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its a feel thing for me, if i feel like im whiffing too much ill drop down to the previous model, but as long as im not messing around w two-handers too early thats usually not an issue
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Apr 23, 2018 16:07
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Tollymain posted:in general, your weapon picks should be decided in roughly the same manner (use the heaviest weapon you can hit things reliably with) except you kind of have to choose a weapon class and stick with it w non-gnolls
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Apr 23, 2018 17:52
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Heithinn Grasida posted:Demon blade for boring, solid play, singing sword for fun. 35 AC / 15 EV. Not at a computer, but my stats are something like 15/29/13 on a barachian skald. I’m using song of slaying a lot so I may as well give the singing sword a shot. And yeah I just blitzed the entire vault while taking almost no damage wearing that chain mail, it’s amazing. Been a fun run but I’ll probably die to random poo poo in the depths.
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Apr 23, 2018 18:49
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15 runes later: At last I am free of ever playing octopodes again] edit:http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue/Whaleporn/morgue-Whaleporn-20180423-192003.txt 14283608 Whaleporn the Grand Master (level 27, 195/195 HPs) Began as an Octopode Transmuter on Apr 23, 2018. Was an Initiate of Gozag. Escaped with the Orb ... and 15 runes! goon crawl is good crawl, also infest carried me through pan and hells, once I got the first three kills on a level beetle spam would drag me the rest of the way through everything. Whaleporn fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 20:29
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Irony Be My Shield posted:I think it might be good to play up this distinction for Strength vs Dex melee. Strength weapons could be slow but deal a lot of raw DPS that you want to find multipliers for, while Dex weapons could land a lot of accurate but weak hits that you want to find additive bonuses for. If we introduce off-hand weapons that give aux attacks those could go well with dex things. Didn't strength weighting for weapons used to be a thing and they removed it?
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Apr 23, 2018 23:40
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Honestly I wouldn't be opposed to stats being completely removed from the game
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Apr 23, 2018 23:44
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i dont entirely disagree but i feel you'd need a replacement mechanic for some stuff like armour encumberment, and just about everything intelligence does like por ejemplo right now the difference between a 10 str 20 int character and a 20 str 10 int character is p huge, in terms of what those characters are set up to effectively use. if this is simply flattened, does this mean you cant create a heavy armour caster anymore? does it mean the weedy defi can wear armour as heavy as a mifi can, with no difference in degree? Tollymain fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Apr 24, 2018 |
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Apr 24, 2018 00:19
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Teal posted:I guess it's more of a philosphical question if the game should do its best to tell the player whats what and leave the unpredictable to getting shanked by Sonja to Abyss or if getting a DPM value estimate would be too minmaxy. angband did it and it was categorically an improvement
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Apr 24, 2018 00:25
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how swingy is angband's combat
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Apr 24, 2018 00:36
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Tollymain posted:i dont entirely disagree but i feel you'd need a replacement mechanic for some stuff like armour encumberment, and just about everything intelligence does Obviously it'd be a huge effort which is why I had it as a throwaway line instead of a true FR (figuring out Chei in this scenario sounds hard). But my basic idea is that some races are already better at dealing damage, or casting spells, or wearing armor just by aptitudes. A HOFE can wear heavier armor than a DECo right now because of the orc's higher strength, but if you made the armor skill reduce armor penalties you'd have that exact same dynamic but with fewer confusing numbers being thrown around. I still have no idea how slay+3 compares to str+6 and I've been playing for years. If you must preserve the fact that a post-game deep elf is better at casting spells than a post-game human (because at all other stages of the game the elf's superior aptitudes already causes that) then give deep elves a mutation that gives them like 1/3 of a wizardry bonus or something like that. Basically, I don't care about str, dex, and int--I care about spellcasting ability, AC, damage, and EV. So make effects that modify those and throw the stats away, imo.
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Apr 24, 2018 01:08
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I agree. Removing stats from Crawl is a pretty ambitious goal due to how baked into everything they are, but they add basically nothing to the game by their inclusion except not knowing what exactly they do and how much of it.
