The Tavern

Thought about this today: why is there not an MR slot on the player screen like for other resistances ? Is it because there is more than 3 level of resistance ?

giann wrote:Thought about this today: why is there not an MR slot on the player screen like for other resistances ? Is it because there is more than 3 level of resistance ?

Yes. It's on the % screen underneath the main listing, it says something like "_______ resistant to hostile enchantments"

nicolae: Now that you say it, we could show MR (and stealth) as bars on the % screen instead. Would help with the notorious propblem of adjective sorting.

dpeg wrote:nicolae: Now that you say it, we could show MR (and stealth) as bars on the % screen instead. Would help with the notorious propblem of adjective sorting.

Yes please! Would love that change.

Don't know about stealth, but I would love this to be done for MR.

dpeg wrote:nicolae: Now that you say it, we could show MR (and stealth) as bars on the % screen instead. Would help with the notorious propblem of adjective sorting.

That's what I meant.

I must light up an objection : the dot representation is nice, because elem resists are limited. As we can see with giann post, player could assume MR has a cap.

And as all MR sources don't provide the same protection, I fear we will have other questions like "I got 3 MR+ items, why is display MR++ (or MR##)?".

The wordy representation has a cap too ("almost entirely").
I think if you represent it like this

Code:: ####....

there shouldn't be much confusion because it's similar to how spellpower is represented.

I wonder if it's possible to make it so stealth and MR bars would be something like the hp and magic bars? That would solve the problem of different amounts of MR from gear. Also, doesn't leveling up give more MR, amount depending on the species?

What's wrong with showing the exact value? I believe it's already possible for the player to calculate the value on their own (barring unrands), so why hide it?

Wouldn't that be even worse than current situation? Instead of a (rough and misleading) estimation of your current MR you would get a number that means... what exactly? What if you don't wanna to mess with code?

The number would reveal the relatively small changes in stealth provided by elven boots/cloaks or dex increases, which would otherwise be hidden on a logarithmic scale, but you're right, without an idea of what's a high value the exact current value doesn't tell you much. A spellpower-esque bar would be more fitting and a nice improvement over the very vague descriptions we now have.

I agree.. "###......." MR .. looks better than "somewhat resistant to hostile enchantments"

having it display on the % screen would be great

As you can see from the below table there are 10 ranks of MR. According to that, MR does effectively cap at around 300.

MR description MR number
not resistant <10
slightly 10-29
somewhat 30-59
quite 60-89
very 90-119
extremely 120-149
extraordinarily 150-189
incredibly 190-239
uncannily 240-299
almost entirely >=300

So in theory, we can display that very easily.. 5/10 is "very resistant" for example is: #####..... (using same display format used for spell strength)

According to the wiki though, we don't ever really need more than 7 pips.. "extraordinarily resistant" is enough to handle all the game's threats

I feel uncanningly supportive for this idea.

skyspire wrote:According to that, MR does cap at 300.

almost entirely >=300

I would think ">= 300" would imply that it does not cap at 300.

TwilightPhoenix wrote:I feel uncanningly supportive for this idea.

Can you please represent your support with a number?

It has an effective cap. According to bots:

Chances of anything resisting a spell are calculated like this: (magic resistance + 100 - the spells power) is compared to ( random2(100) + random2(101) ) and if the random numbers are less the spell is negated.

So, lets say spell power is at the cap of 200(correct me on this if its wrong, that seems to be the max.) In that case, given the best possible monster roll, you get MR - 100 > 201, or MR > 301 to always resist. Given that, it is safe to call 302 the cap on MR, and with 302 MR you will never fail to resist a spell. The fact that an internal variable can go higher than that isn't relevant, in gameplay terms MR stops having any effect at that point.

Sar wrote:Wouldn't that be even worse than current situation? Instead of a (rough and misleading) estimation of your current MR you would get a number that means... what exactly? What if you don't wanna to mess with code?

I dunno, I think it would be nice if crawl were more explicit with these kinds of numbers in general. MR isn't the most obvious case, but with things like weapon speed, hiding the true value just encourages spoilers and mental math.

