The Tavern

Troves can ask for scrolls of identify. This to me has two undesirable characteristics.

Unlike other troves that ask for consumables, if you have the scrolls, they are of extremely low value. It asks for a lot; if you have them you are certainly gaining them faster than you use them up, and unlike (say) heal wounds there is little prospect of a sudden spike in demand later that makes you seriously regret using them up. The decision to use an identify scroll trove if you can is a no-brainer.

However, the possibility of getting one incentivises the hypothetically optimal player to carefully conserve the scrolls long past the point one otherwise would, just in case an identify scroll trove turns up. I guess there's a bit of an interesting tradeoff there (do I risk trying a distortion, *Contam, or *Fragile randart?) but mostly what I think there is is an incentive to do something tedious just on the offchance something really unlikely happens. This isn't true of other consumable troves because the consumables they ask for are worth conserving if you can anyway.

I'd also like to pick on the potion of haste, scroll of blinking, scroll of acquirement, and horn of Geryon prices. A trove isn't worth one of these items, let alone a stack, unless something is rendering those items useless anyway (Chei, sac artifice, you're about to do Zot and blinking doesn't work there, etc.)
The scroll of teleportation, potion of curing, and potion of resistance prices are much more reasonable.

It just wants to be shown the Horn of Geryon (ETA: no, it doesn't...). Do you really think that about the acquirement price? On the face of it, I'd rather have 16 acquirement-ish items than 2 in specific categories. Perhaps I'm missing something.

From one of my current games:


And yeah, it takes the horn.

Huh. That changed in commit 81848e55ed1a922b5cfb99103cc810f11a0f5a95 which was in December 2014... before I started playing, so it's a mystery to me how I remembered they just wanted shown the horn.

While we're on trove prices, piety trove for Ru worshippers. It's like no trove, except that an unspoiled player might think it resets piety and sacrifices alike, so it's like no trove plus a trap for unspoiled players.

You're missing that troves only perform about 6 acquirements on average, not 16. I would take a trove over two scrolls of acquirement on a felid, I guess, but otherwise, nah.