The Tavern

I think that the identification minigame should be reduced to just scrolls, jewels and potions. Armour and weapons should generate fully identified.

The reasoning is the following: it is already burdensome, when you are in the late game and you have to manually identify all blue armour or weapons of the category that could interest you. Probably, by Vaults and Elf and Depths, you are already at this point.The chances that the items you are identifying will be useful get very, very low. This means that the player isn't making a tactical or strategic decision. The player only has to choose: do I want to play optimally, probably wasting my time and effort, slowing the game, doing inventory juggling to identify this stuff, or do I want to just go on and have my fun?

But now we have gnolls. Gnolls can use anything they find. Gnolls are interested into identifying anything they find. Gnolls have to stop and identify everything, unless they choose to just go on and ignore chances to power up.

To improve playability, armour and weapons should already be fully identified when seen on the floor, or in enemy hands. This would also solve a few problems, like displaying resistances you aren't supposed to know about (see e.g. leather armour of poison resistance).

Artifacts have a few interesting properties like *drain and *contamination, so they could be a special case and still need identification (so people can still end up in the robe of misfortune).

As for jewels, I have often said that 2-step identification should go. If you identify a +2 ring of strength, you should be able to tell the numerical value of all other rings of strength without having to individually id every single one of them. The current situation serves no purpose, and even curses are normally meaningless by the time you are finding the second ring or amulet of the same kind.

The interesting parts of the ID game are potions and scrolls, and, sometimes, wands (having to choose between having more charges and knowing what a single potion does). These can stay.

BTW, gnolls probably are one more reason why spell books should disappear as inventory items, since gnolls can potentially use all spells they find in a game, and I don't think it makes sense to force them to make trips to the books. Other species too, but gnolls make the problem more apparent.

Maybe Gnolls specifically should get some boon to identifying items more easily.

But I don't think every other race needs it.

And honestly, by the mid-late game most of the time you will have equipment good enough that you don't care to identify every blue item or every artefact anymore, even in weapon categories that interest you, just because no matter what you know it is not getting better than what you currently have

FR for 0.21: remove gnolls silly items detection, add "you automatically id weapons and armors" mut
FR for 0.22: make this standard for everyone.

Shtopit, I partly agree.

For weapon brands, I suggest that the player always recognize a particular brand after identifying (from scroll or wielding or monster attacking with) that brand the first time. The same for armor, except that you don't get to ID from monster wearing them.

For rings with pluses/minuses, I suggest they be simplified to greater/lesser, and perhaps a few more bad ring egos created to keep wear-ID suitably risky.

I think it would make sense to automatically identify standard weapons/armour if you have high enough skill in the appropriate category. For weapons this could be at mindelay for the given weapon type; obviously if you have perfected usage of a weapon then you should know everything about it by sight. This would already help gnolls more than other species because they reach mindelay in multiple weapon categories at once. For shields and armour it should similarly be around the skill level when you have minimised the penalties. Randarts/fixedarts should still never be identified. I don't think jewellery needs anything changing.

But randarts/fixedarts are always idenitified. Do you want to change that, or do I misunderstand you?
My thanks go to everything else you say - sounds like a good solution!

Surely they're only identified when you wield them (or sometimes, when you find them in a shop)?

Fixedarts are always identified when you find them, with the exception of the Robe of Misfortune, that gets a randart-like description. Randarts, however, are unidentified (except possibly in shops).

Oops, I didn't read carefully enough. Where you said randarts/fixedarts, I read unrands/fixedarts. My bad. Randarts are not identified.

Yes, still my mistake about fixedarts tho! I have never really noticed seeing them identified on the ground for some reason.

What is the difference between unrands/fixedarts?

Unrandarts and fixedarts are the same thing. They're items with predefined properties and a unique tile.

Randarts have all their attributes randomly generated, and a randomly picked tile.