Amulet of Speed

[Ashi]

I think the Amulet of Speed should no longer have a maximum bonus of +3, because I think that there is nobody that wears them. Even if a low level character found one, he'd probably have more use for his See Invisible or Wisdom amulets. Otherwise, he'd probably sell it so he could get a more useful amulet.
This could create plenty of new equipment strategies; instead of an Amulet of Wisdom and Ring of Speed, for example, one might choose an Amulet of Speed and Ring of Constitution.

[Berendol]

Yeah, that's yet another thing that was useful when the game was turn-based but has lost its value in the transition to realtime play. Amulets of Speed should be a lot better, and perhaps a few rare ego-items could be made that grant speed and something else to make up for the lack of enough artifacts to go around.

[Crimson]

Some of this is addressed in angband 3.1.x, so it'll be picked up once I figure out how to get that done.

I'll have to check and see exactly  how much of it is picked up though, or  somebody could check againsta a 3.1.x spoiler and let us all know

Crimson

[Berendol]

Well if you wanna wait until early evening I'll peruse the sources and get the answer for you  If someone else wants to give it a shot, I would start in object2.c, tracing through apply_magic to find the function for amulets (I think it's a_m_aux3 in mangband, not sure about vanilla)

Update: I can't find 3.1 anywhere, and 3.0.3 is the latest available on the official Angband site.

[andrew wright]

There are some nice tricks you can do with random numbers to make higher numbers less likely.

You may want to make them so that there are a lot more lower amulets than higher amulets, so it is really hard to get a good one.

One way of doing this is to spin a random number 1 to 10. Call this number x, now spin another number 1 to x.
Call this number y.

y is much more likely to be small than big. eg. For y to be 10, x must be 10 as well. So the chance is one in a hundred of getting the best possible outcome.

[Berendol]

Or just use the normal distribution RNG instead of the regular RNG, where you can shift the bias towards lower or higher numbers... it's just that easy. That's how item "magic" levels are calculated to adjust for depth. Ever noticed how deeper items are better? Well our regular players have... that's why they play at 6350'. Give the sources a look sometime, you might discover a lot of stuff that you didn't know existed.

PS. Register your name on the board!

[Berendol]

OK, there are no special rules in today's Vanilla CVS source for amulets of speed. So, theoretically, anything up to the max PVal is allowed in the next Vanilla. On the other hand... here on MAngband, we have the bonus generated by the formula randint(randint(3)) which has about a 1/16th chance of generating a +3, which is the maximum. Yeah, tight restrictions. One word about Vanilla's amulets of speed. They no longer exist. The closest things are the new Amulets of Trickery, which give dex, sust dex, stealth, speed, search, infra, res nexus, and res pois. Rarity 8, depth 3500'. Let's get some of these in here, shall we? I like the Amulet of Resistance too.