Canine Blues Arooo posted:

Resistance checks should matter more than they currently do, but shouldn't afford you immunity and instead should afford you some level of comfort while secondary mechanics are forcing tactical play without resorting to pure damage at any time.


Said no one ever.

Darox posted:

So what I'm getting from that is that Extended should be decided by resistance checks instead of tactical decisions.

apple posted:

Can you elaborate on this? I'm curious as to why you're saying this when extended already "gear-checks" you for resistances in hells and the unique pand lords (with random pandemonium floors being a mixed bag), and torment will wreck your poo poo without appropriate resists.

rN+++ would negate most of the torment "debuff", sure, but if torment is cumulative, the damage is going to start piling up regardless if you don't have a good choke point to limit the attacks. This would just give you a chance to avoid the indirect damage from being tormented by trying to avoid subsequent attacks from other enemies or the fiends. I think it's an interesting idea where you have to consider your current position at least, and not just a gear check.

Darox posted:

You can do all of Hells & Pan with just one pip of each resistance, with resist pots on hand to help you fight some of the lords. This stops being the case if half the enemies strip off your resistances.

nucleicmaxid posted:

Sounds like it might be more interesting if you had to think about it when they stripped your resist. Maybe you should've read that post before that you didn't read.

Darox posted:

Hmm yes putting on more resist gear is a very interesting tactical choice. I am sure that with 300 untouchable hp, deflect missiles and rC+++ you will be VERY CONCERNED by that Ice Fiend when your rN+++ drops down to rN+.

Removing Torment and nerfing Hellfire makes singular fiends/tormentors completely unthreatening and even in bulk they won't be more threatening than before. Like, this doesn't change your tactical decisions it just makes the right decisions even less involved.

E: On reflection I was probably exaggerating the resistance gate thing, it'd mostly only gate you via MR/rN to avoid severe draining damage, while making it much easier to mindlessly tab through everything else.

Ferrinus posted:

What if enemy casters had mana pools, straight up, and more powerful ones could spend turns Sif-channeling (or using similar mechanics) to recover it?

nucleicmaxid posted:

Yeah, with his replies, I don't think he actually read the post.

quote:

430 gold - the +0 cloak "Hemp" {+Fly rC+ Dex+3}

apple posted:

Resistance stripping from torment/hellfire is just a minor point on one potential way to make things threatening without relying only on damage being pure or unavoidable. The overall threat level should be the same (if not more if handled improperly), but provide more avenues to mitigate the danger.

Like Canine also mentioned, caster AI also kinda bothers me. Doing something like stair dancing the initial Tomb:2 ambush on a melee character, I could very well die while retreating upstairs if the mummies got their poo poo together and just chain tormented and finished you off with smite.. instead I just operate on the assumption that they'll waste a lot of turns doing other things so it works out.

Darox posted:

And if orc wizards acted optimally no felids or mummies would never reach temple. Saying 'what if we made enemy casters predictable and smart' is a garbage statement because the response is 'you have to nerf everything or the game becomes impossible'.

LogicNinja posted:

So close...

Darth Windu posted:

I don't blame him, it is long and boring and none of it will ever make it into the game. The thing making the endgame boring is the environments, not the caster AI or what the gently caress ever.

Darox posted:

fightmans

Hempuli posted:

I'd really appreciate it if someone could take a quick glance at the morgue and shout at me for something dumb I did (preferably related to spell memorizing): http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/Hempuli/morgue-Hempuli-20140920-000417.txt

BigFactory posted:

Where did this poo poo start? Is it a yospos thing or something? It's really not very cool

Hempuli posted:

Just lost another DDNe; the actual cause of death was somewhat uninteresting (underestimated a pack of orc priests led by a high priest at O:4), but even before the death the game felt strangely difficult. I had a Lair ending with dire elephants, and could hardly damage them, and in Orc the knights and warlords were mostly undamageable except by using Makhleb's stuff or wands. Vampiric Draining was definitely my most powerful spammable attack, which felt a bit wrong since my artifact spear seemed to do nearly no damage. I'm pretty sure I didn't train stuff properly, but I never felt really secure changing my training from casting/necromancy to fighting/polearms.