Hold Ctrl, attack empty space, look at the number in round brackets after your turncount. That is how fast you are hitting dudes. Won't get the min delay from that, though.

Edit: that doesn't work in older versions but definitely works in trunk.

Edit: that doesn't work in older versions but definitely works in trunk.

It does work in older versions, you just previously had to enable the option to display how long your last turn took in the rc file.

On topic: yes, please have MR use the "###......." notation and put it on the % screen.

Attacking empty square used to took 1.0 turns regardless of your actual weapon skill.

Sar wrote:
TwilightPhoenix wrote:I feel uncanningly supportive for this idea.

Can you please represent your support with a number?

I feel 156 support for this idea.

I am extraordinarily supportive towards a spellpower-esque MR and stealth display.

Sar wrote:Wouldn't that be even worse than current situation? Instead of a (rough and misleading) estimation of your current MR you would get a number that means... what exactly? What if you don't wanna to mess with code?

A single number works fine for AC/EV/SH. I'd say MR should be treated the same.

BlackSheep wrote:without an idea of what's a high value the exact current value doesn't tell you much. A spellpower-esque bar would be more fitting and a nice improvement over the very vague descriptions we now have.

The bar doesn't tell you much either because it's scaled for XL27.

Code:: ###.................

might be 99% resistant for an XL 5 player but the bar gives no indication of this.

######--

pubby, I'm not sure what do you mean by "99% resistant for an XL 5 player". The racial MR? It's just a bonus flatly added to your MR. It's true that you need less MR in early game, but that's because you face hexers with lower HD and their spells are easier to resist.

I think the #.. display for basic resists is good because it means the same thing for the whole game. You'll take 50% damage if you have #.., be it against a "throw flame" from a orc Wizard, and you'll take 50% damage from a Fire giant's Bolt of Fire.
If you have ##...... MR, you'll resist 90% of a orc wizard's slow/confuse, but only 5% of a Deep elf sorcerer's Banishment.

So yeah, basically, it's not really adapted.
Not that the current one is more adapted.

Elemental resists are

Code:: +..

not

Code:: ###.....

The latter is how spellpower is represented, and a ###..... Throw Flame doesn't do the same damage as ###..... Bolt of Fire, but you can still see the progression.

Or we can just shift adjectives so that "very resistant" would mean very resistant, not awfully resistant.

I guess anything is better than trying to remember whether extraordinarily comes before uncannily or not, but there are still problems with displaying MR as a spellpower bar. For one thing, it just shifts the rule of thumb, from remembering that you want to be extraordinarily resistant at a certain point in the game, to remembering that you want, say 5 pips of MR at least at that point. On the positive side, 5 pips is clearly better than 4, so there's that.

I'm also concerned about whether showing the absolute MR cap is a good thing. Realistically, most games you aren't even going to get near that cap. Wouldn't that just frustrate players who find they can't increase MR anymore? Or else lead them to make strange equipment choices, or maybe makes them think that they need to scum for more loot. For a lot of spells, training magic up to the point that you hit the spellpower cap is desirable and maybe even optimal skilling; for the MR bar to look like the spellpower bar but behave differently is kind of weird.

I dunno, maybe pubby's suggestion is the least bad one. MR generally does work more like AC/EV (more is better) and you're usually less concerned about reaching the cap than in reaching a minimum threshold that experience has taught you is pretty safe. Also, a lot of players do calculate their actual MR value. So maybe simply displaying the number isn't horrible.

I also think that MR is like AC/EV and should be displayed as a numeric value.

With high-level spells you will probably never reach the last #, also AC interacts with damage in a fairly predictable manner (same can't be said about EV but most people will say that point-by-point their value is similar, which is pretty good I think).
Anyway, I'm not too attached to scales or numbers, I just think that current method of displaying it is less than ideal.

A good while ago monster MR was changed so that 200 would be complete immunity, a ++... display for player MR sounds reasonable, ensures the effect of putting on a MR ring is displayed (as it always fills one more gap) and is small enough for the player to have a sense of urgency when comparing it to the other resistances, unlike a huge spellpower-like bar that would just be too big to lend itself to those comparisons.
I do think however, the adjective display when you hit @ or in the status screen should remain and would work best alongside this new MR bar.

