were pickpockets nerfed too much?

[Stingray1]

Items are overrated.

[grobblewobble]

And you advice to heavily trapped areas... are you seriously drop your whole inventory + some items you wear near you (monsters could block you/pick up smth/kill you without those items) or on another level (every time?...) when you encounter row of traps/trapped area without wand of trap detection? Or would you rather get guaranteed skill and complete them without any hassle with traps?

Pyramid: I make a stash in the barbarian glade. Not the whole inventory goes in the stash. Iron helmets are not easily destroyed and even if it happens, not a big deal. Higher metal items and artifacts are safe, a big pile of cooked lizards will never get destroyed whole. After I "detected" the traps, I will maybe make a quick trip back to the glade to get important items like healing potions back.

Or some games I don't even bother, like Jellyslayer. But if you have anything important, like SoCR, you can leave them behind no problem.

Griffyard: same as pyramid, but the stash goes on the upper level.

Maze: I won't go there unless I have enough magic mapping + teleport to do it the painless way in any case.

Mana temple: it is very rare not to have a wand of trap detection at this point.

Door traps: this is why detect traps is of some use in the early game. Later on you have keys. Besides, after detecting a door trap you still need to set it off, so you still have the hassle of making a temporary stash if you want to avoid item destruction.

All in all, I find it way more hassle to get the skill than it ever saves me.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Hardcore players reach a point where they tend to find almost every skill/talent overrated, redundant or irrelevant. Detect Traps? Huh, who cares about item destruction, you can win the game without items. Courage? Huh, irrelevant, good players never get surrounded (tell that to my last victim of being sandwiched between two summoners in the Big Room). Detect Item Status? Who needs that, you can always carry stuff to an altar (but then they'll tell you that girdles of carrying are irrelevant and that good players play unburdened). TH? There are already more than enough items. Etc.

And yes, you can probably win the game naked, without non-orb items and killing everyone with acid spit while eating food from the ground. But in practice most players get into undesirable situations for one reason or other (maybe bad luck, maybe suboptimal play) and all those skills, like items, increase survivavility.

And yes, you probably can't point out a single game where you can say "I died from not having Detect Traps" or "I died from not having TH", but all of those things have an influence on overall risk. A trap can blow up your girdle of carrying, not having TH can make you run out of water or ID scrolls and miss on a good item, etc.

Most players are not perfect and every game has a lot of points of risk. That's why no player wins the game in 100% of the tries. Minimizing risks is important.

[_Ln_]

IMHO - Detect Traps *is* overrated - I'm telling you from game experience perspective. Since Pick Pockets were nerfed, I haven't tried to enter the thieves guild a single time and have 2 or more wins and one guy killed by Sharad Waador. Is it so hard to zap a wand of trap detection in the Mana temple/Darkforge/Pyramid? Mind you, I've played a lot of Mist Elves, so I know all about the traps there is. I've done Maze 3 times without Magic Mapping and Detect Traps, 2 times of 3 without teleport spell and once without teleport control. All I've lost was 7lb which I forgot to unequip. And all three times I had to explore practically all of 4th, 5th and 6th levels because I'm that lucky.

And I don't ever stash items except in the following cases:
1. Khelly's scrolls on D:1
2. Everything before ToEF if I don't have rings of ice. If I have rings of ice, I go with all my equipment (except scrolls above).
3. Everything outside of the Air Temple.

I also happily jump in the Rift with thousands of stones in my backpack.

I completely agree with Jelly that the importance of Detect Traps is Guidebook propaganda - because I've followed this advice religiously until the prereleases. There is a lot of stuff there that results in "bad" (overly paranoid) habits.

And seriously, learn not to hang onto items - they are given by RNG and taken by RNG.

[grobblewobble]

And yes, you can probably win the game naked, without non-orb items and killing everyone with acid spit while eating food from the ground. But in practice most players get into undesirable situations for one reason or other (maybe bad luck, maybe suboptimal play) and all those skills, like items, increase survivavility.

