much heavier dose of RNG scrambling when it comes to roguelikes.

[One-Eyed Jack]

Duvessa, play some trunk and re-evaluate.

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/minmay.html

[Psiweapon]

Unrandarts are really stat sticks. If they don't happen to cripple your melee capability, carrying one of those stat sticks in your weapon slot may be a good option.

[tasonir]

The last randart I just came across was a very impressive -2 helmet with dex-5 on it. That said, if you find an average of 15 or so randarts during a game, you probably find 2-3 that are really good, and therefore randarts are powerful. Not every one is, but the category is a large boost to player strength over the course of a complete game.

From my last four wins:
Character 1:
+1 helmet of Temperance {rF+ MR+ Dam+4 Stlth+}
ring of False Pretenses {rN+ Str+2 Int+2 Dam+5}
character 2:
amulet "Yluomaji" {rMut rF++ Stlth-}
ring of Losuylil {rElec rC+ rN+}
character 3:
the ring of the Vendetta {rPois Str+5 Slay+6 Stlth-}
the amulet "Schiu" {Ward rF+ rC- rN+ MR++}
character 4:
+8 mottled dragon armour of Failure {rPois MR+}
the +16 crystal plate armour of Egalitarianism {+Blink rPois SInv}
the +8 glaive of Varaqoc {chop, rElec rF+ rN+ SInv Stlth+}

This is just plain good equipment. Very reliably, you'll find 2 or so "keepers". That doesn't mean normal equipment isn't good either - I gave up on the above glaive when I had a vampiric bardiche, for example.

To get back to the OP though, I think troves are pretty good already, and probably don't need to be much better. You generally get 1-2 useful items out of the 10-15 that generate, and that's enough. If you want to make them better, bump up the number of items that generate by 20% or so, and they'll be more useful on average. I don't think they need much change, though.

[njvack]

Mod note: insanely offtopic post deleted. Keep it CYC, y'all.