bmh (01/25/83)
I'm interested in the hypothesis that monsters get tougher to kill (require more hits than earlier than in the same game) in 5.2. I've noticed this especially with vampires because they go from being painful nuisances in the 20's to my worst enemy in the 30's. Given a low enough armor class (<=0) vampires rarely bother me until the levels below 30. After taking only 3 hits on average to kill in the 20's (wielding a reasonable 2hnder) it requires approximately 6 hits kill vamps and it becomes harder to hit them. This leads to losing games because one can survive D's and P's by that time, usually, but not when vampires have drained you from 100 to 50 hps. Purple worms are probably a good measuring stick because you generally have a 100% chance of hitting them when you reach sub-20 levels; assuming you have good strength and are at a high experiene level. Anyone else found similar behavior? What about lower levels, anyone have much experience in the 40-50's range?
emrath (01/28/83)
#R:unc:-455600:uiucdcs:9500118:000:866 uiucdcs!emrath Jan 27 23:09:00 1983 We had a weird occurrence here a while back. A guy went into the game and the initial display came up garbled. Upon replotting, we found that ALL monsters were permanently asleep. You could walk over, zap them with haste or do anything and then beat them up. Stuff & gold was generated normally, you never had to eat, but hp didn't regenerate. Traps still affected you (arrows & darts), so those potions were important. Needless to say, we did some experimenting. By the time he got to level 48 or so, he had a +5,+5 2hander & strength of 23 or 24 (AC was irrelevant). By this time it was very clear that the number of hit points a monster starts with is related to the current level, for it took progressively more hits to kill the deeper he went. To kill a comatose D on level 47 or 48 it took some 15 to 20 hits with that sword. About this time it got boring....