Talk:Wrath of Trog

Some thoughts on this weapon

This is an interesting weapon, since it's basically unchanged from its 1.1 form. What's particularly notable is the fact that when it was introduced, it *was* a powerful weapon, or so is the impression I get from playing 2.3. Why? Several things:

• Monsters used to do a lot less damage. Thus, the huge delay on this was less of an issue, since being vulnerable for 1.5 turns wasn't likely to get you killed.
• Berserk has been heavily nerfed, and not just by reducing the Haste bonus from 2x to 1.5x (which was, by the way, done after the original Haste nerf). It used to last a lot longer, and moreover be much more predictable: berserk did not originally depend on killing monsters, but seems to have just had a set duration. This would virtually always be long enough to kill anything in your path, so even with the nastier slowing it was rarely a problem, especially when combined with the fact that monsters would rarely be able to do enough damage to kill you in that time anyway.
• Comparatively, this was a *good* weapon. Battleaxes seemed to be very rare in the 2.3 games I've played (I'm not positive I ever found one, and none of the artefacts from that time originally had a brand, though some have since had one added), and brands also seem very rare or nonexistent. Items themselves were considerably rarer (for one thing, I never ran across any obvious treasure vaults), so if you found this, it was probably about the best weapon you could get. Exec axes didn't exist in 1.1 (not in the source code), and I'm not sure if they existed in 2.3 - they did in 2.7, but that version had a LOT of additions.
• With the lack of existence of Trog, this was actually valuable as a source of berserk for non-berserker, non-high-level fighter characters. The spell either didn't exist or was rare, and amulets of rage were rarer than they are now, since there were fewer items.
• Axes were one of the few good types of weapons back then. M&F were shitty: A mace did 7 damage, and even an eveningstar did a paltry 12 damage. Great maces did not exist. Polearms were much worse. On the other hand, battle axes did the same 17 damage they do as of 0.11. Long blades and axes seem to have been the only really good weapons.

So the point is, Crawl has had a very definite power spiral as compared to its early days. Partly this weapon has been nerfed indirectly, but a good deal of it is that monsters and players have tended to do more damage overall in subsequent versions. It might be interesting to write a script to compare average melee damage/spell damage of winning characters versus version. Such information is technically extractable from dumplogs, though I imagine for spells that might be quite difficult, since you'd have to deal with calculating spell power. I bet that the increase has continued even in more recent versions, but I could be wrong. -Ion frigate 03:31, 3 March 2013 (CET)