Well, in my experiences, it kills stuff fast enough.

I once dual wielded one (Or was it made of octiron? I'm not sure.) with a flaming sword for pretty much the whole GC. I don't think I took longer to kill monsters then I do with whips. Definitely better than trying to go unarmed.

Burning items placed inside of flammable containers sould have a chance of both setting other items inside ablaze or burning the container.

Also, SOCMing large chest filled with wands into a gunpowder, then putting a burning stick inside, dropping it next to Petrus and running like hell, anyone?

Nice.

BTW, how does biome distribution on the worldmap work? Does it take anything like climatic zones (ie. snow near the map edges, New Attnam and its jungle in the middle) into account?

Would it be possible to enable shield bashes, for the reason mentioned above, that any kind of dual wielding will very quickly overshine shields simply because you have two attacks *and* two blocking chances, even though smaller?

They need not neccessarily do lot of damage, but giving them at least some offensive capability would nicely balance them against high damage, lower blocking of most other weapons.

I'm not sure, but defining shield as melee weapon instead of as an armor in gear.h might do the trick?

BTW, (b)ash command would also be ideal for getting fruit from trees.

You could, for example, make it a renewable source of food, with bashing not damaging the tree (thant's what (a)pplying an axe at it is for ), but only shaking the fruits off it, with a cooldown for the tree, so that you could only get one fruit every several hours (several fruits every several days?). That way, you would still need to get some food from shop sometimes, when all the trees are recharging, but still could sometimes snack on the pineapples you bash down from pine trees (how else ).

Not exactly the worst fail I had, as it wasn't in regural gameplay, but I was fiddling in CLIVAN in wizmode, with stats upped to about 200 and physpher equipment, and decided to take on Petrus in fair fight, just to see how well would the more than triple stats than his and way better equipment would fare.

Petrus ended quardriplegic, and I, the living god, was decapitated by the archangel all of the sudden.

I think it would be very nice if there was a way how to add non-guaranteed special rooms. Eg. the orc room would not necessarily appear, even if you explored the whole GC, in every game. That would allow for two things:

Ad 1) we could add tons of new set pieces, as it is quite easy to script a special room, so even we non-coders could contribute. That would also add quite a bit of variety to the dungeons, making it more fun to explore.

Ad 2) the special rooms could get a probability weight for their appearance, so we could set the minefield to high probability (so it would be generated in msot games, as everybody loves their minefield), but also introduce several low probability, high danger and/or reward rooms.

The same could apply for the theoretical wilderness maps, with a low chance of you finding a hunter's hut, kobold camp or wizard's tower if you entered the wilderness.

I'd also say more continents.

For one thing, you have a guaranteed source of permanent levitation, so you are able to get anywhere on the whole worldmap, even over the sees. For another, magical portals and/or bridge tiles for worldmap are nice possibilities how to connect several continents.

However, I'd really like to see the continents to become more island-like in appearance and more round, as well, with lakes and wider swathes of oceans in between, so that it's not that easy to fly from one continent to another.

Also, it would be incredibly nice to integrate worldmap encounters, so that you could be ambushed while travelling over the wilderness. I've seen some ideas as to the makeup of these encounters based on the tile biome on the wiki, but adding several more encounter types, like bandit groups and roving undead, would be ideal in my opinion.

That would require the generation of one-off map for the encounter, which could be also used to enable the player to enter the wilderness on his own. Basically, while travelling, you could be both forced into small scale map by an encounter, with some hostile creatures generated for you to fight, or you could enter (by '>' with no dungeon on the current tile?) the wilderness map, with no items, but some neutral animals and either trees, snow or sand (depending on biome) generated.

From variants, I personally prefer CLIVAN.

It adds quite a bit of content, and even though it seems slightly unbalanced at times (too many good items from the new dungeons), it's very nice.

The wiki has many of the answers you seek:

Mondedr pass