Daemongar, you are talking about BT1, right?
In BT3 things seem to work a bit differently.
Items that cast spells have their charges listed. The amount of charges they start with seem to be totally random.
Ok, thanks. I remember that from BT3 now, but in BT1 & 2, the charges weren't listed so my assumption was that they had a hidden random value of charges the player couldn't see. What I would do is "dupe" Fire Horns because they were still useful at later stages. BT1 wasn't a huge victim of HP bloat, just like earlier D&D.
THACO0 does not seem to be tied to AC anymore. One annoying thing is that characters with multiple attacks either hit or miss with all their attacks.
Suppose that speeds up combat but has to be frustrating. The only good thing is that eventually most folks will have the option to equip weapons that either kill or don't, or provide other bonuses.
The godly Fire Horn has been rendered impotent, and the few times the monsters don't repell its attack it only deals a few points of damage. Would be interesting to know why, as spells usually work fine. The Bard is starting to get rather useless. Duo-Time was a life saver early in the game, but now I mostly use the Bard to play Sir Robin's Tune in combat to prevent monsters from summoning help.
That kind of boggled me too. My entire strategy for BT1 was run from any combat where the Fire Horn wouldn't get me lots of xps. In BT3, enemies save way too often (but I think even in Unterbrae, they have Frost Horns already, so I think if you fight around in there, you'll eventually have one or two.
Think the Bard has some ok weapons coming up, but for me, the bard was pretty much there to buff AC early in the game, and provide HP regen in combat later in the game. Since the bard can carry around wineskins in BT3, I would always have the AC buff on and use that every round in combat when my AC's aren't maxed. In later game, I would use the HP regen song every combat round, as the effects stack.
I think that very late in the game, he gets some songs that actually do damage so he doesn't suck *as* bad, but he holds his own compared to something like Warriors. They can do lots of damage, but it only affects one opponent. A lot of the creatures in BT3 need crits to kill (well, have 9999 hps each.)