DCSS help me with casters
jamp...@gmail.com
about something a bit different.
i hear a lot for melee characters the importance of turning off
primary weapon to let fighting/armor rise. and beyond that skill
control seems much easier on a melee character.
im wondering if anyone has some useful guidelines about building a
caster. i know diluting skills is bad but im not sure what a standard
approach is. Do i turn off primary spell school once it gets to 4-5?
do i turn it back on later? how many secondary schools can you
usually pick up, and when? do i need to have dodging off or on?
any clues about your personal style concerning this (im sure theres
several approaches) with which youve seen some success would be
appreciated.
thanks!
David Ploog
> i hear a lot for melee characters the importance of turning off
> primary weapon to let fighting/armor rise. and beyond that skill
> control seems much easier on a melee character.
Of course. The reason is that a pure melee character has only a small
number of skills to build. There is Fighting, the weapon skill and eithe
Armour or Dodging/Stealth (usually the former). This means that it is not
difficult to also train something like Throwing or Invocations alongside.
> im wondering if anyone has some useful guidelines about building a
> caster. i know diluting skills is bad but im not sure what a standard
> approach is.
"Dilution is bad" is too narrow a description. What is true: early
dilution can put you in a dead end because you'll be unable to kill
monsters that the game throws at you. However, late fixation on too narrow
a skill set (Specialisation) can lead to being unable to deal with
particular threats.
> Do i turn off primary spell school once it gets to 4-5?
I would merely suggest to never switch off Spellcasting. Whether you want
to build to Spellcasting alone depends on various factor, for example
specific aptitudes. If going Venom Mage, it is generally a good idea to
switch off Poison soon.
> do i need to have dodging off or on?
I think that both Dodging and Stealth are essential. (The latter allows
you to avoid fights.) Im the long run, you should probably train both. In
the early game, however, it might be necessary to develop firepower (i.e.
focus on your main magic skill(s) first).
Hope this helps,
David
Mark Mackey
<jamp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>im wondering if anyone has some useful guidelines about building a
>caster. i know diluting skills is bad but im not sure what a standard
>approach is. Do i turn off primary spell school once it gets to 4-5?
>do i turn it back on later? how many secondary schools can you
>usually pick up, and when? do i need to have dodging off or on?
For offensive spellcasters (elemental mages, conjurers and the like),
the key to survival is Hurting Monsters Lots. This means having the
right spells, and casting those spells with lots of power. As a result,
(a) Spellcasting is Good (more spells)
(b) Conjurations are Good (more power to the main offensive spells)
(c) your main supplementary spell skill (Ice/Fire/Air/Earth etc) is Good
(more power to your most-used spells).
You can run most casters quite successfully without ever turning any of
these off. Exceptions are:
- Poison Magic becomes less useful in the end game, so venom mages tend
to turn into conjurers. As a result, turning Poison Magic off to dump
xp into Conjurations is usually wise.
- Elementalist need to decide how much they want to specialise. You can
usually either have access to high-level conjuration spells outside
your school, or to the high-level non-conjuration elemental spells of
your school, but it's a long slog to get both. So, as a fire
elementalist, do you want Crystal Spear or Ring of Flames early? Choose
by focussing xp more into Conjurations or Fire Magic respectively.
I generally turn off the extraneous spell schools once the spells they
enable that I want are sufficiently consistent. For example:
- If you use Blink, then let Translocations increase until Blink is at
Excellent, but unless you're going to really focus on Translocations
with an eye to Controlled Blink there's little point dumping more xp
into it.
- let Divinations increase until Detect Creatures is useful, and
possibly for a couple more levels until Magic Mapping is useful.
There's no point to raising it higher than that.
- turn Enchantments off early on unless you're going to focus on it or
unless there's a high-level dual-school spell that you're aiming
towards (like Ring of Flames). The pure Enchantment spells are
great if you have *lots* of skill, but fairly useless if you only
have a small amount. You rapidly hit the point where the only critters
that you can Confuse successfully are those that aren't a threat
anyway :(.
On the subject of non-spell skills, Dodging is very useful. So is
Stealth, but more for some than others: if you're an air elementalist
hurling lightning bolts all over the place then Stealth isn't going to
be that much use. Otherwise, Fighting is always useful for the hp
(beat up some weak critters or plants), and a few levels of Traps and
Doors never hurt anyone. Most spellcasters shouldn't bother with
Throwing and Darts and the like.
Hope this helps. Others, of course, will have completely different
viewpoints :).
--
Mark Mackey
The Association for the Advancement of Dungeon Crawling
Hints, tips and spoilers
http://www.swallowtail.org/crawl/
David Ploog
> I generally turn off the extraneous spell schools once the spells they
> enable that I want are sufficiently consistent. For example:
>
> - If you use Blink, then let Translocations increase until Blink is at
> Excellent, but unless you're going to really focus on Translocations
> with an eye to Controlled Blink there's little point dumping more xp
> into it.
>
> - let Divinations increase until Detect Creatures is useful, and
> possibly for a couple more levels until Magic Mapping is useful.
> There's no point to raising it higher than that.
>
> - turn Enchantments off early on unless you're going to focus on it or
> unless there's a high-level dual-school spell that you're aiming
> towards (like Ring of Flames).
All of these are valid and I am concerned this is some flaw in design.
Less so for Translocations, but definitely for Divinations: as you say,
there is no reason training it up, and the mana costs are meaningless
(since the spells are never cast in battle, unlike Translocations). I
guess that Enchantments are overpowered but that is a different issue.
