|
High Elves were my favorite species, partly because I'm an insufferable Tolkien nerd, partly because of their long, flowing blonde hair and partly because they did have a unique playstyle. Very high stats (highest of all species but demigods) combined with good spell casting and strong all-around magical aptitudes made them very good at learning a very wide range of different magic and using a broad toolset to deal with problems creatively. Tengu have to pick and choose and are pushed hard towards certain schools. High elves could pick up bits and pieces of whatever they found, which made for a different spell selection every game and a lot of fun in finding synergies between different schools of magic. Other species can do this too, but have limitations. Deep elves are the ultimate generalist casters, but you'll never want to take one into melee. Humans, hill orcs, merfolk, tengu etc. have a much tougher time casting such a broad net and making a character that could fight, hex, charm and pick relatively freely from summonings, necromancy or conjurations. High elves were exactly such a character. They sucked if you tried to make them good at one thing, but were quite strong once they got going if you hit just the right investment into a little bit of everything. Nothing in crawl quite fits that niche now. I will admit, however, that while I haven't played crawl too much in the past year or so, when I have, I've enjoyed deep elves and ogres more. Two bright notes for those complaining about the removal of HE, though. First, I've seen some people complain about the lack of other species besides Ce with very high bows. Actually, I never found HE that great in this area compared to other choices. If you want a fighting archer, Ce is better, and if you want a magic archer, DE is much better. Don't forget DE has +1 bows and that pairs very well with their magic aptitudes, since a longbow gives you an MP independent way to quietly eliminate even quite sturdy monsters without getting into melee. Second, in the most Tolkieny sense, high elves haven't actually been removed since all the high elves in middle earth were actually deep elves anyway!
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2016 12:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:39 |
|
|
Sage Grimm posted:AE puts you in melee range to deal the most damage which isn't the greatest play for squishy mages. Zap can miss and Static Discharge is pricey for spamming it early game. Then Swiftness is such that you can't really cast it in preparation for handling an enemy so you're ready to bail because of the movement speed penalty after it wears off. So if things do go poorly, you need to be prescient and cast it just before things go wrong or you cross your fingers and hope the extra turn after getting reamed doesn't get you killed. What's more, lightning bolt is almost certainly the weakest mid-game spell in a starting book. It's dangerous to use and highly unreliable. Static discharge can handle most threats that lightning bolt can't but also not as safely and reliably once you're a couple floors into lair as other mid game options like sticky flame/fireball, throw icicle/icebeasts, petrify/lrd or battlesphere/IMB. I actually quite like lightning bolt on low-mid level hybrids, since it's monstrously powerful if you use it at the right time and you're lucky, but it's not so easy to get enough experience to hybridize early and make lightning bolt powerful enough to feel relevant (it really needs good spell power to be worth it, because of range and accuracy more than damage). AE's starting book feels very awkward to use and much less streamlined and well designed than other books. Lightning bolt, in particular, either needs to be buffed and replaced with something else, or knocked down to level four and weakened.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2016 09:18
|
|
|
Actually, I find lightning bolt quite nice for hydras since it can one shot them a fair bit of the time. That's where it really shines, against very nasty single targets when you can set up a bounce. It's also quite good against big packs of durable critters, like yaks or death yaks. The issue is that it can also crap out and do nothing, and does so fairly frequently, while also alerting the entire floor to your position, meaning you just blew a bunch of MP on failing to resolve a bad situation at the same time as making it very likely that things are about to get a whole lot worse. It's still good, and the book of air absolutely equips you to handle just about everything in lair, it just that AE lacks a reliable main nuke in the mid game that doesn't feel lovely to use. Lightning bolt feels great as a supplementary tool, not as a main source of damage, and static discharge, which is great in around d:5 - d:6 and still decent in the early mid-game, starts to feel a little weak pretty quickly. Venom mages are quite good, though I usually take a hybrid approach. Poison magic to 7-8 and a tiny bit in conjurations for sting early on gives you OTR and meph cloud to simply ruin the day of anything not resistant to poison, while leaving you enough xp to train a weapon and some defenses for anything that resists. Spiny frogs and black mambas can be a problem, but can typically be handled as long as you're not very poorly equipped, in which case you just do orc first. Hydras are a bigger problem, but can be managed with standard tactics (wands, walking away, conjure flame or other good low level anti-hydra spells you might have found, god powers, or just killing it in melee if you're, say, a buff Chei character). Heithinn Grasida fucked around with this message at 12:27 on Dec 17, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2016 12:21
|
|
|
Most of the changes on the .20 list look good! I'd just like to indicate my opinion that if the game becomes shorter, which is good, experience really needs to become more plentiful. This is not an argument based on difficulty. Berserkers would still be able to win the game "easily" with half the experience, and other archetypes could do so with skillful play without extreme difficulty. However, a reduction in the amount of experience available in the game would decrease the number of possible skill combinations that could win. That number has already decreased, though not to a very meaningful degree. Further reductions in the amount of experience available would surely lead to a much more restrictive class and skill system, which would seriously damage one of the most interesting strategic aspects of DCSS' play style. To use dpeg's principle which, to be honest, I feel is overly reductive and slightly deceptive, a further reduction in the amount of experience available in a game would reduce choices available to the player, rather than increase them. I'd also like to suggest that as the game becomes more and more streamlined, it starts to lose its identity. I agree with the removal of the haste spell and I agree with the removal of the haste wand. But, I worry that an overly rigorous focus on "meaningful choices" based on random, emergent factors will move the game significantly away from an "rpg", which is the kind of game I like to play, to some kind of weird, abstracted single player chess match that will have overall far less broad appeal. Such design principles, for example, are one reason I don't like Sil in spite of many reasons to adore it, and are a reason I have no interest in Brogue. These principles are only interesting on a purely intellectual level, but, psychologically, are utterly unappealing to me, and probably to many other players as well. Ferrinus posted:Hey: before bringing back Pakellas, bring back Singularity. Just pick between one and three of these balance fixes: make it tloc/hexes 9, forbid it from affecting stuff you can't see, make the singularity itself a traversable square rather than an obstacle (it blinks or teleports anything entering it, maybe?) This is correct. The spell opened up a large number of tactical options to a player than invested enough to use it and synergized in different ways with each of the other level nine spells. It was problematic, yes, but it was also extremely good. Removing it was a major blight on the game. Heithinn Grasida fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Dec 19, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 17:15