It might be possible to adjust MR to be on a similar scale to AC and EV.
i.e. it starts out about 5 and by Zot it's about 35.

That was indeed my first thought and perhaps simply making the displayed MR for players 1/5th of their actual MR would work and be not misleading, but I don't think it's as informative as the bar with the text description would be.
And well sure other solutions could work but I am not going to code any of it so I try to keep what I propose simple.

i think any of these suggestions are better than what we have now. I actually like number display more than bar. And 1/5th the number displayed is actually a good suggestion, I like that idea. MR of 30 means you are pretty safe.. Whereas MR of 2 you should expect to be paralyzed or confused or polymorphed easily.

I think a number display would be much more accurate and easier to understand at a glance.

Another idea is to have it be color coded.. if MR is very low, it can be in red.. If it is better but still dangerous, it can be yellow. A "safe" MR, the number can be displayed in green. Just a suggestion, but just a colorless number displaying is much much better than current.

I like the idea of using a spellpower-like bar for MR. I don't see the point of giving a number instead. As it's already been said, without a scale a number is meaningless, why do people ignore that and keep pushing this? There isn't any solid argument about why displaying a number would be better than a bar.

dck wrote:a ++... display for player MR sounds reasonable [...] unlike a huge spellpower-like bar

Err, I'm not sure what you're arguing about here. The power bar has 10 dots which matches the 10 adjective levels of the current system. Is it about using a plus instead of a sharp or reducing the size to 6?

dck wrote:I do think however, the adjective display when you hit @ or in the status screen should remain and would work best alongside this new MR bar.

Sure, we can keep the adjective in @. It will help the transition for players who are used to it.

galehar: could you come to ##crawl-dev for a moment?

i would rather see it as a number.
even a bar would be be better than the current way of showing it.

It probably won't help if someone mentions once more that these numbers would be without context? Anyway, no numbers with me, I explained often enough why.

galehar wrote:I like the idea of using a spellpower-like bar for MR. I don't see the point of giving a number instead. As it's already been said, without a scale a number is meaningless, why do people ignore that and keep pushing this? There isn't any solid argument about why displaying a number would be better than a bar.

Well, we have AC, EV and SH as numbers. I'm probably missing something here, because I can't think why MR should be different.

Having said that, any suggested display is better than the current situation. So thanks in advance for implementing whatever gets implemented!

Sprucery wrote:Well, we have AC, EV and SH as numbers. I'm probably missing something here, because I can't think why MR should be different.

Having said that, any suggested display is better than the current situation. So thanks in advance for implementing whatever gets implemented!

I assume AC, EV, and SH are numeric because you can easily gain or lose those things in increments of 1 by putting on or enchanting equipment, and when you put on and take off equipment that boosts some statistic, players want to see that stat actually change so they know their stuff is working. Note, for instance, that rings of MR provide 30 MR, and each adjective rank of MR (except for the really high ones) has a range of 30 MR, so when you put on a ring of MR while having low MR you will notice the adjective changing.

galehar wrote:
dck wrote:a ++... display for player MR sounds reasonable [...] unlike a huge spellpower-like bar

Err, I'm not sure what you're arguing about here. The power bar has 10 dots which matches the 10 adjective levels of the current system. Is it about using a plus instead of a sharp or reducing the size to 6?

Reducing it to five in fact, every dot being worth 40 MR which is the same as a MR ring. Conveys well the amount of MR you get from a piece of armour, guarantees you see the improvement in a clear way when you put on a MR ring and it is small enough that it can be compared to the other resistance bars and give players a basic idea of how much is a lot. I believe making it a larger bar would abstract it too much from the current display pattern of resistances and would make it less clear.
I would also like the plus to be used to further differentiate it from spellpower bars (which do not work in a linear way anyway).

galehar wrote:I like the idea of using a spellpower-like bar for MR. I don't see the point of giving a number instead. As it's already been said, without a scale a number is meaningless, why do people ignore that and keep pushing this? There isn't any solid argument about why displaying a number would be better than a bar.

Yes, number without scale is not good, but using max possible MR (302 I think someone said earlier) to scale is not good either. Most players are going to be winning games with maybe a little more half their MR bar filled, which just seems weird.

