Changes in 0.5.2 Races: - The Beornings player race has been added. Beorning are similar to humans in their normal form, but can shapeshift into bears whenever needed (use the ']' command). - Bear form gives bonuses to combat, AC, STR, and CON, and penalties to magic devices, bows/throws, and mana. - The bonuses in bear form start out fairly moderate, but grow with player level. - Beornings make great Rangers, Warriors and Priests and are generally good in all classes except Mage and Necromancer. Monsters: - Multi-hued monsters now only switch between the colors of their breath weapons, if applicable. - The WOUND spell is greatly toned down at high levels, but unchanged at low and mid levels. - Some ranged attacks will close on the player more readily. Set Items: - Item sets have been added. These combinations of artifacts gain powers (flags and pval) when all weilded together. You will be notified when a set item is identified. Thanks to Gail Shaw for her work on this. - The current item sets are: "Elven Gifts", "Shadow Ward", "Flame of Wrath", "Eorl's Arms", and "Gil-Galad's Battle Gear". All consist of two items, and some are fairly low-level. Have fun discovering these! - Expect future versions to include more sets, some with more items. An info file will definitely be added in the future. Item Selection: - When selecting items, and there are valid items on the floor, typing '.' will select the first valid item from the floor. This is regardless of whether the floor list is currently being viewed. Combat System: - There has been a general revision of the Combat system by Leon Marrick. The version in this release has some differences from that in the standard Angband patch. Generally, while big heavy weapons are still best for those who can handle them, lighter ones are more competitive under the new system. Slays and brands are even more important than before, especially for smaller weapons. - Critical hits now add damage dice (usually 2 in melee and 1 ranged). This makes lighter weapons more better, as they benefit more. - Brands and Slays now add damage as well as multiplying it. This means that brands are sometimes more important than base damage dice, especially for lighter weapons. - 5 and 6 attacks are now possible but only for fairly extreme combinations of strength, dexterity and weapon weight. - The attacks/round calculation is more generous, but not so generous as that in the standard Angband patch this update is based on. Dexterity has been made more important at the high end of the scale, but little changed on the lower end. - Several weapons were tweaked to better fit the new combat system. Archery - It is now possible to have fractional shots per round (1.2, 3.6, etc). - Number of shots per round still depends on class and weapon, but longer depends on level. Instead it depends on dexterity. Even first level characters may get some exta shots, but only very high DEX characters will get their maximum allotment. - Class/weapon combos that could get extra shots at high levels can gain the same number of shots with enough dexerity. In addition, all characters can get up to 0.5 extra shots per round with all ranged weapons. - Archery is otherwise subject to the new combat system above. Monster Movement - A new monster movement system has been implemented (LM), using smarter tracking and removing some ways in which the monsters could 'cheat'. - Because of the speed of the new movement AI, all flow related options have been removed. All AI/flow related compile flags (except MONSTER_FLOW) are removed. - Monsters flee more intellegently, flow better over unusual terrain, and push each other in a more robust way. Circular detects: - A status display at the bottom of the screen shows the word 'DTrap' in yellow if you have detected traps and not moved out of the detect radius. - Items of trap detection identify easily. - The disturb_trap_detect option will cause a message when leaving the region of your last trap detection. Classes: - Assassin have gained both melee and missile skill. A high level Assassin with a light enough weapon now has the accuracy of a Warrior. - The Rogue's monster trap is modified. It is nearly unchanged at low levels. At high levels, it does more damage at first, but is less effective at finishing mosnters. - Added some damage to a high level Necromancer spell. Bug fixes: - Many. Most notably the ammo auto-pickup/encumberance bug.