|
|
|
dpeg posted:I am replying mostly for this point, because I think it's understandable, but misguided. Yes, Crawl is losing flavour left and right: species/backgrounds removed, simplified mechanics (let me mention book amnesia one more time, but one could even consider victory dancing or item destruction as providing flavour). This is an excellent post and I appreciate it for reminding me of something that's absolutely true, but that I tend to forget as I get lost in the urge to complain. But at the same time, it's responding to something that was not my original point. In the first place, I think, or at least I hope, when people complain about flavor, they are primarily complaining about the loss of flavor for flavor's sake, not the loss of flavor in an absolute sense. Sil also has excellent flavor in an absolute sense. In fact, it might represent the highest standard of flavor in any game at all for me, since Half and Scatha executed the Tolkieniness masterfully. In a flavor sense, it gets close to the platonic ideal of a Tolkien game. And I still don't really like it. Crawl may have very good flavor itself, but people still are right to complain about the removal of things hammers and sheep. They made the game more fun to play even if they weren't strictly good design. Neither of those things was a terrible loss, however much I hate to admit it. But other sacrifices have been made on the altar of good design that were more harmful. An example I've brought up repeatedly is the dragon's call / dragon form synergy that existed for a few versions. It was obscure and almost useless to the vast majority of players, but it made for something flavorful and fun that you could try for if you knew about, and if you didn't know, it really didn't hurt you at all. There was no practical reason to remove it except for an aesthetic compulsion on the part of the developers and the game is poorer for its loss. However, the removal of things like that synergy was not actually the point of my complaint. Flavor is not the only psychological (which I mean as opposed to strictly intellectual in a challenge, or puzzle sense) factor in making a game fun. Though it might seem "low brow", most people who play RPGs want to be awesome and to do awesome things. Although in the specific case of haste, I think the intellectual aspect of more interesting design outweighs the psychological aspect of reward, casting haste was awesome. Finding a haste wand is awesome. If you cannot do those things, you cannot be quite as awesome as you could before. My personal sentiment is that the current design trend is pushing the game somewhat away from a fantastic and varied experience where you see bizarre things and do awesome poo poo to some kind of chess puzzle in the newspaper. You might feel satisfied and stimulated, but you don't feel awesome in the video game sense when you figure out that black's path to checkmate in four moves is rook to queen four. Obviously that statement is quite extreme, I don't mean it to be taken literally, but I think it shows basically my complaint about things like removing singularity, high elves, the crown of eternal torment, or the dragon form / dragon's call synergy. I stand rather firmly on the maximalist side of the equation, but strongly respect that minimalism is a necessary part of what makes Crawl an amazing game. But I think the forces of minimalism are throwing the universe out of balance, and even the Orb of ZOT may not stem the tide of chaos and destruction!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2016 16:07
|
|
|
Darth Windu posted:Also ive kinda skimmed over the last 30 or so pages of this thread and a lot of the changes are for the worst. i get the feeling the dev team is too focused on the tournaments and top crawlers and are kinda ignoring the gently caress around goofball players. They have sacrificed Fun on the sacred alter of Efficiency and the world is lessened for it You might think that from reading this thread since we tend to revel in negativity, but actually I think the vast majority of changes have been positive. The only really bad change was the removal of singularity, which was a deeply problematic spell that needed to be changed, but should not have been removed. I do agree that there is now a bigger focus on Serious Gameplay Choices over just screwing around and that's pushing the game in a direction I don't like, but most of the changes resulting from this attitude only have had a minor negative impact. IronicDongz posted:there were already multiple other species who were better at being a hybrid than high elf before they were removed anyways, I don't really get where this "king of the hybrids" idea comes from when they weren't really that strong The issue is not whether or not high elves were good. I agree they weren't. What made them interesting was the combination of extremely high stats and high apts. That let you learn a wider variety of spells compared to other hybrids without sacrifice in your melee ability. Compare HEIE to MfIE. MfIE was the better choice if you wanted to win the game. Mf has higher HP, reaches mindelay faster with a better weapon type, has comparable defenses and can swim. But HE was more interesting to play, because your play style was strongly shaped by what books you found since you could reasonably expect to still be able to cast strong ice magic even if you picked up a bunch of hexes, air and necromancy, for example. MfIE, because of far lower int, lower spellcasting and lower overall magic apts would be much more restricted in its choices. The early game for the two was roughly the same, but the Mf would handle the mid-late game much more by brute force, whereas for the HE to shine, the player had to recognize interesting spell combinations and use them effectively. For example, taking freezing cloud, simulacrum, metabolic englaciation, bolt of cold, silence, deflect missile and, formerly, haste, was not unreasonable for a HEIE melee hybrid. But the merfolk would really feel too spread out with such a diverse spell selection. The same comparison holds between HE and Te, the other "high apt" hybrid species. It is even more true when comparing HE to even aptitude species like Hu, Dr or Dg. The species were already pretty distinct based on apts, but between apts and stats HE could be played in a fun and rewarding way that other species could not. Removing HE was still not as bad as removing singularity, though. PleasingFungus posted:This is a good list! I'm putting it on my backlog to look at. I'm glad these suggestions got some recognition. I had an idea of my own that could be used in addition to or instead of a few of these. Singularity could root you to the spot, either with a barbs like effect, or just with root like from shambling mangroves. That, along with making the singularity tile passable, making the singularity disappear if the central tile left LoS and restricting its range would allow you to damage thing out of LoS in combination with abilities like darkness or fog (more tactical depth) while still removing possibility for abuse. It would also require you to seriously consider whether or not it's worth the risk to cast in dangerous situations, which would also make the spell better and more interesting.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2017 07:46
|
|
|