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Apr 24, 2018 01:11
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Tollymain posted:in general, your weapon picks should be decided in roughly the same manner (use the heaviest weapon you can hit things reliably with) except you kind of have to choose a weapon class and stick with it w non-gnolls Drain also actually does the same damage as flaming/freezing versus non-rN+ stuff, in addition to its debuff. But the resist it checks is way worse. Tollymain posted:how swingy is angband's combat So if you fight a black reaver you have to always be expecting the mana storm and make sure not to let your hp drop low enough to be killed by it. If you're in an open room and somebody summons three of them you definitely want to teleport away or use ?destruction or something ASAP. The player's melee damage is not that swingy though. Definitely nowhere near crawl.
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Apr 24, 2018 01:27
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Panic! at Nabisco posted:I agree. Removing stats from Crawl is a pretty ambitious goal due to how baked into everything they are, but they add basically nothing to the game by their inclusion except not knowing what exactly they do and how much of it. Intermediate solution: remove stat increases over time (and make backgrounds not affect stats). Have them only be from races/items/gods/mutations.
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Apr 24, 2018 01:28
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i feel like at that point you may as well give species visible flat modifiers to general abilities like instead of having x str y int z dex you just say "okay, a minotaur has a modifier of str% on melee damage and ignoring armor penalties, a modifier of int% on spell hunger and spellpower, and a modifier of dex% on stealth/dodging/ranged damage calculations" replace items and mutuations and so on that affect stats w secondary modifiers, put species stat modifiers on the aptitude table
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Apr 24, 2018 03:46
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not that i think that would be a bad thing, but it might be a lot of work lmao
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Apr 24, 2018 03:47
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What happens when you kill things over deep water? Does the stuff they drop just disappear? Same for ammo fired at enemies over deep water? Seems pretty bullshit to me, I lost half my throwing nets in shoals
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Apr 24, 2018 04:09
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You can get stuff back with statue form iirc lol or fedhas sunlight
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Apr 24, 2018 04:21
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IronicDongz posted:You can get stuff back with statue form iirc lol Not while flying over deep water though?
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Apr 24, 2018 04:24
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icantfindaname posted:Not while flying over deep water though? Nor from ice form. Gotta be at the bottom to get em, my dude.
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Apr 24, 2018 04:25
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how much would it change things if species had a percentile mp modifier instead of a flat number modifier that only affects the character when they level up
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Apr 24, 2018 05:08
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Panic! at Nabisco posted:I agree. Removing stats from Crawl is a pretty ambitious goal due to how baked into everything they are, but they add basically nothing to the game by their inclusion except not knowing what exactly they do and how much of it. I don’t agree that they add nothing to the game whatsoever. They do impose interesting choices sometimes. Like do I raise str a little on my deep elf or go all in on int. But I agree that in the end Crawl is probably better off without them. RPATDO_LAMD posted:Intermediate solution: remove stat increases over time (and make backgrounds not affect stats). Have them only be from races/items/gods/mutations. This removes the only interesting things about stats, which is that they require the player to make decisions. If they’re just random, vague bonuses, there’s very little reason to keep them at all. Tollymain posted:i feel like at that point you may as well give species visible flat modifiers to general abilities I’ve seen ideas like this a few times before and I don’t really like them. What is really cool about Crawl now is that there are no hard restrictions on what different characters can do. If you invest in str or find some good items that boost str, your deep elf wizard can mess things up with a demon blade, lajatang or longbow pretty much just as well as a minotaur can. And sometimes it’s legitimately a good idea to train up long blades, staves or bows on a deep elf. Even though you want to avoid being in direct melee as much as possible, the option to kill things without spending MP effectively isn’t prohibitively expensive and comes in handy a lot, especially if you’re averse to constant kiting and resting. Under this proposal, every deep elf will always suck at melee and every minotaur will always suck at casting. And middle of the road species like human or demonspawn have a real chance to get screwed by never being able to get good enough at any one thing. That cuts deeply into Crawl’s charm. Tollymain posted:how much would it change things if species had a percentile mp modifier instead of a flat number modifier that only affects the character when they level up This is how things were not too long ago, isn’t it?