> Mark Mackey
> The Association for the Advancement of Dungeon Crawling
> Hints, tips and spoilers
> http://www.swallowtail.org/crawl/
Since you've been around forever (longer than almost all developers of
DCSS, I think :) I always wanted to ask you if could warn us if something
gets lost in the current designs. Would you? The game is under heavy
transformation and we may easily miss some finer points...
David
Jed Davis
> - let Divinations increase until Detect Creatures is useful, and
> possibly for a couple more levels until Magic Mapping is useful.
> There's no point to raising it higher than that.
There is Forescry, but there may also be better uses for those skill
points.
--
(let ((C call-with-current-continuation)) (apply (lambda (x y) (x y)) (map
((lambda (r) ((C C) (lambda (s) (r (lambda l (apply (s s) l)))))) (lambda
(f) (lambda (l) (if (null? l) C (lambda (k) (display (car l)) ((f (cdr l))
(C k))))))) '((#\J #\d #\D #\v #\s) (#\e #\space #\a #\i #\newline)))))
David Ploog
> Mark Mackey <ma...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
>
>> - let Divinations increase until Detect Creatures is useful, and
>> possibly for a couple more levels until Magic Mapping is useful.
>> There's no point to raising it higher than that.
>
> There is Forescry, but there may also be better uses for those skill
> points.
There are a few spells that try to break the Divination school's chains.
But I think that one should either re-build Divinations from ground up or
even just trash the whole school. Yes, in my opinion simply removing it
would be an improvement. The reason is that spells work quite well in a
(typical) roguelike if they can be balanced in some way. For battle
spells, the balance comes from the MP cost: a conjurer with no Magic left
is an endangered conjurer.
Div spells are not affected by this balance: you will never cast Identify,
Magic Mapping, Detect Foo in the midst of battle. Thus they can (in
Crawl's setting) only be balanced using hunger cost and/or high level --
both of which are artificial. This simply leads to spells like Identify
being no-brainers (no-one uses them, except for convenience if you have
Selective Amnesia ready). Despite this, the Identify spell still causes
harm: it would be very nice if identifying a deck would give away the top
card, for example. This is impossible if a Identify spell exists.
Likewise, the Magic Mapping and Detect Traps spells are really cheap. The
former renders Magic Mapping scrolls useless, the latter the Traps & Door
skill.
Another indication that the Divination school is superfluous is that there
is no need to train it up.
Quintessence (hopefully interesting to other games as well, and the reason
why I write this): some useful effects are best not made accessible via
spells but via something that's consumable. Detect Foo scrolls, for
example, are just fine.
I am not sure but the incriminated spells may have been inherited from the
leading roleplaying game. Another reason to toss them out :)
David
Erwin M.
> Quintessence (hopefully interesting to other games as well, and the
> reason why I write this): some useful effects are best not made
> accessible via spells but via something that's consumable. Detect Foo
> scrolls, for example, are just fine.
> I am not sure but the incriminated spells may have been inherited from
> the leading roleplaying game. Another reason to toss them out :)
More likely they came from Angband, where detection spells of various
sorts are essential to survival. If you can't detect traps, you may fall
down a trap door, and lose your chance at looting the rest of your
current non-persistent map. If you can't detect monsters, you're risking
a horrible death from something you can't see (but which can see you).
Identify is a must because of the volume of items, especially given the
mechanics of item properties in that game.
Of course, Angband is a different breed of roguelike, one that demands
grinding -- without an appropriate combination of equipment and
attributes at any given time, you are very ill-advised to proceed beyond
a certain point. Crawl tries to (and succeeds pretty well) go the other
direction.
Even with that, there's been some pretty spirited discussion on
r.g.r.angband lately on getting rid of Identify, or at least *Identify*
(the version that reveals all ego powers and is amnesia-proof), and
substituting it with ways of discovering an item's properties through
use. Crawl is pretty good about that already. I'm not saying that ID
should be done away with as an item -- keep the ID scrolls for points in
the game where it's a really bad idea to be testing certain items by
using them, and for items that are really tough to ID-by-use (are there
any that absolutely *cannot* be ID'ed by use?) -- but there's no real
need for it to be a spell.
One possible solution: turn all Divination spells (not just Magic
Mapping) into evocations and find a way to incorporate them into some
item that isn't a rod. Of course, if we're just keeping these things as
consumable items anyhow, even that may not be necessary.
David Ploog
> David Ploog wrote:
>
>> Quintessence (hopefully interesting to other games as well, and the
>> reason why I write this): some useful effects are best not made
>> accessible via spells but via something that's consumable. Detect Foo
>> scrolls, for example, are just fine.
>> I am not sure but the incriminated spells may have been inherited from
>> the leading roleplaying game. Another reason to toss them out :)
>
> More likely they came from Angband, where detection spells of various
> sorts are essential to survival. If you can't detect traps, you may fall
> down a trap door, and lose your chance at looting the rest of your
> current non-persistent map. If you can't detect monsters, you're risking
> a horrible death from something you can't see (but which can see you).
> Identify is a must because of the volume of items, especially given the
> mechanics of item properties in that game.
Does not sound fun to me, to be honest.
> Even with that, there's been some pretty spirited discussion on
> r.g.r.angband lately on getting rid of Identify, or at least *Identify*
> (the version that reveals all ego powers and is amnesia-proof), and
> substituting it with ways of discovering an item's properties through
> use. Crawl is pretty good about that already. I'm not saying that ID
> should be done away with as an item
I didn't mean that: scrolls are generally fine, and the id scroll should
stay, by all means. (I indicated how I'd like to have it be stronger once
the id spell is gone.) Even very strong scroll effects are usually okay,
as it is a finite commodity, hence requires choices when/if to be used.