I think that message is quite true about HESk. HESk was really, legitimately bad. HEWz and HEIE were decent hybrid starts, though, if weaker than other species. From a purely early game viewpoint, HE was bad. But in spite of the early game being the hardest, most of the time people actually spend playing the game is not spent there. In the mid-late game, well-played HE hybrids were distinct, interesting and strong.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2017 08:32
|
|
|
Well, you could come up with any number of reasons to explain the statistic, for example that new players who jump into the game are more likely to pick high elf than weird Japanese bird people, but it could also just be that High Elf has a tough early game and people die more often with it. I will say that I don't really like Tengu and personally find them harder to play than HE, but that might just be me. Internet Kraken posted:I don't buy the argument that HE were a "bad" race. I never had any trouble with them. They are slightly slower to get going but they have no equipment restrictions or major inherent flaws. They are only a little weaker than other common hybrid races early on and potentially a lot stronger later. -10% HP is their biggest problem but most magic oritented races have to deal with that or worse anyways. HE isn't "bad". People are being hyperbolic. HE is average. It has a weaker early game than you'd expect, which might lead people to say it's bad. It does have a very strong mid-late game if played well, but that doesn't matter as much. I do think HE is uniquely bad for Sk in spite of seeming like a natural fit, because charms, hexes and spellcasting aren't really that important to Sk. You can get spectral weapon up pretty early with almost any species. Auxiliary melee attacks or beefiness are much more important to help you survive the early, awkward period until you get enough weapon skill and defenses to allow your spells make a big difference. HE has low HP, no additional sources of defense and no way to deal extra damage in melee, so it has a tough time fighting toe to toe with a sub-par melee start.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2017 11:05
|
|
|
IronicDongz posted:I mean singularity is kind of fundamentally really, really hard to balance because the whole point is it is a spell which does big damage in a big AoE, and lasts multiple turns...you can limit firestorm's range to make it not hit out of LoS(and even that doesn't work with veh) but if singularity lasts multiple turns that lends itself very easily to hitting out of LoS because all you have to do is back up. you could make it just not hurt anything you can't see but then that would, I think, "feel" very strange(and be a bit annoying with fog). perhaps other people disagree though and there are already other kinda unintuitive LoS mechanics like how clouds evaporate super fast out of LoS for the sake of balance/tedium. If you don't like Ferrinus' suggestion, mine also solves the fundamental problem with the spell. Either have the spell prevent movement entirely or exact a heavy cost on movement. I still include the caveat that the central tile must be passable and must disappear without LoS to prevent players from casting it into a room and closing the door or blocking hallways with it. One could easily argue that Singularity is the better form of Tornado. The difference between singularity and tornado, and what makes singularity a better and more interesting spell, is that singularity changes your tactics with other damage spells, and pushes you towards choosing some over others. It interacts beautifully with firestorm, for example, and nicely with tornado, but doesn't offer as much to someone casting glaciate. It is the perfect companion spell for a summoner, since it does big damage without hurting your summons. Simply being able to target the spell also makes it more interesting. I can't find any aspect of Tornado's design that makes it inherently better, and as Ferrinus pointed out, it's fine to have spells that do similar things in suitably different ways. Look at firestorm vs. glaciate or poisonous cloud vs freezing cloud, these spells are mechanically quite similar, but have interesting differences that extend beyond their damage type. dpeg posted:Development is not focused around tournaments or top players. It's even unclear to me how people arrive at this conclusion, but it's just not true. This is why I listed the removal of singularity as the only really bad change even though HE was my favorite species. I agree with your arguments that there has to be an upper limit to the number of species. I am interested to try out frogs and dogs if I can ever get a playable connection to web tiles again (and if dogs make it into trunk; I hope they do because it's an interesting idea). However, I do think the devs, if it indeed makes any sense to talk about "the devs" as a monolithic entity, are wrong about the the level of differentiation between species that makes them interesting and are quite wrong about what will be interesting to new players. Overly differentiated species, like felids, feel gimmicky and aren't much fun to play, especially for people new to the game. High elves, however, played differently from other species and played just like high elves seem like they should play based on the context from which they were adopted. They were a well designed species, if less distinct from others, and felids are poorly designed, in spite of being more distinct. Nevertheless, I accept the logic of your argument, even if I think your aesthetic judgements are poor in this case. dpeg posted:Singularity: you know this psychological effect how it feels much worse if you find 10$ on the street and have to part with 5$ rather than just finding 5$? In a sense, Singularity has never existed. It was tried out, and found to be absolutely, unrepairably overpowered. For most things removed, you could (and people do) say: "why not think a bit harder about how to replace it?" That's true, but it is hard. So if you really think that Singularity should be a Crawl spell, make ideas how to improve it. This has happened., and be persistent. You may even have to make a thread on the tavern or something to keep the idea alive. This, however, is nonsense. Many people offered ideas on how to fix singularity at the time that it was removed. I have persistently lamented the removal of the spell and offered ideas more than once. Ferrinus has "bring back singularity" as his personal Carthago delenda est. Perhaps we didn't make suggestions in the right places, but the tavern does not feel welcoming to new ideas from posters who aren't color coded to be the people you're supposed to listen to, at least to my eyes. I do not think it was terribly hard to solve the problems with singularity. The issue was very clear and easy to identify: the spell introduced abusive play where you could primarily kill things that were out of sight. Once that problem is identified, a number of possible solutions spring to mind about how to fix it. This needs no great depth of thought or brilliant inspiration. The problem was obvious, and one clearly stated, solutions were also obvious. If, after implementing the most agreed upon solution to the major design problem with the spell, it was still found unbalanced, it could either be fixed by tweaking numbers or abandoned at that point. I respect that the developers are going to make the game they want to play and I think that in general you all do a great job of it. But in this case, you made a decision based on unclear or incomplete understanding of a situation and then supported it with faulty logic. dpeg posted:Also, why do you use the adverb "totally", isn't "bullshit" a noun? Bullshit can be a noun, verb or adjective depending on the situation. The adjectival use has a much stronger colloquial feel to it, but is still common. Take the sentence, "don't give me these bullshit excuses" as an example. This all is true for North American English, at least. Heithinn Grasida fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Jan 9, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2017 05:01
