Thank you ADOM: by gut

[Kyreles]

"If you have already started playing with restrictions, you probably also know how to win without having to rely on powerful items."

Correction. We know how to survive until we get the powerful items we need to rely on. And I have to say, the hassle is eased TREMENDOUSLY if you get 50% more loot. Treasure Hunter is all about preventing hassle. Stair*spit*hopping, gremlin *spit* bombing, pick*spit*pocketing and casino *spit* restocking are all alternatives to get the loot you need, but they are all boring, time-consuming and extraordinarily cheap. But hey, whatever floats your boat.

We all know your feelings on pickpocketing

[anon123]

Casino restocking isn't that time-consuming nor boring considering the huge piles of always-useful equipment it generates.

[grobblewobble]

Casino restocking isn't that time-consuming nor boring

Oh boy. Now you dunnit.

*grabs popcorn*

[JellySlayer]

There is useful equipment in the Casino?

[Silfir]

Oh no, it is exactly that boring. Only a tiny fraction of the items in there are "always useful"; the really powerful artifacts or magic items, or stuff that you must eventually find and haven't (scroll of danger, wand of monster creation). Some more are "nice to have I guess", and the vast majority of it is completely and utterly superfluous. And that goes for the initial Casino stock. Restocking it gets you maybe one "always useful", a couple of "nice to have I guess" and 95% superfluous. Even then, if you're all the way to the Casino, you beat the Tower of Eternal Flames, and chances are excellent you can complete the game just fine without a single Casino item, even the really "always useful" ones.

Let me tell you about my feelings about Pick Pockets, because that quote said barely anything. Its mere existence means that if you want to play optimally, you have to press three buttons before killing any humanoid creature, with the exception of if it would kill you, rather than just the one button for running into them (or two to shoot it - which is also kind of a hassle, but at least it's logical that you have to shoot things to train yourself in shooting). I'd love the skill to be taken out and shot for the sake of thousands of players who tried to get in the habit, but couldn't, and felt bad about it, and the hundreds or so that actually use it all the time, those poor fools. Maybe they've even convinced themselves that it adds depth or is otherwise acceptable. You're just turning keypresses into extra items. No item that you pickpocket would have been dropped by the creature in question; it gets magically created out of nowhere. It makes no sense and completely distorts balance; either the ones who do it get a piss-easy game, or the ones who don't get an unfairly hard one (thank the stars it's the former). The only way I go to sleep at night is by ignoring the very existence of the Pick Pockets skill. I used to grudgingly learn and use it the amount of times required to get Detect Traps, but even then I felt dirty for even associating myself with that abomination.

If I had the power to dictate one change, just one change, in an upcoming ADOM release, it would be the fix of Pick Pockets to only steal items the creature in question would have otherwise possessed. I would pick this over fixing any bug, even crash bugs, perhaps even over bonus dungeons or monsters. Pick Pockets needs to die.

Those are my feelings on pickpocketing.

[grobblewobble]

I'm sorry those evil pickpockets have hurt your feelings, Silfir. *hugs*

[JellySlayer]

You know that monsters don't have proper inventories in ADOM, right? All of the loot that gets generated when you kill a monster is also created out of nowhere, and didn't exist before the monster died, AFAIK.

[Silfir]

Yes, but they're supposed to have them. They're not supposed to have even more just because you picked their bloody pockets.

[anon123]

Oh no, it is exactly that boring. Only a tiny fraction of the items in there are "always useful"; the really powerful artifacts or magic items, or stuff that you must eventually find and haven't (scroll of danger, wand of monster creation). Some more are "nice to have I guess", and the vast majority of it is completely and utterly superfluous. And that goes for the initial Casino stock. Restocking it gets you maybe one "always useful", a couple of "nice to have I guess" and 95% superfluous. Even then, if you're all the way to the Casino, you beat the Tower of Eternal Flames, and chances are excellent you can complete the game just fine without a single Casino item, even the really "always useful" ones.

Potions of water you can bless on an altar. Scrolls of identify and uncursing that can be blessed to identify or uncurse everything in one go (and you can drop those cursed potions of invisibility beforehand). At least a couple of PoGAs or potions of -stat-, and top-tier healing potions. Armor and weapons that will often have nice prefixes or stats, like an eternium cap [+0, +8], tower eternium shield [+16, +5] or a spear of penetration, when I have polearms trained to level 11. Slaying ammunition and the corresponding weapons it can be fired with, often "of accuracy". +Rgen items. Lots of spellbooks for my wizards to take the shortcut, go to the surface and partly thanks to the CoS, gain enough castings to never worry about them again; maybe even a new spell. If you're very lucky, a wish or an artifact.