(Aside: I think that Nethack shows that you can break even scrolls:
genocide is way too strong in my opinion, and polypiling items means
infinite resources.)
> One possible solution: turn all Divination spells (not just Magic
> Mapping) into evocations and find a way to incorporate them into some
> item that isn't a rod. Of course, if we're just keeping these things as
> consumable items anyhow, even that may not be necessary.
Yes, for Crawl there are plans to redo the miscellaneous items. If you
have balls (say) which give Detect Foo but use up a charge each time,
everything is fine again. I think that for Detect Traps and Monsters this
may be more interesting than just have scrolls of these types: it is an
incentive to train a skill (Evocations) as higher skill would obviously
translate into better/more information gain.
David
jamp...@gmail.com
im starting to get a bit better at splashing spells in with dominantly
melee characters as well over the last few weeks. Just lost a
clevel22 vampire knight of lugonu, easily my most fun character to
date.
gunna try some more pure casting now that you all have given me some
good direction.
thanks a lot =) specially to those of you doing development, this game
is insanely good.
Mark Mackey
David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
>All of these are valid and I am concerned this is some flaw in design.
>Less so for Translocations, but definitely for Divinations: as you say,
>there is no reason training it up, and the mana costs are meaningless
>(since the spells are never cast in battle, unlike Translocations).
The mana costs as such are meaningless, but that isn't necessarily a
flaw with the current system. Divinations currently works reasonably
well as a side-path magic school. It isn't worth (generally) sinking
dozens of skill levels into. However, Magic Mapping is very useful, and
you do have to make a decision as to whether it's worth spending skill
levels on - they are skill points that definitely be of use elsewhere.
The 4 point mana cost is neither here nor there, and neither is the
failure chance (as you won't generally be casting it in time-critical
situations). However, the possible penalties from a miscast are
significant enough that if I want to have Magic Mapping then I need to
raise Divinations to a reasonable level. I think this is currently
nicely balanced.
I've never been that convinced by ForeScry, though (in comparison to
Deflect Missiles, for example), and I wouldn't object to the removal of
Identify.
I like the location fuzz that has been added to Detect Creatures, but I
would possibly suggest that it be made level 3 as it's rather more
useful than most of the other level 2 Divination spells. My spellcasting
characters would strongly disapprove of this change, of course :)
>I guess that Enchantments are overpowered but that is a different issue.
Enchantments are difficult to balance. You need powerful enchanters to
be able to affect end-game beasties, but at the same time you don't want
dabblers to be able to paralyse shadow dragons and thwack them to death
with impunity. Perhaps more could be done with altering the duration of
enchantment effects based on enchantment resistance, so that even a
dabbler might be able to confuse the dragon, but at best for a single
round, while a mighty Enchanter could keep it chasing its tail for days.
>Since you've been around forever (longer than almost all developers of
>DCSS, I think :) I always wanted to ask you if could warn us if something
>gets lost in the current designs. Would you? The game is under heavy
>transformation and we may easily miss some finer points...
In general I think the Stone Soup project has done wonders for the game.
It's kept its flavour, the UI is much improved, and the gameplay things
that you have changed have in general needed changing.
On a slight side note, I find it interesting that UI changes affect
gameplay so much. One example is inter-level travel and stashing. Back
in the bad old days, trekking all the way back to Lair:1 was a pain, so
you tended to carry more on you, and then set up secondary stashes on
Vault:1 or the Vestibule or wherever and take the risk of it all being
eaten by an itinerant jelly. Nowadays there's very little penalty to
just scurrying back to the Temple or Lair:1 whenever you feel that
you're carrying a potion of heal wounds more than is strictly necessary.
This perhaps isn't a bad thing, but I'm not sure I would have predicted
ahead of time that the solution to amulets of conservation being
overpowered could be found in a UI enhancement :).
--
Mark Mackey
>being no-brainers (no-one uses them, except for convenience if you have
>Selective Amnesia ready). Despite this, the Identify spell still causes
>harm: it would be very nice if identifying a deck would give away the top
>card, for example. This is impossible if a Identify spell exists.
There is, of course, no reason why a scroll of identify and the spell
have to do the same thing (in fact, they don't currently: I don't think
that the spell can identify multiple items, but the scroll can). If the
scrolls did have additional powers, then that would actually argue in
favour of keeping the identify spell: you could use the spell to
identify most things and save the scrolls for the stuff where deeper
knowledge would really help.
>Likewise, the Magic Mapping and Detect Traps spells are really cheap. The
>former renders Magic Mapping scrolls useless, the latter the Traps & Doors
>skill.
Magic Mapping isn't that cheap for anyone except Earth Elementalists.
You have two schools to train up. In addition, the scrolls have a much
wider radius, which means that for more urgent situations (such as
finding that *$&Ā@Ā#$ bazaar portal before it disappears) a scroll is
definitely the desired choice.
>Another indication that the Divination school is superfluous is that there
>is no need to train it up.
You do to some extent, so there is a tradeoff of points in Divinations
vs points elsewhere. You're right in that there's no real reason
currently to train it beyond level 10 or so, but there's also no real
reason to train Traps and Doors beyond level 10 either.
One idea: what about a high-level Divinations spell which expands LOS?