|
|
|
IronicDongz posted:yeah like, every suggestion for demigod is overcomplicated because it comes from people who don't like playing them and think they need to be "fixed". but they're already in a good spot. if you tack on more gimmicks to them you're kinda missing the point of the species, and maybe you not liking their playstyle just means you're not the target audience for them. I agree with this but I still don't like demigods. I only have one win with them, so I can't be considered an expert, but I think the lack of religion would actually be an interesting thing to play around if the species by itself were stronger to make up for it. Demigods barely feel stronger than humans without a god until quite late in the game. High HP is overridden by the awful XL growth, so that humans will often have higher or equal HP anyway and high stats are overridden by poor apts. "But Heithinn Grasida", some will surely say, "don't you know that -1 is actually the baseline, average apt and so demigods don't have poor apts at all? " And I'll reply that for the most part that claim is misleading nonsense. Even if it were true that the actual average aptitude is -1, which if I recall, is not the case, there's a big difference between the average aptitude of all skills over all species and the average aptitude of skills into which players actually invest. Most merfolk will use polearms and ice magic, not axes and fire magic. Many centaurs will use a bow. Tengu will probably cast air magic, and not earth magic. Minotaurs invest in weapons, fighting, dodging and armor and only might dip a little bit into casting. Even though the distinction between species based on aptitudes is growing weaker, it is still very strong. It's reasonably to claim that -1 aptitudes are workable, but it's preposterous to claim that they're average. The average aptitude for skills into which players make deep investment is probably a little under 1, which is much higher than -1. Demigods really need faster XL growth, there is simply no reason for it to be so low other than flavor, and they really need better apts. As it stands, they're weaker than many species that can follow a god for most of the game. That changes by the very late game when XL growth and aptitudes are not so important, but they're just miserable to play right up until the very end. If you want a game where you're very strong, but have to adapt to what the dungeon gives you, play a human of Chei or Ashenzari. Both experiences will be like playing a demigod, except fun. Making demigods fun won't require making them gimicky, but it will require making them not suck. I recommend a slight increase in their base stats, boosting their defensive apts to 0, their fighting to +2 and their spellcasting to +1. This keeps the feeling that it's a little harder for them to master specific skills than humans but that they're naturally good at everything. Reducing the amount that they will spend in XP sinks that every demigod is going to invest in will enable them to more versatile, in spite of slowish growth in specific skills. I strongly recommend at least a big buff to their spellcasting, if nothing else, because high int and high spellcasting makes for very fun casters that can do a little bit of everything. DE has that but DE never wants to be a hybrid. If Dg had big spellcasting, I think they might be able to assume a similar playstyle to that which was lost with the removal of HE.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2017 08:03
|
|
|
rchandra posted:I like demigods and this post. They even lost stats when their stat growth got changed from sid/2 to choice/3, it'd be nice to have that compensated for with the apts. Playing gimmicky things like DgFi with ALL THE STR is fun, but for hybrid types using all three stats I don't think choice balances -4 total stats. All INT on Dg casters is fun too, since you can beat deep elf and have great HP (even though it doesn't matter until something like depths 5 when you will have finally caught up in your primary casting skill). I'm always tempted to invest a little into all three anyway, though, so I can wear heavy armor and have decent EV, so the new stat gain scheme is still a loss for me over the previous one.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2017 17:57
|
|
|
Haifisch posted:Dynamic Monsters opinions from my brief game that I suicided out of boredom: To provide my own feedback on this, which is completely anecdotal and may not be relevant for a number of reasons, I went into a game with Dynamic Monsters with a very negative impression of how it was going to work and came out thinking it was okay. I played an OgIE to shoals: 2 and got bored; I might go back just to see how branch ends play out, but I hate lair branches and there are lots of other shiny new things to try. I felt that a price on retreating to safe terrain really did make me decide when it's worth it or not and added a new kind of tension to the game that was interesting. However, OgIE is now a monster combo and the game never really threw anything absurd at me until I could handle it, so I only ever saw one bezotted monster, which was some random orc wizard on Orc: 2. So I have no idea if the this change accomplishes what it's supposed to. But, I do feel a warmer to the idea of placing a price on strategic retreat in general, even if I'm not sure if there's actually going to be a good way to do it. Darth Windu posted:Horns and hooves own. Talons and claws and Antenas are garbage Poppycock! Claws are the best by far and all the others are annoyances. I wish you could just always have claws on demonspawn because they make for the ultimate unarmed characters.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2017 08:46
|
|
|
Book amnesia was really cool and useful and it sucks that it's gone!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2017 04:37
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:That's why the weapon skills should be renamed to stuff like "lunging" "cleaving" and "riposting" and give you increasingly strong or reliable versions of the named powers as they're leveled up. This was from a while ago, but my internet was out. That change would make weapon choice effectively cosmetic. I like that the weapon categories in crawl all do different things, but I don't like the way the game handles weapons and weapon skills in general. Base damage is an obscure mechanic that confuses new players, min delay results in lots of weird magic numbers and enchant weapon scrolls are generally enough to reinforce specializing in a single weapon. If I were to ever go completely mad and write a fork of Crawl, here's what I would do with weapon skills: -Specific weapon skills are gone -- you get -1 attack delay in a weapon type of your choice at 12 fighting and another -1 at 24, either in the same weapon type or in a different one. The base delay of all weapons is adjusted to match. -Weapons now have a base accuracy and the effects of accuracy and evasion are greatly increased. Beating an opponent's evasion by a certain amount increases your damage depending on the amount by which you beat it. This is also a much needed nerf to heavy armor melee, since you'll be more vulnerable to highly accurate monsters. -In place of weapon skills, there are now two skills: Power and Grace. Power increases the damage of your weapon, modified by strength and Grace scales up its accuracy, modified by dex. Fighting gives a small bonus to both. These skills would be quite cheap. A typical hybrid can probably get a high score in one and a low score in the other and followers of okawaru, ash and trog can probably have high scores in both. -Unarmed remains its own skill that increases the base accuracy and damage of unarmed combat, but in order for it to be effective you need either grace or power to back it up. Unarmed still requires high investment, and still ends up the strongest in the end if you have a high score in all three skills. -Short blades remain the weakest weapon type, with slightly lower accuracy than other light weapons and lower base damage, but can stab. Or maybe they're just removed entirely and all light weapons can stab. -The number of weapons is reduced and weapon types are simplified. Each weapon category has a light, accurate weapon and a heavy, powerful weapon for both one-handers and two-handers. Rare weapon types, like triple swords and demon whips have high base accuracy and damage, meaning they are the choice for characters that can afford to invest heavily in each school. Edit: What you posted is a really good idea, though, if weapons did more than their special property and "damage" or "more damage". Heithinn Grasida fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Jan 25, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2017 11:00
