The Tavern

This relates to the threads on trimming useless monster gear.

When a player first encounters a troll leather armour, it is at least potentially a good choice, especially for casters, hybrids, and ogres. By the time one gets to Vaults and especially Depths, troll leather armours uselessly pile up as we slaughter packs of Deep and Iron trolls. I don't think any player would choose to switch to a vanilla troll leather armour at that point in the game. So why are they there? Mainly, I think, because trolls drop armours and these are trolls.

The easiest fix, and probably the most popular on this forum, would be to only have plain trolls drop armour.

Another option, and for me the more interesting one, would be to make Deep and Iron troll armours better than plain ones: something like 5AC 3ER for Deep and 7AC 7ER for Iron, with a corresponding increase in enchantability. This would make both of them better than any mundane armour, allowing for a mid-late troll armour upgrade for those so inclined, while still not being good enough protection-wise to make them a no-brainer for anyone. In that respect, these new armours would provide meaningful choice. Regen should stay the same, since adding more would step on Moon Troll uniqueness. I'm open to any suggestions as to further differentiate these armours mechanically.

Flavourwise it makes sense for them to be better because the trolls from which they are taken are stronger and more powerful; why should their hide-armours have the same stats as that of a plain troll? As I've argued before, this kind of change makes the gameworld richer, more consistent (Deep and Iron trolls do in fact have more AC than plain ones), and more plausible, all of which heighten the player's immersion in that world and thus perhaps their enjoyment.

5AC 3ER is a worse version of steam dragon scales, and 7AC 7ER is a copy of swamp dragon scales
the AC and ER space is already saturated, there are 18 body armours!

What if scales weren't hardcoded - the current effects they have treated as an ego. Steam scales would be Light Scales with the steam ego, and deep trolls could drop Light Scales with the regen ego.

It is a bit weird, though, that they come in different colors based on the trolls they come from. I would imagine it's pretty surprising as a new player to kill an "iron" troll, have him drop a hide with a special grey metalic color, and have it be identical to the troll leather from normal trolls earlier in the game.

Makes sense why the change was made, but when a difference in looks doesn't match a difference in function it's a bit misleading, especially when the flavor of the trolls would indicate some of them have much tougher hides than others. When you see the iron troll still just dropped a green hide, you don't need to check it to understand it's the same.

The regen ego makes them different armors, though. Now whether that's enough of a difference to warrant including them is up for debate - personally I'd like to see them, because I value regeneration highly, but you could certainly argue that just the ego difference isn't enough.

We could tweak the numbers to make them slightly different from Swamp and Steam, but slightly different wouldn't be substantially different. I'd argue that this light-mid range of body armours is the best place to have more diversity, especially in terms of egos and especially later in the game when we can expect a range of dragon armours to choose from. Compare newtroll armours to the heavier and less generally useful body armours like chain mail, which I personally have only ever used as a highly enchanted randart, or Shadow Dragon armour, which I've never had a reason to use, as they're heavy enough to require a high-STR character but not as something really heavy like GDA or CPA, and furthermore don't (unless randarts) offer a useful ego.

And it's worth restating that even without the addition of my hypothetical armours, no harm would be done if Deep and Iron trolls stopped dropping armours altogether.

> We could tweak the numbers to make them slightly different from Swamp and Steam, but slightly different wouldn't be substantially different.

Ah but remember that the status quo is not "slightly different" or "substantially different", but "identical to an armour available before lair". Even slight differentiation (+ the regen ego) would be an improvement.

Yes, it'd definitely be better if they dropped nothing.
Not really. If you had 3 slight variations of plate armour, it would be worse than just having one item called plate armour.

> If you had 3 slight variations of plate armour, it would be worse than just having one item called plate armour.

Depends on what the variation is. If it's only AC/ER tweaks, agreed it's pointless. If you're adding egos like Regen, it's better. We already have fire/ice and pearl/shadow/storm which are slight variations on each other with tweaks to ego. A troll variation on swamp scales with Regen instead of rPois could be worth it.

Why does this matter? Crawl has more than 100 different kinds of spells but no one points out that the total number of spells is already saturated and should be heavily trimmed. Hell, no one even wants to complain about the 6 different(lol) types of bolt spells. As long as they're different to some degree I really think they should be allowed to exist.

Devs have been talking about removing some of the bolt spells for a while now...

People actually talk about cutting spells all the time

There's also a key difference between spells and armours in that most of the time a spell is a game element players actually engage with, rather than just slapping on and saying "got my AC and EV where I want them for now, done"

You could make the later ones come pre-enchanted. Still probably usually not worth it but no need for new armours.