Jukka Kuusisto
>On a slight side note, I find it interesting that UI changes affect
>gameplay so much. One example is inter-level travel and stashing. Back
>in the bad old days, trekking all the way back to Lair:1 was a pain, so
>you tended to carry more on you, and then set up secondary stashes on
>Vault:1 or the Vestibule or wherever and take the risk of it all being
>eaten by an itinerant jelly. Nowadays there's very little penalty to
>just scurrying back to the Temple or Lair:1 whenever you feel that
>you're carrying a potion of heal wounds more than is strictly necessary.
Well, I stille leave stashes on whichever level I happen to be on when
I feel like I'm carrying too much stuff. All stashes are left after
clearing the current level and next to the downstairs I'm going to
use. If I need to make a stash before clearing the current level, I
take the nearest upstairs and leave a stash next to the downstairs and
come back down.
I've never had a jelly eat my stash while revisiting a stash level.
Maybe I will change my habits when that happens for the first time :)
-Jukka
--
Jukka Kuusisto
David Ploog
> David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>>
>> All of these are valid and I am concerned this is some flaw in design.
>> Less so for Translocations, but definitely for Divinations: as you say,
>> there is no reason training it up, and the mana costs are meaningless
>> (since the spells are never cast in battle, unlike Translocations).
>
> The mana costs as such are meaningless, but that isn't necessarily a
> flaw with the current system. Divinations currently works reasonably
> well as a side-path magic school. It isn't worth (generally) sinking
> dozens of skill levels into. However, Magic Mapping is very useful, and
> you do have to make a decision as to whether it's worth spending skill
> levels on - they are skill points that definitely be of use elsewhere.
This is true, but picking up a little Divinations is no big deal for a
caster.
Enchantments is another school every caster would like to have, but here
things are better balanced (not ideal either, of course): the school
demands heavier investment, the spells are used in battle (when the Magic
cost hurts) and there is the glow.
Here are my issues with the various Div spells in a nutshell.
Magic Mapping
Very useful, to the point that casting it on any new level is ideal.
Considered overpowered as it gives away all the secrets of a level. (The
same holds for the scroll, and there are plans to change that.)
Makes the scroll superfluous.
When removing the school, I would like to add other means of mapping, see
below.
Detect Traps
Again very useful. Nullifies the T&D skill (minus the door part, which can
be blessing -- the latter will be fixed in any case).
Detect Creatures
Was hopelessly overpowered until the fuzziness was added and the caster
nerf got added. (I like the former a lot, the latter seems a bit
superficial to me.)
Is trivial to learn and cast (for any caster, that is).
In short, I think that these effects are bad if they can be spammed
without a cost (which is currently the case, the only potential cost being
raising Div slightly so you can cast MM well enough). Since these effects
are more of a once-per-level nature and almost never used in battle, they
should belong to consumables rather than spells.
I propose to add scrolls for detecting monsters and perhaps secrets. I
would like to have miscellaneous items that come with charges (so are
limited) and give some of the spell effects. Thus, Evocations would take
the place of Diviniations, which seems good to me for various reasons.
Also, misc items like Rod of Divination and Ball of Seeing really fit.
> I've never been that convinced by ForeScry, though (in comparison to
> Deflect Missiles, for example), and I wouldn't object to the removal of
> Identify.
I agree on Forescry but it's a spell that has some right to exist, in my
opinion :)
> I like the location fuzz that has been added to Detect Creatures, but I
> would possibly suggest that it be made level 3 as it's rather more
> useful than most of the other level 2 Divination spells. My spellcasting
> characters would strongly disapprove of this change, of course :)
Never talk about design with your player hat on! :)
I never understood why Detect Items has such a high level, by the way.
>> I guess that Enchantments are overpowered but that is a different issue.
>
> Enchantments are difficult to balance. You need powerful enchanters to
> be able to affect end-game beasties, but at the same time you don't want
> dabblers to be able to paralyse shadow dragons and thwack them to death
> with impunity.
The paralyse spell is removed (the wand is still there) and got replaced
by Petrify. One of the reasons was that you couldn't stab paralysed
monsters (for balance reasons) which was pretty perplexing. Now you can,
but the spell is gone :)
> Perhaps more could be done with altering the duration of enchantment
> effects based on enchantment resistance, so that even a dabbler might be
> able to confuse the dragon, but at best for a single round, while a
> mighty Enchanter could keep it chasing its tail for days.
This is an interesting idea. I've proposed to decouple the effect of
schools on some spells. E.g. for Repel/Deflect Missiles, your Air skill
would determine the strength of the protection, while Enchantments would
determine the duration. (Of course, Air 0 would not mean no protection;
neither would Ench 0 mean zero turns.)
> On a slight side note, I find it interesting that UI changes affect
> gameplay so much.
Yes, I noted the same. Didn't expect it really, but now we're trying to
think about it in advance. For example, the foo forms are not optimal. But
before changing any of them, transformations got an interface boost (worn
armour is melded during the transformation and immediately re-wears when
the transformation ends). This makes them much better, obviously, and also
painless to play. Any individual changes to form spells should come after
that.
Another example is that zombies don't use stairs anymore. This is a nerf
to Yrdelemnul (who got boosted in other ways) and some Nec spells, but it
makes for much smoother play and adds nice tactical choices when entering
new levels.
> One example is inter-level travel and stashing. Back in the bad old
> days, trekking all the way back to Lair:1 was a pain, so you tended to
> carry more on you, and then set up secondary stashes on Vault:1 or the
> Vestibule or wherever and take the risk of it all being eaten by an
> itinerant jelly. Nowadays there's very little penalty to just scurrying
> back to the Temple or Lair:1 whenever you feel that you're carrying a
> potion of heal wounds more than is strictly necessary. This perhaps
> isn't a bad thing, but I'm not sure I would have predicted ahead of time
> that the solution to amulets of conservation being overpowered could be
> found in a UI enhancement :).