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:I figure that weapons could either keep their properties or get new orthogonal ones. Like if swords still riposte, then if you're holding a sword you get two chances to riposte each time you dodge, one flat and one skill-based. Orrr weapons go to a more damage type-y model where some are better at punching through armor, some are more accurate, some reward accuracy more, etc. Would all weapons scale in damage, accuracy and delay with the highest of your weapon skills? I'm still not sure how you could effectively distinguish weapon types that way. Double riposte is workable, if maybe a little weird, but double cleaving and double reaching don't make much sense. I'm not really sure there's design space for many new weapon abilities: look at how long it took for riposte to be implemented. Damage types under a system where you have access to all weapons just seems annoying. It's interesting to play around with one monster in Crawl, but constant weapon switching would get old. Differentiating weapons through accuracy and AC piercing might work, but I don't think it fits very well with Crawl's stat system. If damage and accuracy for all weapons are both coming from one skill then that only leaves stats and a handful of special cases to modify accuracy and base damage. But strength and dex are not very strongly differentiated on most characters, and even when they are, it's very possible to gain a huge bonus to one or the other from gear. That means you're not really building towards any weapon type and don't have much sense of agency or control in your choice of weapon. That's why I want two weapon skills, one for accuracy and one for base damage with accuracy playing a far more important role in the game than it does now. This differentiates weapons based on their weight towards accuracy or damage while allowing more interesting choices of weapon and build. It also keeps stats in place as important, but secondary determinants of damage output. With a greatly stripped down weapon system, attaching weapon passives to skills would also make sense, but it would be quite hard to do it while keeping weapon types distinct without both drastically reducing the number of weapons and having more than one damage determining skill to allow the player to build towards certain weapons. Carados posted:I mean this is incredibly game-design intensive and will require a huge amount of balancing and boring stuff but: I think Lord Sloth already expressed this clearly, but I think it's explicitly part of Crawl's design that melee combat remain as simple as possible. Even quite a few people don't like evoking polearms to perform reaching attacks. I don't think a more elaborate system involving stances and abilities would be bad, but it would have to belong to a different game. But Crawl's melee system is by no means perfect. Sil's is much better: it gives interesting, but very simple skills that change the nature of combat a lot (flanking, tactical retreat, zone of control, etc.). There are no extra button presses and combat is a lot more dynamic with more tactics and choices. Crawl has the advantage of not being maddeningly frustrating to play, however. The experimental Council god (unless that's what you mean rather than Uskayaw) gives movement based skills, one of which is identical to Sil's flanking+whirlwind. I think adding those abilities to a god really fits Crawl well, though, and I really hope the council god makes it in. I'm not sure they're appropriate for every character, however. But, I completely agree that the relationship with weapon skills and weapons is very boring. Pay more XP to use a bigger weapon is serviceable, but doesn't offer many interesting choices.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2017 08:33
|
|
|
Fitzy Fitz posted:I really like vampires, but I think their hunger minigame is tedious. I wish their metabolism was halved or something. I'm playing a vampire now and I just completely ignore it. I drink all the blood and I never dip below very full unless I'm not paying attention. Going to try Crypt now and see how that changes things. I agree that I basically hate the mechanic, though. The game encourages manipulating hunger levels, but actually doing so is awful.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2017 03:48
|
|
|
Merfolk is the choice if you want great apts so your skills grow quickly. Draconian can be quite good too, with high HP and built-in defenses. Those are probably best if your goal is just to use blade hands. If you're playing trunk, ogres make pretty beastly transmuters since they now have reasonable aptitudes, high Str, which strongly influences damage on top-tier transmuations, and +30% HP for little downside. They're great early, but later you really hope you find a replacement for blade hands.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2017 13:34
|
|
|
I didn't phrase that properly. Dragon form outdamages blade hands (unless you have no str and crazy dex, maybe?), but comes with an extreme drawback. But in terms of overall power, I agree that blade hands is the best transmutation, because unlike all the others, it just amps up your unarmed damage to a crazy degree without any particularly significant drawback. It makes you like most other standard melee characters, except you'll probably use lighter armor so you can cast it. But I like statue form and dragon form more for ogres. Mostly that likely just comes from an overall bias against blade hands, since I think it's terribly boring. But statue form also gives great defenses with huge HP and nice resists for a species with limited slots. Dragon form on an ogre gives the highest damage output in the game combined with the highest HP. You can even maintain acceptable defense if you have ozo's armor and Chei. A dragonogre can lose 200 HP to cheiwalking next to an orb of fire and not be very bothered because you're still more than half full and you know you're probably going to kill it in one hit.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2017 17:34
|
|
|
That's true, but with the steep cost of unarmed combat I think it's probably better to just go for a few standard, low level utility spells that you'll likely be able to cast if necessary in spite of the penalty. Thinking about it, blade hands does make ranged combat very inconvenient, though, which is a big downside. No ranged weapons, no wands and no high level conjurations. But I rarely try for ranged options on transmuters anyway because you need so much XP just to get your melee and defenses up.Ferrinus posted:I found that playing a vampire in Crypt was really good for immersion/role-playing purposes because I'd practically start salivating IRL as soon as I turned a corner and saw a necromancer or death knight or other enemy that actually had blood in its body. That was basically my experience. I never dropped below full, but I used up all of my potions of blood. I've never had to deal with spider with a vampire and I almost never do extended anymore, but what I hate about them is that even if you go kiku to manage hunger, simply the process of managing it is incredibly tedious. I want rN for this branch, so lets wait for out satiation to go down enough, then whenever I've taken too much damage, corpse drop and drink a bunch of blood, heal up, then hammer 5 again. It's simply awful. Vp is a perfect example of why not every species should have a gimmick. The stats and aptitudes are quite interesting enough by themselves: It's a light armor race that can easily get loads of stealth, can handle melee nicely and is really, really good at hexes. It would be loads of fun to play if its gimmick weren't terrible. Heithinn Grasida fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Jan 27, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2017 18:28
