Difference between revisions of "Talk:Dust Devil"

Latest revision as of 21:33, 19 June 2021

Dust devils have changed now
- they should have better fighting skills now (i have not tested how much better)
- the limit of 2 devils was removed, and is probably determined by a skill (i can summon 2 easily, 3 if i'm lucky)
Someone suggested that it might be fa.ri.sp, but i cant be sure of that
(The above comment added by Nauia at 08:26 on 26th Feb 2010 -- Please remember to sign your discussion page comments with four tildes: ~~~~)

I can easily get three dusties (or a creeping doom and a dustie) with my stock bonuses, but am unable to get four even with OC wis bonus, a flat cap, and the high altar. Those stat increases took my mi.ar from 396 to 430, but I forgot to check other skills (fa.ri.sp is at a bonus of 402 most of the time). Not sure if this will be remotely helpful, but it might aid someone in figuring out which skill is used, or at what bonus levels the limit is increased... -- Mishal (talk) (MUD finger) 11:06, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

If anyone's interested in doing research on their fighting skills, maybe Holy Insight would be useful (just a shame it's not more granular)... anyone who doesn't have it can give me (Ilde or Roywyn) a poke; I've got at least one alt with the ritual and I'd be happy to use it on people's dusties. Maybe we could put together a table of dusty fighting skills vs. priests' skills. --Ilde 20:08, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Holy Insight results

Results of performing Holy Insight on different dust devils:

The devils tested were also all "extremely poor at staying unnoticed", "average at noticing things", and had "average" scores in all stats except str, which didn't come up. Magic and religious matters also didn't come up. #1 is actually two different devils, made by the same person and with no differences between them. #2 is actually three devils, again made by the same person and showing no differences between them. --Ilde 01:46, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Again, #3 was two different devils by the same character. They were extremely poor at religious matters and staying unnoticed, with average int, con, wis, dex. Ditto for #4, which was of average strength, as well. So, so far it looks like fighting skills and hitpoints increase with skills (or just with size?), but not anything else. (#5 was also two whirlwinds with identical conditions.) --Ilde 04:37, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

ETA: The huge and gigantic dusties being "reasonably good" (250-300 bonus, apparently) at combat, while the larger colossal and enormous ones were only "quite good" (200-250 bonus) isn't a mistake, although it makes me wonder whether "reasonably good" and "quite good" are labeled correctly on the Holy Insight page. Unless dusties actually get worse at fighting as they get bigger, which seems implausible. Yep, they were switched on Holy Insight. Mystery solved! --Ilde 05:21, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Interesting comparisons

• 175/148/276/near sacred waters versus 186/148/276/near sacred waters: hp goes from "better than average" to "reasonably good", showing that of.area affects hp. Also shows that devils of the same size are not all the same, as both devils were gigantic.
• 177/53/224/high altar, increasing mi.area to 277 while keeping of.area steady: size increases and hp eventually goes from "better than average" to "reasonably good", showing that mi.area affects size and hp.
• 236/123/276/high altar versus 177/53/277/high altar: higher of.area (and slightly lower misc.area) results in a "colossal" devil instead of a "gigantic" one, showing that of.area affects size.

Research: Number of devils

I've heard that de.ar affects how many devils you can summon, and I've also heard that ri.sp might affect it. So, let's see if there's any correlation.

Format: number of times can summon at least specified number of devils/number of attempts to summon that number of devils.

Modifiers of course means visible modifiers besides controlling dust devils, which is implied. Going outside of AM and journeying once along the road stops you from being either visibly near or far from holy ground. Passage rooms also work for Hat, Gapp, Gufnork, and Sek, although for Fish, Sandelfon, and Pishe they result in having the unique bonuses (in water, indoors, rain).

How they're counted:

• If one devil is summoned, then dismissed (or times out), it's counted as a success for 1 devil and ignored for higher numbers (as there was no attempt to control more than one).
• If one devil is summoned and attempting to summon another results in it slipping away, it's counted as a success for 1 devil, and a failure for all higher numbers.
• Failing to summon a devil while not controlling any devils counts as a failure for all numbers.