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Apr 24, 2018 06:20
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mad props to the orc sorceror that managed to paralyze me in the less-than-a-turn window it had before another twogre stepped up to fill the place of the one i just killed on that note, can we please convert all paralysis effects in the game into petrification or otherwise alter the effect into one that you can do anything about beyond having some source of mr lmao
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Apr 24, 2018 06:21
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Here’s my own proposal regarding stats: Replace armor, dodging and spellcasting skills with strength, dexterity and intelligence “skills”. These occupy a special place on the skill screen, but are trained as normal and each species has appropriate apts. They can be pushed over 27 by items and divine powers. All weapons now get an accuracy multiplier. If you hit, you get flat damage bonus equal to the amount by which you beat your opponent’s EV times your weapon’s accuracy modifier. For example, a bardiche has a multiplier of zero. It doesn’t matter how accurately you hit, the big-rear end axe blade slices the enemy up good. A spear has a multiplier of one. A graze does very little, but stabbing someone in the eye or slicing his hamstring ends the fight. If you use a weapon in one hand with nothing else, you get a bonus to the accuracy multiplier. This lets us have dex builds that fight effectively with light weapons while still having to choose between shields or more damage and lets us avoid adding dual-wielding. This wouldn’t be a small change. The biggest effect would be the impact of armor skill on ER. Fighters starting out wouldn’t have the strength to wear their own armor effectively. What I propose would be to dramatically reduce the impact of ER on EV (but not spellcasting), reduce armors’ base AC, but have strength aggressively scale the AC bonus.
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Apr 24, 2018 06:26
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you should probably tie weapon skill into it
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Apr 24, 2018 06:44
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Heithinn Grasida posted:I’ve seen ideas like this a few times before and I don’t really like them. What is really cool about Crawl now is that there are no hard restrictions on what different characters can do. If you invest in str or find some good items that boost str, your deep elf wizard can mess things up with a demon blade, lajatang or longbow pretty much just as well as a minotaur can. And sometimes it’s legitimately a good idea to train up long blades, staves or bows on a deep elf. Even though you want to avoid being in direct melee as much as possible, the option to kill things without spending MP effectively isn’t prohibitively expensive and comes in handy a lot, especially if you’re averse to constant kiting and resting. Under this proposal, every deep elf will always suck at melee and every minotaur will always suck at casting. And middle of the road species like human or demonspawn have a real chance to get screwed by never being able to get good enough at any one thing. That cuts deeply into Crawl’s charm. on the stats front, under a system similar to what i said youd still find items/mutations/etc that let you "boost strength", they'd just work differently now. heck, depending on how things were tuned it could be easier for the deep elf wizard to become more fighty by picking up some gear. theres a reason i dont give hard numbers :v thinking on it im p sure i could easily rewrite your post to one criticizing the current scheme also no idea on the mp front, i've forgotten too much about this game lmao
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Apr 24, 2018 06:54
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Tollymain posted:you should probably tie weapon skill into it Yeah, that’s an important point. I think ideally weapon skill should still account for a bigger damage boost than dex. Something like 60/40 or 70/30. But weapon skill and fighting already contribute to accuracy. This proposal would require simplifying Crawl’s bizarre headache-inducing accuracy formula, though, and the exact numbers would have to be worked out from there. Removing stats would be a big change, though. Practically every spell and piece of armor would have to be rebalanced, which would undoubtedly lead to all kinds of problems. And my proposal for dex would require lots of weapons to be rebalanced too. This would demand some seriously goony spreadsheeting.
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Apr 24, 2018 06:58
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Tollymain posted:on the stats front, under a system similar to what i said youd still find items/mutations/etc that let you "boost strength", they'd just work differently now. heck, depending on how things were tuned it could be easier for the deep elf wizard to become more fighty by picking up some gear. theres a reason i dont give hard numbers :v Thinking about it, I didn’t fully understand your post, but you’re totally right that my criticism of it could just as easily be applied to the current scheme. The only thing I’m really attached to is that the effects of stats not be so significant as to completely screw over off-type hybrid builds like troll casters or deep elf fighters. Do you mean get rid of stats, but keep derived attributes? So minotaurs have a baked in +20% weapon damage and -5 ER (arbitrary numbers) that shows up on their character sheet. Then you can find gear or mutations that have the same effects as strength, but we just don’t let players choose that on level up and we don’t call it strength anymore. So you can find a ring of +16% weapon damage and -4 ER or get the +4 EV, +4 Acc, +20 stealth mutation. If that’s what you mean, I agree it’s an improvement over the current system. But I think the one interesting about stats, whether we show them as primary or derived, is the ability to choose them. That’s why I’d favor moving their effects into existing skills. That way your troll can pump int and cast without relying on luck in terms of gear and mutations.