This is an interesting assessment. When I got into Crawl, I felt that
"Conv was considered on par with "Mut. Generally, "Gourmand and "Slow were
considered overpowered. The former has been nerfed, the latter is still
overpowered for berserkers.
The addition of stash tracking has lead to a different solution than just
travelling back and forth all the time (which I do, too): some players
simply drop good, but unneeded scrolls (EW, acquirement) right where they
are. This is much more clever than it sounds at first, and was not
possible before.
David
David Ploog
> David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>> This simply leads to spells like Identify
>> being no-brainers (no-one uses them, except for convenience if you have
>> Selective Amnesia ready). Despite this, the Identify spell still causes
>> harm: it would be very nice if identifying a deck would give away the top
>> card, for example. This is impossible if a Identify spell exists.
>
> There is, of course, no reason why a scroll of identify and the spell
> have to do the same thing (in fact, they don't currently: I don't think
> that the spell can identify multiple items, but the scroll can). If the
> scrolls did have additional powers, then that would actually argue in
> favour of keeping the identify spell: you could use the spell to
> identify most things and save the scrolls for the stuff where deeper
> knowledge would really help.
As indicated in the other post, I'd like to have misc. item(s) that help
with identification. The number of uses would be limited, but if high Evo
got more uses, that would make lots of sense to me.
> Magic Mapping isn't that cheap for anyone except Earth Elementalists.
> You have two schools to train up. In addition, the scrolls have a much
> wider radius, which means that for more urgent situations (such as
> finding that *$&Ā@Ā#$ bazaar portal before it disappears) a scroll is
> definitely the desired choice.
This is true. By the way, I forgot to say that sense surroundings on
randarts is probably also a bad idea. We need randart properties that make
you consider using them based on local (tactical) grounds, not for global
(strategical) use, like mapping or levitation.
>> Another indication that the Divination school is superfluous is that there
>> is no need to train it up.
>
> You do to some extent, so there is a tradeoff of points in Divinations
> vs points elsewhere. You're right in that there's no real reason
> currently to train it beyond level 10 or so, but there's also no real
> reason to train Traps and Doors beyond level 10 either.
This is true, but there are plans to give incentive to train T&D beyond
that. (1. There is a cool idea by b0rsuk to plant traps from wands _only_.
2. T&D could give a passive sense monsters (traits) ability).
> One idea: what about a high-level Divinations spell which expands LOS?
This might be hard to balance. In 0.5, most spell ranges got cut down, so
it is not a glaring imbalance as expected. I would rather propose a spell
that reduces LOS (for everyone). On that matter, I have contemplated
whether some branch could be differentiated by shorter LOS (Crypt, for
example).
David
Martin Read
>In short, I think that these effects are bad if they can be spammed
>without a cost (which is currently the case, the only potential cost being
>raising Div slightly so you can cast MM well enough).
And if you're a conjurer, there's a good chance you want Earth Magic
anyway, which obviates the need to raise divinations to cast MM.
--
\_\/_/ turbulence is certainty turbulence is friction between you and me
\ / every time we try to impose order we create chaos
\/ -- Killing Joke, "Mathematics of Chaos"
universal.da...@gmail.com
David, I have heard you say this before (in the IRC channel), that the
Divinations school is flawed enough that it would be worth it to scrap
it entirely; you are right that Divinations is currently quite under-
powered, but I think it would be a shame to lose the spell school
entirely, as I think there are some very interesting things that could
be done with Divinations. For instance, the effect of the Sage card is
very interesting, currently quite under-used (only available from the
Sage card, which will very rarely ever be encountered by non-
Nemelexites), and fits perfectly with the Divinations theme. It also
helps alleviate the main problem with Divinations, that you cannot
afford to invest XP into training Divinations instead of training a
skill that will help you kill high-level monsters: a Divinations spell
which produces a finely-tuned version of the Sage effect would allow
characters to use XP from their pool more efficiently as they train
skills they had to neglect in order to train Divinations. This makes
significant training in Divinations a gamble and a long-term
investment: your other skills will be weaker for a while, but once you
can memorize the Sage spell and begin casting it, your other skills
should begin to catch up. I do not think the Sage effect as currently
implemented in the 0.4.5 source would do the trick--it would need some
fine-tuning; but I think this would be an interesting way to try to
make Divinations worth training.
-Chapayev
David Ploog
> On Mar 24, 9:08 pm, David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
[The Divination school and what to do with it. My proposal: the axe.]
> David, I have heard you say this before (in the IRC channel), that the
> Divinations school is flawed enough that it would be worth it to scrap
> it entirely; you are right that Divinations is currently quite under-
> powered, but I think it would be a shame to lose the spell school
> entirely, as I think there are some very interesting things that could
> be done with Divinations.
I actually agree. In general, one can try to repair broken things and it
should be possible to come up with Divination spells that are fun,
thematic and not broken. However, this is a _lot_ of work, much more than
making species interesting. (You can see this from how much work has to be
done on the 'ordinary' spells.) So in a sense, I am bailing out :)
Let me reiterate my main point: almost all of the Div spells should never
have been spells in the first place. I believe they should be removed as
spells; some of them should resurface in consumable form. I also don't
mind having misc. items with access to these effects, for their usage
would be limited and the skill in question would be Evocations, an
interesting skill to train up.