I think dck's suggestion is a reasonable compromise. Scale it to a more reasonable value like 200, and just keep the adjectives for people who care about the values between 200 and 300.

Players over 200 MR should just be immune like monsters.

Yeah, I like dck's suggestion. I don't really see value of having all those huge MR numbers that are not necessary (which is not exactly obvious too).

dck wrote:Players over 200 MR should just be immune like monsters.

Actually, they already are. There aren't any monsters that cast enchantments with spellpower > 125 (78 after stepdown). Players with 178 MR are immune.

Sprucery wrote:Well, we have AC, EV and SH as numbers. I'm probably missing something here, because I can't think why MR should be different.

They work completely differently, so that might be a reason. Just giving counter examples doesn't move the discussion forward, you have to use your brain and explain why you think a number is better.

dck wrote:Reducing it to five in fact, every dot being worth 40 MR which is the same as a MR ring.

Isn't there other pieces of equipment which give smaller bonus? What about level up bonus? Starting with a 1:1 ratio of bar/adjectives seems like a good start. We can always adjust it later if we think it's necessary.

dck wrote:I would also like the plus to be used to further differentiate it from spellpower bars (which do not work in a linear way anyway).

Good point. Using pluses also make the overview interface more consistent.

DracheReborn wrote:using max possible MR (302 I think someone said earlier) to scale is not good either. Most players are going to be winning games with maybe a little more half their MR bar filled, which just seems weird.

Most players win with much less than half their maximal resistances, does it feel weird? We could also put the maximum lower than 300.

CommanderC wrote:
dck wrote:Players over 200 MR should just be immune like monsters.

Actually, they already are. There aren't any monsters that cast enchantments with spellpower > 125 (78 after stepdown). Players with 178 MR are immune.

Well, that simplify the issue then

Indeed, armour MR ego gives 30 MR (almost another pip in a five dots display) iirc, which would work well with XL bonuses to add up for another + when you put on a MR item that isn't a randart or MR ring. And randarts give 35+ at bare minimum, so putting on a MR item and not seeing any improvement wouldn't be very common and when it would happen it'd be because you were barely over the threshold of the last dot.
Making it mimic the adjectives system can work, but even cutting out the unnecessarily high ones you have an eight dots display, that to me seems a bit much.

What I particularly like about a five dots display is that it conveys well how resistant you are; with three pluses you are at what currently is extremely resistant and in fact do a lot of hexes very often, with four you are 10 MR over what currently is extraordinarily and resist basically anything in any realistic scenario, then the last one just full immunity.
What I also like is that every plus in that display is a big improvement, with noticeable effects on how often hostile enchantments affect you.

We can do the same thing for Stealth:

0- 9: "Extremely unstealthy"
10-29: "Very unstealthy"
30-59: "Unstealthy"
60-89: "Fairly stealthy"
90-119: "Stealthy"
120-159: "Quite stealthy"
160-219: "Very stealthy"
220-299: "Extremely stealthy"
300-399: "Extraordinarily stealthy"
400-519: "Incredibly stealthy"
520+: "Uncannily stealthy"

The reason why many of us prefer numbers is because AC / EV / SH are all numbers, and none of us would like to see that converted to a bar. Just like ring of +6 protection will increase AC by +6 (and we see the number) , so also it would be great to see ring of Magic Resistance show an actual number change when you put it on or remove it. Over time we learn what the numbers mean, we don't need to be spoon fed "very resistant" vs "quite resistant" .. (the adjectives are confusing as hell and make no sense anyway.. you literally have to read a manual to know that very resistant is better than quite resistant. So yes, numbers are better in every way than the present system. And bar is also better than the present system, so I won't be complaining no matter what change happens, because it will be an improvement.

But I hope you can understand why we like numbers. I'm sure you would complain if someone removed AC as a number and replaced it as a bar. Then they have argument about numbers make no sense. It makes perfect sense if you know what the numbers mean.

For example if you divide the stealth numbers by 10 for the display, one would quickly learn that a stealth of 20-30 is very good .. and stealth of 40 is awesome.

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