And yes, you probably can't point out a single game where you can say "I died from not having Detect Traps" or "I died from not having TH"

That's different. Treasure hunter is much more useful than detect traps. I'm not saying here that items are not important, but that the detect traps skill makes very little difference in your ability to protect them. Stash your vulnerable items, discover the traps, go back and pick up the items, then come back to fight Rehetep. Voila, detected the traps without the skill. You don't need to be a hardcore player for that. If you just follow this simple tactic, the skill is nearly irrelevant - every trap you set off, you would probably also have set off if you'd have had the detect traps skill.

Of course if you start the game with the skill you might as well use it. But the time when you get the most out of it is early on, when a trap door trap can kill you. By the time you can finally pick up the skill from Yergius (and you trained it to a good value too), it is no longer going to help. This got even worse now that pickpockets has been nerfed. So, back on topic, yes, I think the nerf to pickpockets was a bit much and especially made the Yergius quest very unattractive.

[gosos]

what about corruption traps? you guys keep saying that corruption isnt a problem? i saw one guy won the game in 93 days. i have a level 22 gnome/wizard at day 100 that is pre-TOeFF. in 1.2 i triple in corruption by day 180.

the wiki/guide says the minotaur maze probably isnt worth doing. it sounds like a big hassle just to move around?

[JellySlayer]

I can't help but be somewhat perplexed by all the things Jellyslayer finds to be readily available. Acid resistance? It's very easy to kill an entire mound of ants and not get a corpse.

There's decent chance of getting a corpse from an ant hive. Probably 50% without food preservation, near 100% with it above 90. If you miss it, well, the rings are fairly common and low DL.

Fire resistance as an intrinsic is a total crapshoot, especially in the early game. In the lightning vortex thread I'm told that lightning resistance is easy to acquire from the Druid's cave.

Both of these can be acquired by wearing the black torc. It's a very, very nice artifact and desperately underrated. You can keep it on until around the Griffyard, then swap torc for ankh and put on the elemental gauntlets to maintain your resistances. Cold resistance is actually the most difficult one to acquire in the early game. Fortunately, ice vortices are slow and can be eluded fairly easily.

Just use a scroll of magic mapping and teleport... game before last I had to go through the ToEF without any SoMM because none dropped all game.

There are a large pile of scroll of magic mapping in BugCave. If you're strong enough to do the Maze, you should be strong enough to consider the Bug Temple as well. Most of the time, I just skip the Maze, because I don't feel that it is worth the effort to complete it. The biggest hazard in the Maze, as far as I'm concerned, is not the traps, but the minotaurs. Most of the minotaurs are pretty tough to kill and can do some serious damage; it's hard to recover HP in the Maze because the average monster that you will face is quite high DL--on D:45, you'll can see stronger monsters, but a large portion of the ones you see will be weaklings. In the Maze, the weakest monster is somewhat non-trivial, and most of the others can do at least a passable amount of damage. Minotaur mages and living walls are both very dangerous and somewhat common. The Maze is, IMHO, for the most part a trap. Characters who are strong enough to think about the Maze don't need the rewards. But it's a great place to slaughter would-be winners who aren't quite strong enough for it.

Don't know how many lightning lizards I've seen there, but I'm usually not up to killing them when I'm at that level and I suspect you'd have to herd a caravan of cats before you found one that dropped a corpse. Maybe around the time that you go beyond the Dwarven Portal keys are readily available, but even then I find myself having to kick down doors.

You can buy keys from Shriek. For the same price as it would cost you to buy detect traps, you can buy a full set of keys and probably some duplicates (depends on race and gender, IIRC, but you should always play female anyway).

Not that I'm not firmly in the detect traps camp for anything other than the early game.

Unless you kill Kranach, you probably can't get detect traps in the early game, and it won't be trained to a useful level until the midgame.

And yes, you can probably win the game naked, without non-orb items and killing everyone with acid spit while eating food from the ground. But in practice most players get into undesirable situations for one reason or other (maybe bad luck, maybe suboptimal play) and all those skills, like items, increase survivavility.