To be precise, I think that Mapping, Identify, Remove Curse and all Detect
Foo spells should be scrapped. See Invisible and Forescry are okay and
could be added to other schools. I second misc. items giving Mapping,
Identify, Detect Creatures/Traps, in limited numbers and with Evocation
skill factoring in.
> For instance, the effect of the Sage card is very interesting, currently
> quite under-used (only available from the Sage card, which will very
> rarely ever be encountered by non-Nemelexites), and fits perfectly with
> the Divinations theme. It also helps alleviate the main problem with
> Divinations, that you cannot afford to invest XP into training
> Divinations instead of training a skill that will help you kill
> high-level monsters: a Divinations spell which produces a finely-tuned
> version of the Sage effect would allow characters to use XP from their
> pool more efficiently as they train skills they had to neglect in order
> to train Divinations. This makes significant training in Divinations a
> gamble and a long-term investment: your other skills will be weaker for
> a while, but once you can memorize the Sage spell and begin casting it,
> your other skills should begin to catch up. I do not think the Sage
> effect as currently implemented in the 0.4.5 source would do the
> trick--it would need some fine-tuning; but I think this would be an
> interesting way to try to make Divinations worth training.
This is an interesting idea and I agree it fits nicely with Div, but it
wouldn't save the school for now:
(1) We need many more spells, since quite a few should really leave.
(2) Global spells are always problematic, consider Alter Self. This one
would be the same -- as you say, it needs tuning.
(3) The idea of the gambit (invest in Div now, have more/better skills
later) is highly intriguing, but still I don't think it fits a spell. You
would be casting it all the time, getting your Div up and that's it.
Instead, this global type of effect would go best with a god, in my
opinion. Lemuel happened to propose a nice Divinations god recently. Would
you mind me adding this idea there? Would be fitting very well, I think.
If you are afraid I take the wrong words out of your mouth, you can of
course add the idea yourself: FR 2713064.
Also, just like species come and go, there is no reason the Divination
school couldn't be reinstated in case we scrap it but enough good ideas
pour in.
David
universal.da...@gmail.com
> Let me reiterate my main point: almost all of the Div spells should never
> have been spells in the first place. I believe they should be removed as
> spells; some of them should resurface in consumable form. I also don't
> mind having misc. items with access to these effects, for their usage
> would be limited and the skill in question would be Evocations, an
> interesting skill to train up.
>
> To be precise, I think that Mapping, Identify, Remove Curse and all Detect
> Foo spells should be scrapped. See Invisible and Forescry are okay and
> could be added to other schools. I second misc. items giving Mapping,
> Identify, Detect Creatures/Traps, in limited numbers and with Evocation
> skill factoring in.
>
>
This makes sense to me. I don't think it would be any loss to lose the
spells you said should be scrapped--although if they are scrapped,
some other source of Detect effects will be important!--I just think
that a playable Diviner-type character is so unheard-of in roguelikes
that I would be excited to see it done in Crawl. There are some fun
things you could do with it, but perhaps that's too far in the future.
Go ahead! The idea of a Divinations god sounds like a great one to me.
David Ploog
> On Apr 6, 5:10 pm, David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>> Let me reiterate my main point: almost all of the Div spells should never
>> have been spells in the first place. I believe they should be removed as
>> spells; some of them should resurface in consumable form. I also don't
>> mind having misc. items with access to these effects, for their usage
>> would be limited and the skill in question would be Evocations, an
>> interesting skill to train up.
>>
>> To be precise, I think that Mapping, Identify, Remove Curse and all Detect
>> Foo spells should be scrapped.
> This makes sense to me. I don't think it would be any loss to lose the
> spells you said should be scrapped--although if they are scrapped,
> some other source of Detect effects will be important!
Yes, we would something for basic detection. A Detect Secrets scroll,
revealing nearby traps and perhaps also secret doors (in LOS) would be a
good idea, I guess.
For Detect Creatures, there is already some of the crystal balls, I think
(never used). The whole misc. items category is ripe for some overhaul,
but that has to wait a bit :)
> I just think that a playable Diviner-type character is so unheard-of in
> roguelikes that I would be excited to see it done in Crawl. There are
> some fun things you could do with it, but perhaps that's too far in the
> future.
If a cool concept emerges, we might just pick it up. We have a knack for
non-standard ideas. There is an old comment (by Linley I guess):
"Divination: These spells provide information to the caster. A diviner
class would be possible (and having detect curse and identify would be
very handy), but would be extremely difficult to play - there is no
potential in this type for combat spells."
[snip idea of a spell modelled on the Sage card,
also snip proposel to add that to a Divination god rather.]
> Go ahead! The idea of a Divinations god sounds like a great one to me.
Done! Thanks for the nice idea.
David
Mark Mackey
Martin Read <mpr...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>>In short, I think that these effects are bad if they can be spammed
>>without a cost (which is currently the case, the only potential cost being
>>raising Div slightly so you can cast MM well enough).
>
>And if you're a conjurer, there's a good chance you want Earth Magic
>anyway, which obviates the need to raise divinations to cast MM.
That's more a symptom of the "Lehudib's is overpowered" problem than a
problem with Magic Mapping.
David Ploog
> In article <tWu*fb...@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>,
> Martin Read <mpr...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>> David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>>> In short, I think that these effects are bad if they can be spammed
>>> without a cost (which is currently the case, the only potential cost being
>>> raising Div slightly so you can cast MM well enough).
>>
>> And if you're a conjurer, there's a good chance you want Earth Magic
>> anyway, which obviates the need to raise divinations to cast MM.