Conclusion

Of.area determines how many dust devils you can have. Sorting by of.area shows that the highest bonus allows summoning three devils 9 of 15 times, the next highest allows summoning a third devil occasionally, the next two highest allow summoning a second devil 10 of 15 times (but never/rarely a third), and the lowest three bonuses never allow summoning a second devil (and result in a certain amount of failure to summon a devil even when not controlling any already). The only oddity is that the second-highest bonus results in complete failure (no devils at all) twice--however, this isn't very surprising, since the bonus is still quite close to the next two lowest, and the misc.area bonus was significantly lower.

Misc.area, def.area, and ri.sp do not appear to have any effect on the number of devils that may be summoned... sorting by any of these results in dramatic jumps in the "2 devils" column.

--Ilde 02:45, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Further research overturns previous conclusion

After doing further, more extensive and rigorous, research on dust devil numbers, both skills DO affect the number of dust devils you can summon. They seem to affect it equally. I did a detailed writeup in Edition 226 of the AM Daily.

Basically, I took characters with different skills, found a spot where I had no ritual modifiers, and performed Dust Devil over and over again until the strain overcame me and all of my devils dissipated.

Once I looked at it in terms of which stage the ritual was failing at, it became clear.

Here's a table of the trials I did, and how many times I succeeded at each stage while controlling various numbers of dust devils.

So, for example, with Set A, I made 25 attempts at summoning as many dust devils as I could. While controlling one devil, I succeeded at the first stage 24/25 times--meaning 24 attempts at the second stage (failing during the first stage means the ritual stops there, and you don't attempt the second stage). Of those 24 attempts, I succeeded at 23, meaning I summoned a second dust devil 23 times. While controlling two dust devils, I succeeded at the fist stage 22 of 23 times, and the second stage 16 of 22 times. While controlling three devils, I always failed at the first stage in that set. Or to put it another way: in set A, out of 25 attempts:

• Twice, I summoned exactly one dust devil, failing in the attempt to summon a second.
• Seven times, I summoned exactly two dust devils, failing in the attempt to summon a third.
• Sixteen times, I was able to summon three dust devils. I was never able to summon a fourth.

Failing to summon another dust devil always caused existing devils to dissipate.

Here's another table, showing the distributions of maximum numbers of devils:

The 0 column indicates the number of times in that set that I failed to summon even the first dust devil. For sets A through D, I hadn't started tracking this.

Ilde (talk) 06:49, 19 June 2021 (BST)

Priest's skills and devil abilities

Objective: Find out if and how the three different area skills affect devils' combat abilities (how often they hit and how much damage they do, and how well they dodge).

Method: Have devils created with low bonuses in all three skills fight someone (in the ctf arena) for about an hour total, healing the player and the devils whenever they're injured. Advance one skill, repeat. Advance another skill, repeat. Advance final skill, repeat. Go through the logs (with a script) and count up the hits and misses for both, keeping track of the damage that devils' hits did (where possible).

Sets:

• Set #1: Devils created with a 180 or 182 bonus in of.ar, 80 de.ar, and 215 mi.ar.
• Set #2: Mi.ar increased: Devils created with a 180 or 182 bonus in of.ar, 80 de.ar, and 302 mi.ar.
• Set #3: Of.ar increased: Devils created with a 276 bonus in of.ar, 80 de.ar, and 302 mi.ar.
• Set #4: De.ar increased: Devils created with a 276 bonus in of.ar, 239 de.ar, and 302 mi.ar.

Sets #2, #3, and #4 were actually done in two sessions, and set #2 actually had two characters creating the devils (I wanted to go back and do more, but had already advanced, so made another character, gave her the same stats, and advanced her skills to the same levels). Also, there was an of.ar tm during set #1, which carried over to part of set #2. This probably doesn't matter, though. We took the following steps to try to eliminate sources of error:

• The person fighting the devils kept the same tactics and used the same weapon throughout, as well as wearing the same equipment (to keep burden constant).
• We only did this during the day, to avoid penalties due to darkness.
• He only fought the devils themselves, not me.
• He didn't use any armour, so that we could get the damage for the devil's hits.