That's the kind of stuff I call "always useful". If you think a casino item must be equipped and kept for the rest of the game to be "always useful", then I guess most (but not all) the things I love getting from there are just "nice to have" in your eyes. But I enjoy getting lots of such items with little effort (using auto-pickup, fully trekking the shop at least a few times isn't utterly boring), so it's worth doing. As is any in-game habit that's somehow beneficial and doesn't ruin my fun as far as I'm concerned. Try to make me not start a game in the Infinite Dungeon, for example

Let me tell you about my feelings about Pick Pockets, because that quote said barely anything. Its mere existence means that if you want to play optimally, you have to press three buttons before killing any humanoid creature, with the exception of if it would kill you, rather than just the one button for running into them (or two to shoot it - which is also kind of a hassle, but at least it's logical that you have to shoot things to train yourself in shooting).

I'll give you that one. Pressing the extra buttons does get cumbersome with time. So I stop using the skill, usually after the CoC graveyard (so many undead to use it on, and they're no risk for me at that point). If I kept on using it on every humanoid until the endgame, I'd probably get some stellar items missed otherwise, but I don't lose sleep over that.

You're just turning keypresses into extra items. No item that you pickpocket would have been dropped by the creature in question; it gets magically created out of nowhere. It makes no sense and completely distorts balance; either the ones who do it get a piss-easy game, or the ones who don't get an unfairly hard one (thank the stars it's the former).

Death drops immediately materialize where the dead monster was. Rats can drop plate mail in this fashion. Dwarfs can dig, but they don't always drop the pick axe they're supposedly using. Most monsters only have a certain chance of leaving a corpse - apparently the bodies of creatures you kill immediately disappear unless a random number generator hits the right number. Those make little sense either, but we accept them as part of the gameplay. That's why I'm fine with how Pick Pockets works myself, and that takes me to the point below.

The only way I go to sleep at night is by ignoring the very existence of the Pick Pockets skill. I used to grudgingly learn and use it the amount of times required to get Detect Traps, but even then I felt dirty for even associating myself with that abomination.

If I had the power to dictate one change, just one change, in an upcoming ADOM release, it would be the fix of Pick Pockets to only steal items the creature in question would have otherwise possessed. I would pick this over fixing any bug, even crash bugs, perhaps even over bonus dungeons or monsters. Pick Pockets needs to die.

Those are my feelings on pickpocketing.

If Pick Pockets only generated a random item with the same probability as a random drop, and then prevented that particular creature from dropping any non-fixed (e.g. random pickaxes from dwarves, the ankh and AMW from Rehetep) items on death, there'd be little difference between pickpocketing and killing monsters to get items. The skill would only be useful to get a few items from NPCs you can't or don't want to kill, taking it from "too effective" from "totally useless" as far as I'm concerned.

[JellySlayer]

Potions of water you can bless on an altar.

Normally by the time I reach the Casino, I have 10-20 extra potions of holy water that I'll never use. If you're spending a bunch of levels in the ID, you probably have twice as many as I do.

Scrolls of identify and uncursing that can be blessed to identify or uncurse everything in one go (and you can drop those cursed potions of invisibility beforehand).

And probably 5-10 of each of these, which I'll also never use.

At least a couple of PoGAs or potions of -stat-, and top-tier healing potions.

And all the stats I care about are over 30, making these pretty useless. Healing potions? I've got 10 PoEH from Thrundarr that I might use on D:50, and the Water Orb for everything else.

Armor and weapons that will often have nice prefixes or stats, like an eternium cap [+0, +8], tower eternium shield [+16, +5] or a spear of penetration, when I have polearms trained to level 11.

Unless Executor is in the Casino, it's doubtful that I need a weapon upgrade because I probably have an artifact weapons that is better than any ego weapon I'm likely to find. Armor? Well, with 70 DV and 40 PV, it's doubtful that I'll find anything that will make any difference.

Slaying ammunition and the corresponding weapons it can be fired with, often "of accuracy".

As if I need arrows at this point in the game.

+Rgen items.

Sure, if you don't have them already, this is a decent find.

Lots of spellbooks for my wizards to take the shortcut

You still need spellbooks for your wizard at this point in the game?

If you're very lucky, a wish or an artifact.

I almost never use wishes post ToEF. Or if I have them, I use them on something stupid like a potion of uselessness. Lots of my characters finish the game with wishes in their packs though. Artifacts? Well, if it's Executor, Preserver, Bracers of War, or maybe Far Slayer, I guess I'd be pretty happy. Pretty much everything else I probably either have better, or wouldn't make a difference one way or the other.