The biggest problem I've been having with my casters is that after the initial handy book, I have no idea what kinds of spells to go for next. There're so many of them and I'm pretty uncertain of how much experience I should dedicate to a different school of magic before memorizing any spells from them. In this game I had the Necronomicon (but dumbly never even attempted memorizing anything from there) and 4-5 other books with overwhelming amounts of spells I didn't know what to do with.

tl;dr: Whine whine game is hard whine whine

I'd really appreciate it if someone could take a quick glance at the morgue and shout at me for something dumb I did (preferably related to spell memorizing): http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/Hempuli/morgue-Hempuli-20140920-000417.txt

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

A lot of words.

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

"Torment is an especially interesting obstacle"

Said no one ever.

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

Give casters the ability to make better decisions. If you are at max range, a lich that can cast OoD will probably cast OoD, but give that spell a cooldown. They way I'd implement caster AI is to give them sets of tiered spells and force a cooldown on each tier. So something like OoD might be a Tier 1 spell, but Mystic Blast might be Tier 3. Casters will probably always reach for that tier one spell, but if you can dodge or mitigate it, you don't have to deal with it again for some number of turns. This could also have an interaction with antimagic, where instead of incurring a fail chance, the internal CD has a chance to be delayed. This is somewhat dangerous though as if you round a corner to 3 casters, the results could be pretty devastating.

Heithinn Grasida posted:

quote:

Unfortunately, the developers rightly fear that most proposed changes will make the game worse.

quote:

Your proposal would make [torment] far less threatening in most circumstances.

A brimstone fiend would be dangerous with a bunch of other fiends together, but alone it would be a chump.

quote:

This would require very serious changes to the UI or the game would become unplayable. I go to elf: 3 and an annihilator shows up. He iron shots me, now I know he's cast his tier 2, but still has his other tiers, so I have to keep track of that. Then a sorceror comes on screen and hastes itself. Okay, he cast his tier 2 also, but banishment also occupies his tier 2, so I have to keep track of how many turns I have of being safe from that particular elf banishing me. Then a death mage shows up. Then another annihilator. Now I'd better take out my note pad and write down every spell cast by every enemy and mark each turn after it has been cast or I run the risk of getting banished and eating three crystal spears at once. My opinion is that this adds an enormous amount of complexity to the game that isn't worth what it's trying to fix.

Heithinn Grasida posted:

I see where you're coming from with this and I've absolutely felt the same way at times. But I have to say I feel skeptical of your solutions. And I think that's the problem, that most people do realize that, regardless of how you feel about torment and hellfire, extended relies on those threats too much and a greater variety of ways to threaten the player would make the game better. Unfortunately, the developers rightly fear that most proposed changes will make the game worse.

It is an interesting obstacle. I'm sure a lot of players and a number of the devs think so too. Here is a thread in the tavern with a very good post by evilmike about torment. Your proposal would make it far less threatening in most circumstances. Yes, it would be very dangerous if there's a bunch of other stuff on the screen at the same time, but you really shouldn't ever be fighting anything that can torment you with a bunch of other stuff there anyway. One tormenting enemy by itself is a serious danger now, but with your proposal it wouldn't be. Another interesting thing about torment is that it sometimes forces you to take a whole bunch of damage without seriously threatening your life, then you have to decide how and where to rest and recover hit points.

Heithinn Grasida posted:

This would require very serious changes to the UI or the game would become unplayable. I go to elf: 3 and an annihilator shows up. He iron shots me, now I know he's cast his tier 2, but still has his other tiers, so I have to keep track of that. Then a sorceror comes on screen and hastes itself. Okay, he cast his tier 2 also, but banishment also occupies his tier 2, so I have to keep track of how many turns I have of being safe from that particular elf banishing me. Then a death mage shows up. Then another annihilator. Now I'd better take out my note pad and write down every spell cast by every enemy and mark each turn after it has been cast or I run the risk of getting banished and eating three crystal spears at once. My opinion is that this adds an enormous amount of complexity to the game that isn't worth what it's trying to fix.

apple posted:

That's basically what skill cooldown on enemy casters would emulate I think

Ferrinus posted:

It would, but it'd save you from tracking individual spell cooldowns for each and every monster - you could just watch the blue bar under an enemy's tile. If spellcasting enemies had predictable AI same as melee enemies, but a mana bar that limited their actions, you'd get enemies that used spells intelligently but that couldn't literally throw them at you turn after turn after turn.