|
|
|
I think I saw someone mention simplifying Vp in ##crawl-dev that suggested letting bloodless vampires heal. I really hope they do that. I agree there's no particular reason to not let them do so. My own suggestion would be to have only 3 states: alive, normal (no status indicator) and undead. Undead has slow regeneration but more resists and alive has fast regeneration but less. Normal is in between. E.g. rN+ all the time, rC+ and rPois at normal, undead resists and the big stealth bonus at undead. They already proposed making all three states have fast metabolism, which is good, but I think it would also be good to increase the satiation gained from drinking blood. That way you actually can easily shift between the states as you want, the way the species description implies, rather than either just ignoring them or having to put up with fiddly, annoying bullshit. Totally unrelated, but I did the desolation of salt yesterday. I've only heard a chorus of praise for it, but I'll add my voice to that as well. Really great flavor and some very interesting enemies. I don't know if this was intentional, but it had a really cool Dark Souls aesthetic that worked very well. Heithinn Grasida fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Jan 28, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2017 08:22
|
|
|
I was just fighting a couple of centaurs in a corridor at low level and quaffed invisibility thinking it would let me kill them before they could kill me. Except that made the centaur in the back take out it's bow and kill both the centaur in front of it and me. Certainly the right choice on the AIs part, but quite counterintuitive for the player.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2017 14:35
|
|
|
I don't think there's a cap. You can certainly get a lot more than that. There's a crazy unrand called the robe of vines that more or less breaks the game and gives you around 3 hp per turn by itself. Demonspawn have the powered by death mutation that also gives you insane regen. My dream character is a monstrous demonspawn with powered by death, spirit shield, augmentation and the robe of vines: extremely durable; incredible melee damage and spellpower; limitless MP.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2017 18:44
|
|
|
Kaedric posted:I have no idea how a squishy character would survive vaults 5 though, that was bonkers. Quaffing haste and running or blinking into one of the corridors lets you funnel things into a more manageable situation. Certain spells can also make a joke of the ambush. Quaffing brilliance and haste before going down the stairs then using ozo's refrigeration is the best way to handle the ambush. It kills everything quickly and quietly, then lets you sneak around and enter the quadrants through the back corners. Be very careful around golden dragons with a refrigerator mage if you don't have rPois, though! Olgreb's toxic radiance is easy to cast, quiet and seriously messes the vault guards up. You can speed up the process with ignite poison, if you want to kill things in a hurry. The comedy option for a caster is to go loud with a CBL servitor, which will bring absolutely everything on the level to your position, but it will also kill all of it, too.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2017 05:23
|
|
|
Haifisch posted:Why stop there? Grab Shatter and spam that until everything is dead. I find a CBL servitor to be even more hilarious than level 9 spells, though it might not be as good now that you can't haste yourself and the servitor and fill the screen with almost 30 3d20 damage balls in the time it takes a vault guard to attack once. To be more serious, I usually take servitor if I'm playing a hybrid that can't easily afford level 9 spells, like an HE (rip) melee character or DE archer. It deals huge damage while you fight and and summoning comes with loads of utility. It's pretty rare that I actually make a CBL servitor, though, since rElec is mandatory and if you can cast a level 7 summon, you usually want to pick up some other summons to go with it. CBL servitors can go nicely with malign gateway, though.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2017 06:19
|
|
(Or one of the other L9s, but Shatter's more fun)
|
Internet Kraken posted:How the hell can you use CBJ with a Servitor and not kill yourself? I tried teaching it to mine last game and it spammed it against the most trivial threats. Which is a problem when the ball lightning still hurts you, and even with rElec it adds up when its casting that poo poo constantly. I don't get a chance to do it all that often, but when I did, since this "combo" means CBL is your only attack spell except for possibly chain lightning or tornado, it was always on a hybrid who had solid weapon skills. So I never bust out the servitor against minor threats. When I do summon it, I play the same was as when I'm casting CBL by itself. Cast at enemies far away while gradually retreating and trying to stay out of the blast radius of the ball lightning. With a servitor, it will eventually get in the enemies' face and blow everything up (including itself, though it has rElec++ so it dies more slowly than the enemy.) Once it starts getting close to enemies, you need to be quite a few tiles away unless you're positive there won't be reinforcements. Don't use the servitor, or CBL at all, against yaktaur packs, since they'll pop the ball lightings while they're still close to you. It's at its best on an archer with portal projectile, who can stand well away and shoot enemies past the ball lightnings.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2017 17:00
|
|
|
LordSloth posted:but it won't screw you over like Nightstalker on a DsFE you planned to firestorm with. But nightstalker is amazing for fire magic since you can fireball and firestorm enemies out of LoS. It has a counter-synergy with Vehumet, but even that is more disappointing than anything else. If you start a DsFE and get nightstalker before you pick a god, go with Ashenzari! That will let you sense the monsters past LoS and bomb them safely. The only characters for which nightstalker has a legitimately negative impact are dedicated ranged weapon users, and even then it's pretty small.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2017 05:01
|
|
|
Internet Kraken posted:I'll be honest, the main reason I almost always go for 15 runes is because I have an obsession with collecting as many unique skill titles as possible. Hard to do that without a glut of experience points. Actually, I find wizard to be the least XP hungry book start and perfectly fine on poor casting apt starts. You do have to adjust your strategy depending, though. For most wizards, I take conjurations to 4-5 and spellcasting to 4, which gets you a good enough magic dart to handle the first few floors, blink, repel missiles, and meph cloud castable by xl 3, conjure flame castable by xl 5 and enough MP to use your spells. Then you start training a weapon. By comparison, with other good hybrid starts, I typically take 7 or so in a main skill, e.g. ice magic, 4 in an off skill, e.g. summoning, and around 5 spellcasting. VM and Ne can get by with just 7 in one skill and the spellcasting. For wizards with poo poo aptitudes, or at least poo poo conj, I usually ignore magic dart and rely on summon imp to handle early levels. Even at very low power you often get a white imp, which destroys everything through d:4. So you only need maybe a point or two in air, fire and poison and some spellcasting, which you can get while simultaneously training a weapon skill.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2017 08:48