Here's the thing. Some items increase survivability. Most of your items probably don't. Most players that I've seen travel around with lots and lots and lots of items in their packs "just in case". The thing is, "just in case" never comes up, or, if your inventory bloat is sufficiently bad, you don't even know what tools you have available. For a lot of players, if they lost half their backpack, it probably wouldn't significant affect their chances of winning. Now, if you lose several pieces of worn equipment all at once and don't have easy access to backups, yeah, you could be in trouble. I don't try to play unburdened to make the game harder; I play unburdened because it makes the game easier--my character is faster, consumes less food, and I know exactly what is in my pack.

what about corruption traps? you guys keep saying that corruption isnt a problem? i saw one guy won the game in 93 days. i have a level 22 gnome/wizard at day 100 that is pre-TOeFF. in 1.2 i triple in corruption by day 180.

the wiki/guide says the minotaur maze probably isnt worth doing. it sounds like a big hassle just to move around?

Corruption traps don't add that much corruption to your total. You need to be hit maybe 20-30 times before you get one actual corruption, and I don't believe that the strength of the traps increases with dungeon depth. The big corruption danger arises almost exclusively from how much time you spend in areas below D:35 or so.

The Maze is very tedious and challenging to complete. The rewards in pre-releases make it much more attractive, but, historically, most players skip it.

[sytar6]

Hardcore players reach a point where they tend to find almost every skill/talent overrated, redundant or irrelevant.

I wager this is particularly true of Jellyslayer. Judging from his latest Steel Man challenge, he probably regards dungeons and towns as overrated too :P

Both of these can be acquired by wearing the black torc. It's a very, very nice artifact and desperately underrated.

I'd be pretty concerned about walking around cursed, but your signature hints that you might not see it as too big a deal.

I actually tried to play a doomed monk a while back. What a disaster that was. Dunno how you do it.

[asdf]

I'd be pretty concerned about walking around cursed, but your signature hints that you might not see it as too big a deal.

You should avoid undeads because of heavy stat drain (both Graveyards), paralyzing monsters (for obvious reasons) and be careful around trapped areas. Lucky/Fate Smiles from altars are _strongly_ recommended. In one game i went probably ~50% of the game with Executor + Black Torc without major consequences.

Basically, rule is - if monster have a special attack - he will land it on you sooner that you expected, therefore you should have high enough DV, so only armor-penetrating critical hits (which are a lot more common too) would trigger them.

[JellySlayer]

I wager this is particularly true of Jellyslayer. Judging from his latest Steel Man challenge, he probably regards dungeons and towns as overrated too :P

Not true at all. There are many things that I think are underrated, and other things are rated correctly. In fact, just above this post, I noted that I consider the black torc to be quite underrated. Something overrated is something that is perceived as more useful than it actually is--not something that is unnecessary or worthless. There are a number of things in ADOM that fall into both categories (and, IMHO, most of them are the Guidebook's fault). The evaluation of most things is pretty reasonable--there's no disagreement about the value of [+0,+0] hats, Woodcrafting, potions of extra healing, etc.

I'm not saying detect traps is worthless. I'm saying that it is not nearly as good as people think it is, and not having it is much less of a problem than people seem to think it is. While inventory destruction from traps can be severe if you're magnificently unlucky, on the average, it's a pretty minor problem in the grand scheme of things.

[edit]

I'd be pretty concerned about walking around cursed, but your signature hints that you might not see it as too big a deal.

I think the benefits of the torc quite significantly outweigh the effects of cursing. It's actually the autocursing that is the more noticeably annoying feature of the black torc, since you usually want to swap amulets briefly (eg. light, free action) at least once or twice before you get the ankh, and scroll of uncursing and holy water are still at a bit of a premium at that stage in the game.

I actually tried to play a doomed monk a while back. What a disaster that was. Dunno how you do it.

I die a lot. If you really want to try doomed and get somewhere, play a powerhouse character with ranged attacks: Wizard or Archer are probably the easiest. Doomed wizard is probably about as difficult as winning with an undoomed thief, I'd say (granted, I've never won with a doomed wizard, but that's because I've been trying to do them with very stupid restrictions--eg. no armor). I've been meaning to write a doomed strategy guide.