I would like to have the artifact axe Eptyron from CLIVAN in the main game, it could potentially even make a nice weapon for the zombie of Khaz-zadm. However, I don't really feel up to finding and porting the relevat code from CLIVAN...

Thanks!


I'll try to explain my reasoning:

I wanted the zombie of Khaz-zadm feel like a boss, a worthy fight, and also offer a meaningful treasure for its defeat. The zombie already had rather good stats, so I let those be, but I gave it resistances, as Ighalli pointed out she can be felled by a wand way too easily. Optimally, she should be a bit hard to fight right after arriving to Attnam, but doable with good equipment and/or after a floor or two of GC. Valpurium battle-axe was given to her because a) it makes her much more intimidating in melee and b) it is a cool treasure well worth the hassle defeating her.

Why a battle-axe instead of a hammer? Well, I find axes are rather underused right now - every other weapon category has a special weapon or an artifact that makes it good to train. Axes, though, lack both special weapons and artifacts. They are not actually unbalanced or underpowered (I feel quarterstaffs are, but that may be IMO), it's just batter to train eg. hammers with the hope of finding a thundr hammer, even if you happen upon some nice axes. Thus I wanted at least one cool and powerful axe in the game, so that some players might actually train axes and stick with them through the rest of the game, just as they do with artifacts of other weapon categories.

I might have gone overboard with making it valpurium and not a different high metal, but I think it's balanced by the risk - the last floor of Catacombs is dangerous, there is the necromancer and the zombie herself can crit you pretty bad with the axe. It is true that this guarantees a valpurium battle-axe in each game, but you have to be able to actually obtain it, which in some games will take some time to build up power. And you can also obtain a valpurium sword in each game by praying to Valpurus, which I don't find that difficult to achieve. You can sell the god gifts just as much as the axe - it's true, though, that the cash you get is quite formidable.

If we are to nerf it, I would prefer to either make it a valpurium axe instead of a battle-axe, or slightly nefring the material, but still leaving the zombie with a powerful axe, for the reasons above.

What do you think?

Also, sorry for the trees, I totally missed them. :/

Most likely (I hope so ) last changes were made to this pull request.

Changes:

* tweaked boss - it no longer falls easily to fireballs.
* several rooms added to cellar (guards have barracks and a dining hall),
* NPCs can tell you more about Attnam (and other things as well),
* Attnam has four cardinals (based on Doc/Obsolete/Attnam.txt),
* tomb of the unknown soldier (based on Doc/Obsolete/Attnam.txt).

Enjoy!

If it's possible, I would like to request review and merging of Attnam Catacombs pull request. I think I finished and fixed everything that needed to, and more changes and ideas can wait for further releases.

So, I realized that librarian has a special way of handling replies based on StoryState - before you give the scroll to Petrus, he gives you general advice, after that, he gives you intelligence on GC. Unfortunately this becomes weird with ToX, where he will still give you GC info and does not mention ToX at all.

This should be fixed and could be handled in two ways: a) we somehow change the way StoryState is handled for different quests and give librarian new replies for ToX; or b) we give librarian general replies he will give at any time, for both GC and ToX.

I actually like the latter way, because then new players might be clued that there is more than just the one quest, after hearing about other locations from the librarian.

What do you think?

I think the idea was that it would have sky-high AV, way over current top plate mails, but also high weight and penalties. We could make it work, even if for only some characters.

I really like this!


I also like this idea! In all seriousness, how cool would it be to walk around in glowing light crystal armor?

Right now, it's more like:

Cloth armor: No penalties, low weight, sufficient-to-good protection (leather is good enough for early game, end game cloth materials like GEF are nearly unsurpassed)
Chain mail: Moderate penalties, moderate weight, moderate protection (yeah, this one is passable, but not as good as cloth, IMO)
Plate armor: Substantial penalties, high-to-moderate weight, moderate-to-good protection (only end game metals may be worth it, and not always)
AoGH: Yeah...

Basically, cloth is OP right now.

I like the different damage type reductions for different armor, but I still think we should try to have the least armor types possible, not add new ones, because then SoCM would open a whole can of mind worms...

Speaking of which, we could make soft gauntlets be called "gloves" and soft boots "shoes", just for the extra flavor. These are like 2 lines in script files, AFAIK.

This was my line of thinking. Early game, you have to worry about carrying weight quite a bit, so low metal chain and (hard) leather armor would both have its pros and cons. Later, you would have access to both high-end soft armors and (rebalanced) plate, so chain should still not be OP / always the best choice.

I'm not sure how well would it actually work, though.


If we change the way of how stat penalties are calculated rather than adjusting flexibility of materials, that should only affect armors, shouldn't it? Plus soft armors already have next to no stat penalty, so the effect on them would hopefully not be dramatic.

I would try to avoid creating a new item type. Someone would then SoCM armor balanced for soft materials into metal or vice versa and we're right at the beginning.