Role Difficulty

Nethack Role Difficulty

Various ideas exist about determining the role difficulty in Nethack. The approach applied here results in the ranking depicted below. It is based on player data taken from nethack.alt.org at 2014-10-24, at that time running Nethack release 3.4.3.

The sample set is taken from players with at least 13 ascensions and an ascension ratio of at least 2%, and whose games have a random distribution of played classes with a standard deviation of at most 0.20 (i.e. excluding players who focus on few roles only). The players are grouped in four classes w.r.t. ascension ratio (A: 50-100%, B: 25-50%, C: 10-25%, and D: 2-10%), and in four classes w.r.t. randomness of played classes (<0.10, <0.12, <0.16, and <0.20, biased towards the more random distributed games).

I've grouped the rank results by the ascension class A-D (see above), and built an overall ranking from those. (An unbiased result for all players, the wiki data, and my own ranking can be found for comparison in the last three columns.) The overall result's coloring spans from the easy (green) to the hard (red) roles, and these colors have been used in the other columns to illustrate the specific differences.

Rank	Overall	A	B	C	D	Unb.	Wiki	Own
1.	Val	Sam	Val	Bar	Val	Cav	Val	Val
2.	Bar	Val	Cav	Val	Sam	Kni	Bar	Bar
3.	Sam	Bar	Bar	Sam	Bar	Sam	Sam	Sam
4.	Cav	Ran	Ran	Kni	Kni	Bar	Arc	Ran
5.	Kni	Cav	Sam	Hea	Cav	Hea	Cav	Mon
6.	Ran	Wiz	Hea	Pri	Tou	Ran	Mon	Wiz
7.	Hea	Mon	Kni	Cav	Mon	Tou	Ran	Cav
8.	Mon	Hea	Mon	/Mon	Hea	Rog	Kni	Kni
9.	Pri	Kni	Rog	\Tou	Ran	Arc	Hea	Pri
10.	Tou	/Pri	Arc	Ran	Pri	Val	Pri	Rog
11.	Rog	\Rog	Pri	Rog	Rog	Pri	Wiz	Hea
12.	Wiz	/Tou	Tou	Wiz	Wiz	Mon	Rog	Tou
13.	Arc	\Arc	Wiz	Arc	Arc	Wiz	Tou	Arc

Note: braces around pairs of entries denote equal metric values of those entries.