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Apr 24, 2018 07:24
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Honestly I don't see the appeal of making str/dex/int trainables rather than just wrapping the effects of str into armor and fighting, the effects of dex into evasion, and the effects of int into spellcasting. It's a change that would require a ton of number tweaking but so would a change where they're trainable.
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Apr 24, 2018 07:41
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the pie-in-the-sky idea im poking around right now is to roll stats and hp/mp growth apts into 3 new % modifiers on the skill screen, with hp modifier/bonus weapon damage modifier/encumbrance mitigation falling under one number, mp/spell hunger/spellpower falling under another, and stealth/dodging/accuracy under the third. ideally none of these base modifiers on a species should be large enough to stop you from playing against type on their own (skill apts still can make it inadvisable) and this doesnt restrict species any further than it already does, heck, hopefully they become less restricted
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Apr 24, 2018 08:06
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Some of the talk here is good but I'm not sure if I can get behind the general notion that "a bit of the game is too confusing and arbitrary, lets just CHOP IT OUT" conceptually. Shouldn't the first take be to clarify and solidify the meaning of these stats? To unroot something like that, you'd have to rework a lot of the game, it'd be a tremendous amount of effort, and the balance would be all out of wack. Here's my proposal for a new starting point to look for directions from; 1. Remove level up stat choice prompt, keep the stat current race based stat growth. 2. Add a new mechanism for adjusting stats permanently, more deliberately, maybe with some "default payoff" if you decide to not engage it. Let me pitch some ideas to the tune of what I mean; A) Add semi commonly occurring Potion of Strengthening/Smartening/Swiftening with effect of (+3STR, -1INT, -1DEX), (-1STR, +3INT, -1DEX), (-1STR, -1INT, +3DEX) (always net gain of stats, if you drink all you encounter, you slowly gain all stats equally) B) add in a new randomly encountered active map element; maybe something like Lifewater Fountain which will let you get +Stat of your choice 3. Start dynamically calculating stat effects and show them to the player.
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Apr 24, 2018 08:20
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cheetah7071 posted:Honestly I don't see the appeal of making str/dex/int trainables rather than just wrapping the effects of str into armor and fighting, the effects of dex into evasion, and the effects of int into spellcasting. It's a change that would require a ton of number tweaking but so would a change where they're trainable. The only issue here is with names, and my proposal (almost the same) has it too. Why does training the ‘dodging’ skill increase my accuracy, stabbing power and stealth too? Why does equipping a ring of armor skill make me do more damage? So I think we should rename armor and dodging to something like “brawn” and “guile” or “stomp” and “prance”, wrap the effects of stats into those skills and special case them to be boostable over 27 by items and gods. Spellcasting can just absorb the effects of int and keep its name, but it should still get the special case. Teal posted:Some of the talk here is good but I'm not sure if I can get behind the general notion that "a bit of the game is too confusing and arbitrary, lets just CHOP IT OUT" conceptually. That growth paradigm seems even more agonizing and confusing that just choosing to increase a stat every 3 levels. But why get rid of stats when we could keep them and show more numbers? Why have two separate numbers that do the same things but go up in different ways? And even if we do calculate stat effects and show them to the player, it’ll still be really hard to figure out which one is actually useful for your character. They don’t add too much to the game that couldn’t be preserved if they were merged with skills, and doing so would streamline decision making considerably. Of course, in the end, I’d be fine if stats stayed in the game. I’d just like strength and dexterity to have more distinct roles and for dex to be able to make an offensive contribution for some builds.
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Apr 24, 2018 09:02
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Heithinn Grasida posted:The only issue here is with names, and my proposal (almost the same) has it too. Why does training the ‘dodging’ skill increase my accuracy, stabbing power and stealth too? Why does equipping a ring of armor skill make me do more damage? So I think we should rename armor and dodging to something like “brawn” and “guile” or “stomp” and “prance”, wrap the effects of stats into those skills and special case them to be boostable over 27 by items and gods. Spellcasting can just absorb the effects of int and keep its name, but it should still get the special case. I wasn't super clear, but I more meant put all the effects into the relevant skills. So the damage boost from strength is under fighting but the armor penalty reduction is under armor. The EV from dex is under dodging, the stealth is under stealth, the accuracy is under weapon skill. Int actually poses the biggest problem because wrapping it into spellcasting would be a huge buff to spellcasting.