>
> That's more a symptom of the "Lehudib's is overpowered" problem than a
> problem with Magic Mapping.
That is bending the topic, but spell ranges have been, ahem, adapted in
trunk. Spells are no longer the universal "see monster at edge of LOS,
kill it" solution. The nerf to ranges is not universal, some go still far.
(Although no spells go beyond LOS anymore, apart from Shock and Lightning
Bolt.)
David
Martin Read
>In article <tWu*fb...@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>,
>Martin Read <mpr...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>>And if you're a conjurer, there's a good chance you want Earth Magic
>>anyway, which obviates the need to raise divinations to cast MM.
>
>That's more a symptom of the "Lehudib's is overpowered" problem than a
>problem with Magic Mapping.
Bolt of Iron is pretty nice too.
r.sh...@gmail.com
> That is bending the topic, but spell ranges have been, ahem, adapted in
> trunk. Spells are no longer the universal "see monster at edge of LOS,
> kill it" solution. The nerf to ranges is not universal, some go still far.
> (Although no spells go beyond LOS anymore, apart from Shock and Lightning
> Bolt.)
Has the interface been at all enhanced to indicate that you're
targeting outside the spell's range? It took me a long time to figure
out why some earth spells would seem to just fail with no indication
of miss or miscast.
David Ploog
All squares out of reach are greyed out. Also, the II screen shows ranges.
Note that ranges were limited before as well, but you would shoot (and
miss!) anyway, so in some sense it is more honest now. We did make ranges
less random and shorter, though.
David
diese...@yahoo.ca
> On Mon, 6 Apr 2009 universal.darts.champ...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Apr 6, 5:10 pm, David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> >> To be precise, I think that Mapping, Identify, Remove Curse and all Detect
> >> Foo spells should be scrapped.
> > This makes sense to me. I don't think it would be any loss to lose the
> > spells you said should be scrapped--although if they are scrapped,
> > some other source of Detect effects will be important!
>
> Yes, we would something for basic detection. A Detect Secrets scroll,
> revealing nearby traps and perhaps also secret doors (in LOS) would be a
> good idea, I guess.
> For Detect Creatures, there is already some of the crystal balls, I think
> (never used). The whole misc. items category is ripe for some overhaul,
> but that has to wait a bit :)
This sounds like an interesting conversation. At first when I read
about scrapping the whole school my first reaction was "Noooo! Fools!"
but looking back I know that I've fiercely opposed some changes before
(auto-explore IIRC) and been wrong and later enjoyed them greatly, so
I think this will produce and even better game. One concern I still
cannot avoid: how should pure spellcasters survive without detect
traps? As discussed in another topic quite recently, a blade trap can
instakill a smartly playing deep elf, and I've lost enough characters
to Zot trap banishments to consider that a semi-instakill too. I don't
think I've ever played a spellcaster without detect traps spell, and
scrolls with similar effect would work on Zot traps (because they warn
about their presence) but not on blade traps, there can never be
enough scrolls.
When I compare my playstyle with heavy armour characters (learn T&D
from the beginning) and spellcasters there is one distinctive
differrence which could hold some keys to a good solution: with T&D
you cannot avoid 100% of traps, but you can lower your chances of
getting killed, which I like very much. With detect traps your choices
are to avoid all or none of them, you either detect all traps closeby
or don't. I think a good solution would somehow make this choice less
binary, so that you still had some risk but you could efficiently
lower it enough to avoid nearly all trap deaths. I don't know what
kind of solution would fulfill this, except making T&D quite cheap for
all races, but somehow I don't like the idea of a mighty wizard having
to physically meddle with boring engineerwork.
David Ploog
> On Apr 7, 6:24 am, David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>> On Mon, 6 Apr 2009 universal.darts.champ...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Apr 6, 5:10 pm, David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>>>> To be precise, I think that Mapping, Identify, Remove Curse and all Detect
>>>> Foo spells should be scrapped.
>>> This makes sense to me. I don't think it would be any loss to lose the
>>> spells you said should be scrapped--although if they are scrapped,
>>> some other source of Detect effects will be important!
>>
>> Yes, we would something for basic detection. A Detect Secrets scroll,
>> revealing nearby traps and perhaps also secret doors (in LOS) would be a
>> good idea, I guess.
>> For Detect Creatures, there is already some of the crystal balls, I think
>> (never used). The whole misc. items category is ripe for some overhaul,
>> but that has to wait a bit :)
>
> This sounds like an interesting conversation. At first when I read
> about scrapping the whole school my first reaction was "Noooo! Fools!"
> but looking back I know that I've fiercely opposed some changes before
> (auto-explore IIRC) and been wrong and later enjoyed them greatly, so
> I think this will produce an even better game.
That's the hope!
One thing I've learned over the years: any prposed change will cause
negative feedback [1], more so if we're talking about nerfing or removing
things. For example, there were many complaints when I proposed to change
Trog, some of them along "if you remove Haste, the god will be useless".
And I will also admit that I myself opposed autoexplore at first. I
thought it would kill the soul of a roguelike :)
[1] This is not so if one proposes new stuff. But changing an existing
feature, no matter how small always seems to upset someone.
> One concern I still cannot avoid: how should pure spellcasters survive
> without detect traps?
By providing the effect in consumable form. Like Magic Mapping, a scroll
should work. Details (frequency and range of effect) are to be worked out,
although wands would also work, I guess. This does have the effect that
you won't spam the effect anymore. If we think that some builds (e.g. pure
casters) are hosed this way, we'll tone down the damage. But I doubt
that's necessary. Also, there is always the T&D skill.