A possible source of error that we couldn't eliminate entirely was the varying degrees of injury that he and the devils had throughout. While I tried not to let either of them get too injured, this wasn't entirely successful, and I ended up dismissing the devil and waiting for gp to heal him and make a new devil fairly frequently. However, degree of injury didn't seem to make much difference in whether he hit or was hit by the devils.

Also, sometimes I got frost, mud, etc. dust devils along with the usual dust ones, because of the weather. These didn't seem any different, though.

Summary table

Percentages are rounded to the nearest percent here, and mean damage is rounded to the nearest hitpoint.

A hit was "resolvable" if it was between two monitors, and no other hits or healing were between the same two monitors. If the devil hit twice in a row without a monitor between the hits, it was obviously impossible to tell how much damage either one did, and if I finished healing him before the next monitor kicked in (a major culprit of unresolvable hits), it was likewise impossible to tell.

• In other words, minus a few outliers.

Conclusions

Increasing of.area appears to increase the amount of damage they deal, and help them hit more often.

Increasing misc.area appears to increase the amount of damage they deal, and help them hit more often.

Increasing de.area appears to have no effect, or else a very small one.

Hit types and damages

These are from all of the sets combined, and may be of some interest if you want to know approximately how much damage a dust devil's hits are probably doing. Since the messages may indicate percentages and not numbers of hitpoints, both exact damage and percentage damage is included.

Of course, these are only for the skill ranges specified above, so they don't include any higher-level damage messages that may exist, and likely have a lower maximum than is possible. They also don't include the different-looking attacks that some types of devils have.

More

Anyone who's curious can find the lists of actions and starting hitpoints here:

• Dust devil research set 1
• Dust devil research set 2
• Dust devil research set 3
• Dust devil research set 4

And here's a list of just the dust devils' resolvable attacks from all sets, with damage:

• Dust devil attacks and damage

Observation on different forms

I suspect that for each deity, the same set of deity-specific devils is used at the low altars, high altars, passage rooms and elsewhere in the deity's temple. It might be better to mark these as '<deity> holy rooms' rather than having separate annotations for high altar, low altar, passage room etc. --Zexium 19:45, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

I think there are a few that you can get in passage rooms, but not temples. Ermmmmm... egrets and egresses in Sandelfon's passage room, balloons, streamers, and some other party stuff in Hat's passage room (aside from party hats and spilled drinks, which show up in the temple too), tiny purple flowers and tiny salamanders in Pishe's, just off the top of my head. Not sure if you can get towels in Pishe's passage room, either. Haven't seen anything to suggest to me that it matters where in a temple you are, though (although of course for all I know there could be exceptions), and there's definitely a lot of overlap between temple devils and passage room devils, so it might be sensible to have the overlapping ones as '<deity> holy rooms'. --Ilde 18:09, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

I get the impression that any form that appears in a temple may appear in a passage room, and also each passage room has some extras. It certainly doesn't seem to matter where in the temple. --Zexium 22:09, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

I wonder if for gapp it might be better to show eg "(various) lace" instead of deadly / flamboyant / ripped etc lace, especially as they all count as "lace" for the achievement, also "(various) <animal>" for hat, rather than listing every combination of adjective and material / animal - it seems to me as if there's a "pick a random adjective from list a and a random animal / material from list b" for these two temples. --Zexium 22:09, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

That makes sense to me. Listing all possible combinations separately is a bit... cluttered. --Ilde 22:56, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Started adding in Ephebian forms as and where I find them. Might take a while to narrow down which are generic and which are room/area specific --celem Mar '14

Noted today that Council Buildings share a common set of forms regardless of city. Warrior's Guilds appear to follow the same pattern Celem (talk) 00:47, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

In general, certain categories share forms regardless of location. For example, warrior's guilds seem to give similar devils wherever they're located, and same for banks. Temples for a particular god appear to give similar devils at each of their locations. In general, the forms listed for Bois can also be found in Genua. And so on.