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I actually prefer paralysis from god wrath and hell effects: it forces you to play cautiously in case it happens, but once it happens, you at least know it’s not going to happen again for a while; this is not true for the paralysis spell. But you hate paralysis from hell effects! I lost a well-gear...

We already have Makhleb who does random elemental blasts and random summons. And Nemelex too, for that matter. Do we really need Qazlal to be a third deity who does basically the same thing? Regardless of the design process that went into Qazlal's creation, the noise conduct is really the only part ...

Throw Flame is actually quite good. There's a tiny part of its power curve where it's not as good as Flame Tongue, but it becomes better in dangerous fights as soon as you have a little extra mp so you can actually kill those dangerous things with it. 6mp is just really very bad to have as you entir...

KoboldLord then are these problems: there is no potion nor scroll destruction nor cap, so you can stockpile them I acknowledge as a problem the fact that I've virtually never had the experience of running out of any important consumables after around Lair or so. Fixing item generation is a hard pro...

The distinct benefit of Nemelex is that your spendable piety stockpile is distinct from your piety income. Every other deity has a soft-cap on piety, such that if you hoard it your income gets less and less until you effectively can't get any more until you spend some. The normal piety dynamic is ac...

Perhaps bring back item sacrifice? The problem with the old item sacrifice is that it was unbearable inventory management, but that can be fixed by making item sacrifice compulsory and automatic, applied to all items. No key pressing necessary, if you see an item Nemelex takes it after perhaps 100 t...

Right; and I probably wouldn't have said anything if it weren't for the fact the OP's description that the character makes 'heavy use of conjurations' which makes me think it isn't a character resembling your description. When one of the best possible equipment options for the specific character th...

#1: Replace all stairs in Tomb with escape hatches. Add escape hatches going the other direction on the other side of enemies. #2: Don't have mandatory rooms filled with dozens of copies of the same enemy that spams Torment while standing behind walls of chaff. Step two is pretty important, and shou...

all before: Yes, resource management is one part of it. But I like to believe there is more: early on, with every ?id you pick up, you have to decide on what to use it. I don't think that the answer is obvious in all cases. For example, if I have trouble killing monsters, I may actually expend it o...

It's very easy to set up a bounce on a specific monster, and it does more damage than your other options when you do. It's definitely the fastest way for an AE to take out large and scary things at range, and sometimes killing things fast is worth other sorts of drawbacks. The noise can cause compli...

It works better in narrow areas than it does in wide-open areas, but basically you see a scary thing, spew out some butterflies, and then you runrunrun while the butterflies flutter around where you just were. Most monsters kill one butterfly per turn, and they generally only need to have to kill tw...

If you've made it to Elf 2 on any build that needs a weapon, you should have already committed to your weapon and used your enchant scrolls on it, because otherwise you are probably already dead. Monsters do kind of get dangerous eventually if you insist on using a +0 unbranded battleaxe or greatswo...

Yes, they've been buffed. They used to be a joke monster, but now they have a hunger attack that means you should basically never melee them. They're also very fast so you can't run away except through extraordinary means, so basically you hose them down with elemental evokers, summons, or other ran...

Shard: because some players keep saying that ninjaing runes/orb is already the best and safest way. That does not really match up with my experience, but I am not a very good player. nago: I've explained why I don't want resistances on runes. And being immune to acidic walls certainly makes Slime e...

The brute force approach with Venom Bolt does work against black mambas and spiny frogs simply because they only have so many hit points, but it isn't an approach I would choose to use if I had a viable alternative. They'll generally run out of hp from scratch damage before you run out of mp as long...

You don't exactly have much else to spend the piety on. As long as you keep enough in the tank for liberal use of Scrying there's no reason not to salvage that tiny trickle of points. You are early enough in the game that reskilling your weapon isn't too much trouble even without Transfer Knowledge,...

Faith is better for gaining piety to use on spamming divine abilities. Regen is better for rapidly regaining hit points after battle so you spend less time vulnerable to wandering monsters. In general, assuming you have a good divine ability that you would want to spam, you should use faith because ...

Dying to a jackal after chain-miscasting your entire mp bar is just part of the spellcaster experience. 10% miscast isn't atypical for species not specifically suited to a book background, but that problem fixes itself pretty quickly for most of them. It could reasonably be argued that this should n...

For mummies, confusion is worse than paralysis. In the case of paralysis, at least you get to fast-forward past the non-interactive part of the game where you wait out the status effect. For confusion, you have to manually advance the clock one tick at a time while completely helpless to do anything...

I say go right ahead and give low-level demons an actually dangerous spell, and move them a little deeper in level generation if need be. Crimson imps can cast Sticky Flame. The player spell need not match any monster that the player can actually fight, since player-summoned monsters that the player...

In the general case, I'll take plate over robes on D1-2 for any background that doesn't start with a book, no question. EV builds can be good, but you don't have what you need to get them ahead of the curve by D2, and for an AC build just having D2 plate is already ahead of the curve at that point. ...

Pocket Spell is open to quite a few major abuse cases. Delayed Fireball is a fine effect because direct damage is an abundant resource, and an ability that gives you a little bit more of it for one turn in a given fight is nice but not particularly unusual. A 0-time Controlled Blink, on the other ha...

I should've probably made it clear that I was asking minmay about his "sif is already better than okawaru" statement, because it sounds completely backwards for me and I want to know why am I stupid It's all channeling. Okawaru has some useful abilities that make your character better at ...

The impact of many changes are not necessarily obvious without actually trying them. If you suddenly decide to cut the amount of water in the soup you are making by half, it will probably end up far too salty, but you won't be able to identify that problem because your solid ingredients will all be ...