> As discussed in another topic quite recently, a blade trap can
> instakill a smartly playing deep elf, and I've lost enough characters
> to Zot trap banishments to consider that a semi-instakill too.
Banishments are much less problematic than blade trap instakills :)
> I don't think I've ever played a spellcaster without detect traps spell
This is actually part of the problem: you admit that using Detect Traps is
mandatory. So something seems to have gone wrong along the way.
> ...scrolls with similar effect would work on Zot traps (because they
> warn about their presence) but not on blade traps, there can never be
> enough scrolls.
That depends. Nothing is set in stone -- there could be level sounds for
blade traps, we could tone down blade trap damage, perhaps really low-hp
characters should go for levitation and controlled flight etc. Granted, a
change of that scope will have various implications. It's probably
impossible to account for all of them beforehand.
> When I compare my playstyle with heavy armour characters (learn T&D
> from the beginning) and spellcasters there is one distinctive
> differrence which could hold some keys to a good solution: with T&D
> you cannot avoid 100% of traps, but you can lower your chances of
> getting killed, which I like very much. With detect traps your choices
> are to avoid all or none of them, you either detect all traps closeby
> or don't. I think a good solution would somehow make this choice less
> binary, so that you still had some risk but you could efficiently
> lower it enough to avoid nearly all trap deaths. I don't know what
> kind of solution would fulfill this, except making T&D quite cheap for
> all races, but somehow I don't like the idea of a mighty wizard having
> to physically meddle with boring engineerwork.
Yes, I don't like forcing all characters to pick up T&D. There should be
an incentive to train T&D to high skills (currently, there's no reason to
do so), but I don't want to read spoilers "train T&D to 10". But this is
an area where one can come up with creative solutions.
The fact that some spells were not meant to be spells remains. By the
way, Darshan suggested several times that traps should not be part of
Crawl's core. Short of axing them altogether -- which we didn't -- one
could still tone them down. For example, replace the high damage traps
with other, more interesting variations. There already are the net and
alarm traps and we could have more like these.
As always, feedback and new ideas are welcome.
David
diese...@yahoo.ca
> On Fri, 17 Apr 2009, dieselvi...@yahoo.ca wrote:
> [about getting rid of divinations school]
> > One concern I still cannot avoid: how should pure spellcasters survive
> > without detect traps?
>
> By providing the effect in consumable form. Like Magic Mapping, a scroll
> should work. Details (frequency and range of effect) are to be worked out,
> although wands would also work, I guess. This does have the effect that
> you won't spam the effect anymore. If we think that some builds (e.g. pure
> casters) are hosed this way, we'll tone down the damage. But I doubt
> that's necessary. Also, there is always the T&D skill.
>
>
> This is actually part of the problem: you admit that using Detect Traps is
> mandatory. So something seems to have gone wrong along the way.
Yes. For me it's almost like you can substract 2 from the available
spell levels you can use because you always have the detect traps
spell. That's not the most creative aspect of the game.
> > ...scrolls with similar effect would work on Zot traps (because they
> > warn about their presence) but not on blade traps, there can never be
> > enough scrolls.
>
> That depends. Nothing is set in stone -- there could be level sounds for
> blade traps, we could tone down blade trap damage, perhaps really low-hp
> characters should go for levitation and controlled flight etc. Granted, a
> change of that scope will have various implications. It's probably
> impossible to account for all of them beforehand.
One idea to tone down the danger without toning down the damage would
be to change blade traps to "something resistable"-traps with similar
damage, for example a non-magical (disarmable) electric trap. Or a
fire trap, which would be annoying scroll-wise. Or if changing the
damage level can be done, a curare trap would be more interesting (or
do we already have that in the game? I haven't played so much recently
and I'm still in 0.3.2).
>
> > When I compare my playstyle with heavy armour characters (learn T&D
> > from the beginning) and spellcasters there is one distinctive
> > differrence which could hold some keys to a good solution: with T&D
> > you cannot avoid 100% of traps, but you can lower your chances of
> > getting killed, which I like very much. With detect traps your choices
> > are to avoid all or none of them, you either detect all traps closeby
> > or don't. I think a good solution would somehow make this choice less
> > binary, so that you still had some risk but you could efficiently
> > lower it enough to avoid nearly all trap deaths. I don't know what
> > kind of solution would fulfill this, except making T&D quite cheap for
> > all races, but somehow I don't like the idea of a mighty wizard having
> > to physically meddle with boring engineerwork.
>
> Yes, I don't like forcing all characters to pick up T&D. There should be
> an incentive to train T&D to high skills (currently, there's no reason to
> do so), but I don't want to read spoilers "train T&D to 10". But this is
> an area where one can come up with creative solutions.
> The fact that some spells were not meant to be spells remains. By the
> way, Darshan suggested several times that traps should not be part of
> Crawl's core. Short of axing them altogether -- which we didn't -- one
> could still tone them down. For example, replace the high damage traps
> with other, more interesting variations. There already are the net and
> alarm traps and we could have more like these.
> As always, feedback and new ideas are welcome.
That sounds good. I also thought about spellcasters having some kind
of sense that there's a trap nearby, which could probably be tied to
high earth magic skill, but that does not fit too well into crawl (I
don't think any magic school skill generates effects you would not
have to cast, short of enchantments -> magic resistance). Also, now
that I think of it one avoidable hich-physical-damage trap type would
be an "Indiana Jones -like" trap that would set a blade trap like
effect off on 3*3 squares around the player, but with a "faint click"
and one turn delay :). That would be stupid and funny but it could be
used against monsters also.
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