|
|
|
Sage Grimm posted:HuWz. HaWz (favouring Charms and Translocations). Barachian Wizard (trunk only). MfWz. DrWz. Joke option Vampire Wizard. HaWz, Barachian Wizard and MfWz all have weak int and will have a really hard time casting at the power of HEWz. They are solidly on the opposite end of the hybrid spectrum from HE, using limited magic to bolster strong defense and melee. HuWz and DrWz are closer, but still lack the apts and stats to accomplish the same thing. They are overall more powerful than HE was, though, you just have to focus a lot more on one type of casting. TeWz might be closest but not only do the apts push you in a very different direction, TE has power, but lacks HE's flexibility. Also, -20% HP is awful. Ds hybrids are just as fun as HE was, but for quite different reasons. I find vampire sort of scratches the same itch as high elf. You have HE-lite stats (above average int and dex), but good HP and either fast regen or strong built-in resistances and stealth. Hexes are good and fun, give you a feeling of really kicking rear end at high spellpower and offer the biggest toolbox of any school. A high hexes aptitude is way cooler than high charms. You also lack the flexibility of HE, but don't feel the lack quite so much because you're super strong in the utility school. I proposed a "replacement species" for HE on the tavern and even coded it, but was unsure of the balance and couldn't quite work up the courage to be rejected by ##crawl-dev. It had HE stats, HP and XL growth, but to distinguish it, it got +3 spellcasting, slightly low overall schools, double MP costs and a spellpower boost. The idea was that they'd be incredible casters who could pick up a big range of spells, but had a hard tactical limit on what they could cast, like spriggan has a hard strategic limit. So, they have to fall back on their good combat apts much sooner because they run out of MP easily. They got some auxiliary attacks to make close combat a little more attractive than it was for HE, especially early.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2017 03:09
|
|
|
Brendan Rodgers posted:Maybe do that instead of removing High Elves and Sludge Elves which I quite liked playing, dunno who they were hurting by being there as options. The best argument for species removal that I've seen is that more species creates more of an intellectual load on the player. A huge wall of choices right at the beginning of the game is overwhelming, especially considering how many species Crawl gives you already, and it's overly demanding to figure out exactly what they all do beyond their short description, especially if the differences between them aren't very big. So there has to be an upper limit to the number of species, and since it would be nice to add species that are more strongly distinguished and interesting in the future, it's necessary to remove those that are found less interesting at present. I completely agree with that. But, I don't think HE was less interesting, especially than something like Ha. The devs have made several revisions to Ha to save it by distinguishing it from kobolds, however I still don't think it offers a particularly interesting niche.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2017 03:42
|
|
|
PleasingFungus posted:Why not just give them low MP, instead of a custom double MP mechanic? That occurred to me and it would be a lot more elegant. But I'd need to look more at how MP is handled in general. I'd be worried that, say, -30% MP wouldn't really be restrictive enough and you'd be able to overcome it too easily if you found a ring of magical power or a staff of power. Not that I think it's terrible if it's possible for the player to overcome the restriction at all, but if it were too easy then I'd be worried that high int, +3 spellcasting and +30% spellpower by level 12 (completely arbitrary) would make them too good. As it is, because of their +2 base MP and high spellcasting, they almost don't feel the difference with book starts at very low levels, but you really have to think about when you want to cast your higher level spells, which I really like. I am worried double MP is too much, though. Another, less good reason is that I was worried low MP wouldn't be weird and different enough to sell.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2017 04:58
|
|
|
It looks like you haven't done depths yet. I would do that first. Holy wrath won't help you much there, though it honestly feels like icing on the cake for a vinestalker anyway. I typically only do the TSO switch after clearing Zot, but I can see doing it earlier. Don't underestimate the wrath, though! If you switch late, you could just stick with TSO. I think Zin is more fun, but isn't necessarily better. Vitalization is super nice for VS, though, since the bite benefits strongly from high stats. Zin is also helpful everywhere if you decide to switch early, but is heavily dependent on invocations.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2017 08:54
|
|
|
Dongsturm posted:There are plenty of game design options that can hide that complexity from the player, like unlocks, new game + mode, etc. I'm not sure that the people who make Crawl necessarily envision complexity as one of its key features. I can't really imagine it as having things like unlocks and new game + while still being Crawl. There is a certain dogmatic insistence on simplicity regarding certain aspects of the game (e.g. no melee abilities) that really defines the game's spirit. Furthermore, the developers have a preference for removing features that they feel don't fit with the game. While it sometimes feels like things are removed based on an elitist and arbitrary "right way to play" defined by the posts of a few people in ##crawl and the tavern, overall I think demanding a certain degree of simplicity and the willingness to remove features is very healthy for the game. That's why I think the removal of HE, my favorite species, is an opportunity to design a race that better fills the design niche that was lost with its removal rather than something just to be complained about. Panic! at Nabisco posted:Short blade converts well into long blade mastery, but I've yet to find a demon blade in my game. Couple of demon tridents in shoals and a demon whip in vaults, but that's it. I have a manual of polearms, would training that up from 0 to use a trishula be at all worth it? I would just stick with the quickblade. I've done extended several times with a VS using a quickblade of holy wrath and felt very powerful each time. I was also casting lots of spells, though, which gets really amazing with the constant MP replenishment late game vinestalkers get. I haven't done the math, but with vitalization I think the quickblade will outdamage a demonblade against anything but the very hardest targets. You will be guaranteed a bite, boosted considerably by high str, with every swing while under vitalization. And that's not to mention the stabs.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2017 11:54
|
|
|
Floodkiller posted:Another approach you can look at for MP restriction is the antimagic brand's effect on your MP. Making that a species mutation and lowering the extremity (maybe to 50% to match your current approach) might solve the issue of reducing the MP without either doubling all spells or giving the players an out from low MP with a single MP+ item. Thanks! I somehow forgot completely about antimagic, probably because I've only ever won 3-4 characters with a casting skill under 10. That looks like it would simplify things nicely and also allow a more flexible approach that avoids confusing issues like fractional increases of MP costs.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2017 14:58