So, for instance, a lich's AI could be like:

1. if at extreme distance, choose randomly between throwing OOD or taking a step closer
2. if at medium distance or lower, throw LCS
3. if have decided to cast a spell but can't, channel mana Sif-style

You'd end up with an enemy that cast powerful spells but not every round, but more importantly was more logical and predictable in terms of when and where it cast those spells.

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

Basically, you'd have to sit down with each enemy that casts torment and determine how threatening they are without it and what you'd have to do to make them threatening again. For an extreme example, I'd like to look at, well, tormentors. They aren't really scary by themselves already, but they can put you in a spot where if you see the wrong dude immediately after, they might have signed your death warrant, with the proposed changes, they aren't really threatening at all without some friends that are on screen. So, give them more tools and make them smart. As so on as they can, they'll torment, and then they do something like spam 'summon imps' or for maximum hilarity, 'summon shadow imps'. They don't need to be putting 1s on the screen with torment, and their theme is still strong.

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

Something I mentioned a week or two ago was that I'd write up a big ol' post about how the way some damage mechanics in the post end game feel cheap and lazy, and offer some suggestions. Well, here is that post...

Ferrinus posted:

What if enemy casters had mana pools, straight up, and more powerful ones could spend turns Sif-channeling (or using similar mechanics) to recover it?

PleasingFungus posted:

Response

PleasingFungus posted:

Is this good? Is this desirable? How on earth would it make them "more logical and predictable"? To me, it just sounds like an additional layer of complexity layered over the current randomness.

Ferrinus posted:

It would replace the random ai. Casters wouldn't pick spells at random, but would not literally be able to cast LCS 1/turn every turn. It's easier to scope out three different liches' mana bars than it is to keep track of which one of them zapped you most recently. Also, enemies having mana bars would give mana drain/burn/whatever effects more to work with.

PleasingFungus posted:

They'd be able to cast LCS 1/turn for several turns in a row, killing you, and then they'd be out of MP. What a shame. (Unless you want them to have a stiflingly tiny MP pool, at which point why not just put a cooldown on all spellcasting, rather than inventing a complex new MP mechanic?)

PleasingFungus posted:

This seems like simulationism for simulation's sake

PleasingFungus posted:

1. It's lazy design: You claim that hellfire & torment are necessitated by PCs for whom normal sources of damage are a joke; this is not true, or it's missing the point, depending on how you want to think about it. The problem of damage could be trivially solved by, say, doubling the damage dealt by extended monsters. (For an example of how this would look, consider Cerebov, and his Fire Storm/Glaciate/Shatter-casting pals, who certainly can do a respectable amount of damage even to strong extended characters.)

quote:

Casting AI is something that's on the medium-term radar to reform (and has been for some time) - the main problem is technical, as usual. The AI code is rather frightening.

quote:

3. Because of how high variance is, it's impossible to play around a worst case scenario, because the worst case scenario is often times death: *Msl and Flight are non sequiturs here, and the high variance problem is present from the early stages of the game; consider walking around a corner to see a pair of orc priests, which is not that rare. Or, for that matter, consider any form of crawl combat, which has huge huge huge variance, masked by low standard deviation over a large number of trials... I don't know that it's good, but it does seem fairly central to Crawl's combat, which I think those in this thread would agree is pretty enjoyable on the whole.

quote:

Hellfire does elemental damage and makes itself scarier: Does crawl really need more fire damage? Or more things to penalize borderline extended characters, while doing nothing to those loaded with randarts and resists? I really don't see any appeal to this at all.

quote:

Some minor changes to resistances: Stacked resists are already very weak; rf++ -> rf+++ already does almost nothing. I would have more sympathy with the idea of reducing resist stacking entirely.

Internet Kraken posted:

I do think there should be a cooldown on certain attacks, namely hellfire. Brimstone fiends are bullshit when they can torment then chain hellfire to kill you outright in a handful of turns. Obviously certain enemies like hellions could have that limit lifted since their entire gimmick is spamming hellfire. I just think its really dumb that brimstone fiends are the biggest threat to nearly any character just because they might get lucky and use their abilities properly. And when they do, you're dead.

paranoid randroid posted:

I personally feel that torment isn't a terrible late game mechanic as its essentially the culmination of the LOS management and enemy prioritization skills the game forces you to learn. The exception being Tomb. Because Tomb is nothing but straight hallways that turn torment casters into an HP tax.