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.





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