|
|
|
Internet Kraken posted:Can vinestalkers heal via potion petition effects or does that count as a device heal still? I assume however it works for them is also how it works for anyone wearing the robe of vines. I've only worn the robe of vines twice, but it was flat out amazing each time. I imagine it's pretty much always worth it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2017 07:12
|
|
|
Panic! at Nabisco posted:What sort of spells were you using? I can't train spellcasting right now because of Trog, but once I switch to TSO I can start, and I have plenty of spellbooks I've been picking up and not burning. Sorry, I missed your post. I was casting a lot because I usually start with caster starts and pretty much always have level 9 spells by extended. Dragon's call is amazing for VS, since because you never run out of mana, you never run out of dragons. Tornado is great, too. But for a primarily melee character, the usual suspects are most appropriate. Blink, song of slaying, regeneration, spectral weapon, repel missiles, silence for tomb, if you can swing it, summon butterflies; I'm sure there are a few more I'm forgetting.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2017 12:28
|
|
|
I don't care about scarves, but I'm glad repel missiles is gone. Balance issues aside, it wasn't an interesting spell and its removal actually might make charms more relevant since you have to invest in the school to get deflect missiles instead. I do think the charms school is badly in need of some new, interesting high level additions to make investment worthwhile. A lot of people like buffs simply as a gameplay concept, and a buff dedicated spell school seems like a very natural thing for the game to have. But at the current rate, the school might as well be removed if it doesn't get something to make it more relevant. I love brainstorming spells and have a few ideas, but I don't think they're necessarily good ones: Charms/Conjurations 7 -- Rune of Reaving. Melee version of spellforged servitor. When you cast it, you get -cast for 5-6 and rune of reaving for 3-4 turns. The rune makes each of your melee attacks have a chance to cast a conjuration you know on the monster you hit. You lose two to three MP per turn whether or not you attack. Blast shapes like fireball and freezing cloud explode outward from you in a cone. Charms/Hexes 7 -- Word of Stillness. Makes every monster in line of sight forget about you and makes you undetectable for several turns as long as you don't cast or attack. Consumes all your remaining MP. Charms 7 -- Grand Glamor -- Wreathes you in an aura of awe that mesmerizes all enemies, causing them to more often prefer moving towards you rather than using ranged attacks or casting spells. Enemies that attack you in melee have to perform an HD check to succeed (minimum 50% chance of success for the weakest enemies). Also mesmerizes you towards the nearest enemy. Any other ideas for new charms?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2017 05:56
|
|
|
SKULL.GIF posted:I'm sorry about your mental state, but we did dramatically buff Mummy spellcasting back when the yellow wands were nuked. What bothers you right now about Mummies? A different, but related topic is that without the haste spell and yellow wands, necromutation is now indisputably awful. It has always been something that a certain segment of the player base has held very strong views against, but whereas in the past there could be legitimate arguments for learning and casting the spell, it's hard to imagine that it would ever be worth it for anyone at this point. Necromutation now seems to be exclusively a trap option that gives experienced players something to feel smug about. Either liches should just be allowed to drink potions (boring, removes the main interesting drawback of the spell), the spell level should be knocked down to 6 dual school or 7 single school, or it should be changed in some other way.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2017 08:51
|
|
|
Araganzar posted:Removing rMut without fixing malmutations breaks several Dev platform promises by repealing the Affordable Malmutations Care Act without replacing those provisions that allowed those of us whose employers do not donate regularly to United Zin to keep our families mutation free. Malmutations are not a big deal for score players - for the rest of us they are total boner killers. Berserkitis, Teleportitis, wand MP, placid Magic, these are all just fun-wrecking. I agree with all of this.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2017 17:06
|
|
|
Darth Windu posted:I love that you can just close the door on a monstrous rampaging six headed hydra and he can't do sh*t about it You can close the door on a orb of fire and it can't do anything about it!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2017 17:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:39 |
|
|
SKULL.GIF posted:A couple thoughts after reading the last few pages: My opinion on this: First point, I agree that SA can often be negative. But, at least of the threads I typically follow, except maybe with Dark Souls 2, excessive negativity has mostly been limited to a few posters. Overly negative and unproductive posters are quickly chased out of threads. Those who are critical, but have constructive ideas, however, typically are not. I don't agree with most of the complaints in this thread, but I do think that the developers have a dogmatic tendency to unfairly classify criticism coming from certain quarters as being not valuable, however logical or well expressed it might be. The defining crawl culture is mostly on the tavern and ##crawl, and that is often at odds with what's expressed on SA. That does not mean SA is completely wrong. There are a lot of good and well thought out opinions here, even if there's also some bullshit and the intelligent posters don't always express themselves in a way that's pleasant to hear. For the second point, this is something I think of as pure dogmatism, that for the most part I can accept purely on aesthetic grounds. Any argument that players will somehow be misled is absurd. Yes, people will be misled. That's not the issue. People don't understand probability and any game that presents unfiltered percentage chances will mislead players. Yet almost every single game gives explicit numbers, however, and players accept the numbers as par for the course and never feel angry about being given numbers in the first place, just that somehow the numbers lied. But players already feel that the numbers, or the RNG or what have you is lying to them in Crawl. Hiding information does not prevent that feeling, it exacerbates it. Crawl's accuracy and damage is overly abstruse, but not incredibly far in excess of some other games. Yet no other game I've ever played, read about or seen goes so far to hide basic gameplay information as DCSS. The only argument that makes any sense at all for hiding it comes from either simple, misguided elitism or from an adherence to a long standing aesthetic decision to not present too many numbers. The aesthetic argument makes Crawl unique, for better or for worse, and I can accept, though I doubt the games identity would suffer greatly from more clarity. SKULL.GIF posted:players already get frustrated with the chance-to-succeed that we display for hexes. I have only ever seen praise for this amazing improvement to the game. Ferrinus posted:* Singularity MarvinPA Delenda Est! (Seriously, please bring back Singularity, but don't destroy MarvinPA!)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2017 19:52
|
|