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Apr 24, 2018 09:08
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With aggressive reductionist thinking you could axe half the spells (both as schools and individual instances), half the weapons (both as classes and as levels in them) and mainly 2/3 of the races, etc. Gameplay as featureless sphere and all. I agree that stats are too confusing for how relevant they are, but I disagree that they add nothing; I think they add some complexity where some of the strongest builds rely on holding down tab and occasionally pressing the right SOS button. While I don't think the game needs to avalanche on infinite facets and features, I can't but feel that stats are a cause for "simplify, clarify, give a sane default behaviour if ignored" rather than remove. Also make DEX worth taking as the primary stat. Since the builds meant to rely on it kind of stuck, I think you could just buff positive effects of high DEX. Maybe something like give EV a secondary save roll where if you fail to dodge proper, you get another roll on it being just a grazing hit for decreased damage.
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Apr 24, 2018 09:18
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stats are confusing as gently caress all i can tell you is what they sort of do, i have no idea what, say, 10 str v 15 str means in practical terms i dont actually care specifically about removing them i just want a system where i know what they're doing :v
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Apr 24, 2018 09:31
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I think stats are redundant in a weird, badly designed way. Deep elves are already better at spellcasting than melee, why do we need two systems reinforcing this? I can tell just from aptitudes that merfolk want to be in light armor. Their str and dex is basically irrelevant to that decision. However, ultimately it doesn't really matter. It's an annoyance at most. The far larger sin of stats is that it's confusing what they do and how much of it they do. If you surfaced the effects of stats somehow I'd be pretty okay with that.
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Apr 24, 2018 09:35
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To me the idea of stats is that they are the stuff that normally interacts with status effects like buffs from potions, rebuffs from hexes and such, while with rare exceptions like Heroism and Draining, skills are untouchable. High skill low stat character will be more sensitive to momentary buffs and debuffs whereas a chei character is a slowly rolling pile of gently caress you I don't give poo poo about anything but raw damage. Investment into stats over skills should be the choice for the more reliable if lower potential option. Investment into skills over stats should be the high risk, high reward option. Teal fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Apr 24, 2018 |
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Apr 24, 2018 09:40
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My problem with stats isn't their existence, it's that the derived stats like encumbrance rating are hidden from you. When I pick a stat I'm fumbling in the dark because it's unreasonable to expect the player to go to a wiki or a database to figure out what +1 strength does for them. I would simply propose a stat screen where you're taken once you level up, it shows the derived stats there and you can see what effect +1 strength or +1 dexterity has on your character, and make a meaningful decision. Once the players can actually make informed decisions, and some time spent understanding what's actually going on, then we can rebalance the stats. I'd wait until we actually have precise values to start rebalancing, we approximate as it is, but with a stat screen we can have a more precise and comprehensive understanding of the balance between the stats. Respectfully, I think making stats a skill is completely unintuitive. If I had to be honest, it wasn't until someone posted in the thread about early game skill training plans that I even realized that I had control over which skill is trained, I had assumed it was basically victory dancing up until then. It seemed to me, at the time, to be the capricious RNG god determining skill increases based around what I had been doing, not a mechanic that's easily missed. To make stats skills would make this new player confusion even worse, at least when I leveled up and it asked +1 to strength, or intelligence, or dexterity, I had something of a vague idea of what it was asking.
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Apr 24, 2018 09:45
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doesnt potion of might give you a straight d10 damage bonus w the str buff being mostly cosmetic and so on
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Apr 24, 2018 09:46
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does the tutorial cover the skill allocation screen
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Apr 24, 2018 09:48
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Just checked, it does but it's a one quick message that happens when you level up and are in the middle of combat, so it can easily be missed. It basically says "hey there's a skill tab" but nothing about how that tab works or what it's good for.
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Apr 24, 2018 10:00
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