Usually I leave randarts on the floor, because I can tell at a glance that they are going to be useless junk for my character. Almost all weapons and body armors fall into this category, and those are the majority of generated artifacts. If we're talking about an aux body slot randart, then I will p...

This has the same issue as mimics. It's now technically optimal to walk by every space methodically. Clearly swamp worms need to be able to leap up out of the water at you, so you don't have to actually touch the tile where they start. A one-shot blink close whenever they become aware of you would ...

That's a bit of an exaggeration. I can't even remember the last time I bothered kill-holing E3, even though I loot that branch far more often than I should. You just use the same tactics as every other part of the game up until this point; get the attention of the first elf in line and then book it ...

a) Farming is never supposed to be encuraged. Making it a good idea to sit on a level for a long to to gain a good hide is bad. Sitting on an early-game level until a shadow dragon spawns is a bad idea regardless of whether you want a hide or not, because a shadow dragon will kill you. The part abo...

I think it might be worthwhile adding more dragons to the Lair list. Dragons and ice dragons are both vault spawns already, so they clearly must be manageable for Lair-capable characters, so it wouldn't be unfair if they could randomly pop up anywhere starting around halfway through Lair. Swamp drag...

A third of your piety is a LOT, especially given that this would be a lot harsher on lower-level characters, who are more likely to be upgrading gear (yes they lose less absolute piety, but it would still be devastating). A better idea would be to have the Ash ability cost a moderate to high amount...

It is a good idea, but it would be better with just a little more ambition. Remove the remove curse scroll, too, and have normal curses time out with xp. That system has been demonstrated to work way better for temporary strategic penalties than requiring the player to grab a consumable off the pile...

You have conjure flame, sticky flame, and fireball all easily castable. You can finish lair with that. Do this thing. You just have to match up the right spell with the right target. Mambas and spiny frogs will normally be killed with fireball or conjure flame, while you can kill any number of deat...

Most malmutations don't really even do anything, particularly at the low levels that actually come up in normal play. There are a handful that are really bad, but something like -2 to dex is technically bad, but it's probably going to be at most 1 point of EV in the end. The impact of most malmutati...

If blowguns use the breath timer, that means that normal use with standard poison needles will involve a dozen or so turns of kiting for every single needle. I'd really rather this not be the case. I don't really put much weight on the impact a particular ability has on optional post-game boss fights.

I don't have particularly strong feelings on the subject, but three people probably isn't enough to make for a useful group to single out. I would bet that most new users don't even know what the name colors mean.

I seem to often end up with too many unidentified potions and scrolls that I then at some point have to just "take a gamble" with when I'm in a jam, often turning myself into a poisoned, hasted, flying, agile, brilliant tree. While that does occasionally allow me to survive, it doesn't qu...

If you train invocations heavily, an Elyvilonite can choose to skip any battle that looks like it might be tough, or sometimes even irritating, so long as the monster involved isn't mindless. You can just say, 'No, I don't want to fight Rupert today. I think I'll just edit that out,' and Rupert will...

I usually use regeneration for in-combat healing, so turning it off whenever there's a monster in sight seems terrible to me. An MP toggle/slot system sounds interesting, depending on the details. I'd like to see something where most characters can get one perm charm slot fairly easily, and for a d...

There is no reason for Regeneration to ever turn off. The mp and nutrition costs are not relevant basically ever, so it might as well be a passive buff that just works in exchange for the three spell slots. It could be argued that the turn spent casting it could be a relevant consideration in certai...

Arrhythmia wrote:Darkness is level 6.

Oh, right. That's a change since the last time I used it. Apologies, I did forget that. I imagine I would help somewhat, but I still wouldn't put 12~15 skill levels into hexes to make a 6th-level spell usable unless I was already planning heavy investment.

The effect is strong, but the issue it has is that it requires a cost-prohibitive investment to make it usable. If you already went all-in on hexes and it actually spawns, then you might as well use it, but that's a minority of characters. Level 7 spells are pretty expensive, and you still need a lo...

The devteam thought of that, and made a special case in the code so you couldn't do it.

If you have a reusable source of mp recovery that doesn't involve resting, though, you can still use that.

Hungry ghosts can straight-up murder you if you let them close to melee. Old-version harpies could also straight-up murder you, but they did it through hit point damage rather than through food destruction. Harpies' ability to destroy food was not actually related to their ability to present a credi...

Fighters are mostly good for lengthening a streak of won games without having to resort to a difficult background. This is only relevant for long streaks, since there are plenty of redundant backgrounds with or without using fighter. They are mostly indistinguishable from gladiator; the starting ski...

If you can compensate for the fact that it is awful and makes you wish for the sweet release of death, channeling is really strong. It is Sif Muna's only relevant power, but it is a doozy of a power even if it is a miserable chore to actually use that power. As long as you have chunks, you can basic...

Wild experimentation usually gets pushed into its own little branch. Once it gets bashed into being actually mostly functional, then it gets turned over to the trunk players for playtesting. There's no sense giving playtesters your code if it doesn't actually work yet when they could be testing the ...

The paralysis is only really awful if you're fighting dangerous monsters when it happens. If you're just hammering down a single mind worm with maybe a little chaff, you can just finish killing it and then take off the shield. If you're fighting a mind worm and a bunch of dangerous monsters with 1 i...

Stat drain is not really a factor here. If the character gets surprised by a bunch of int drain… it can take off the shield. The stat goes back above 0 immediately, and the brainless status goes away after a little bit of extra time. +6 vamp demon blade is really good. You might as well strap on som...

Ghost moths used to appear in portal vaults in mid-Lair. Those were fun. I only managed to clear them a couple times, but I was almost always able to escape alive.

Quarterstaff is the best starting weapon. Why would it make sense to make the monk a clearly superior vanilla melee backgrounds than the other vanilla melee backgrounds?

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