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I didn't play during meleebug, so I can't comment on how noticeable it was. Myself, I hadn't played crawl in some time when I played during melee bug, so it was easy to explain away that I was simply misremembering the lack of effectiveness of short blade damage. (and also misremembering the level ...

Right now a lot of the spellcaster game seems to be: unload MP pool at enemies; retreat to a safe location; rest to regain MP; repeat. This adds a fair amount of tedium to casters - it would be better if they only needed to disengage because they were actually in danger (like melee) and not because...

On the whole I want to play more games where my primary/initial way of killing foes is to cast spells. But my book background D:1 and D:2 life usually looks like this ...."Blast your L1 spell, burn through your 3/4/5 starting points of MP, run away and pillar dance foes until restoring some MP...

I always thought fantasy ogres used clubs because they're big and stupid; a large club is relatively easy to make and requires little sophistication in its use. And they were effective with large clubs simply because of their massive strength and the size of the weapon, not because they were particu...

Steel Neuron wrote:Reap will immediately target the next closest living creature, and it will continue to target enemies until nothing in LOS remains alive.

This sounds like it has a nasty interaction with plants, given how they tend to be distributed. Should probably exclude them too.

Unless you intend to remove every > 10 aut action from the game, which I doubt. Which are left? Slow movement, actions under the effect of slow... anything else? I don't count multi-turn actions, since AFAIK those are mechanically just a sequence of several 1.0 aut actions executed with a single UI...

For example, a weapon that takes 1.4 auts to swing (after accounting for skill, of course) would now take 1.0 auts to swing, but have its damage multiplied by 10/14. This is mostly a nerf to damage output (it magnifies the effects of enemy AC), but is a buff when using speed-based effects (e.g. elec...

Also, in my opinion, the AE start has a distinctive feel of being fairly active and erratic; Airstrike is the epitome of everything the AE start is not.

I'm not entirely certain if that's an argument for or against including it.

Airstrike is a level 4 single-school spell that ignores EV. It checks rWind and does extra damage to fliers. While it's sold that way, it would be more accurate to say that Airstrike suffers a penalty against non-flying monsters. While the literally the same thing, the latter description carries th...

From an IRC conversation (I don't mean to imply that eb endorses or indeed has ever seen this idea, but it was their remarks that got me thinking): <eb> tbh I don't like newdrain or at least how it is used for everything <eb> more things that try to kill the player directly pls <eb> it makes sense ...

I'm not saying "don't add something" -- I'm saying "add the better thing" or at least "add the simpler thing that tells you the same information as the thing you're suggesting in the situations it's actually accurate but is less likely to be misleading about its usefulness&q...

You're right, Hurkyl, DPA wouldn't give a precise picture of how much damage you can deal based on AC. That is not the point of the feature. The idea here is to help players choose between, for instance, a broad axe and a battleaxe of different enchantment levels and brands, at a non-optimal aptitu...

The point of this is not to know exactly how much damage you deal, but rather comparing the relative damage of weapons you might want to wield. Knowing the average damage roll per aut is only good for comparing relative damage of two weapons of the same delay -- a quick blade suffers around twice a...

A variant I would have liked to have is that no artifacts generate.

IIRC, Zap's range is actually longer than LOS, but won't actually hit anything further from you than LOS. I wonder if something happened in the relevant handling of spell range vs. LOS which inadvertently nerfed Zap as a side effect?

That reminds me of my easiest Zot:5 clear ever -- I had a lot of stat rot to rest off for my mummy, so I just sat on the stairs in an open room overlooking the vault entrance and spammed tornado/OOD/chain lightning whenever something came into view. By the time the stat rot was gone, the level was b...

Try using Axes next time, too. Moving around in combat as a MiBe is something you really shouldn't need to do a whole lot of. I really like axes, but I absolutely hate hydras. Is a MiBe strong enough to kill those without resorting to tactics like switching to a backup mace? Nothing particularly wr...

IIRC, gift timeouts cause piety gain to be paused until they expire. Book gifting has been moved to 5 stars, right? That would explain why piety gain becomes very slow. I guess the intention here is to prevent casting level 9 spells like Dragoncall at 50% failure rate because old Sif used to give yo...

That's a very boring safe option, though. "Use only your starting gear or risk getting stuck with something cursed" is much more interesting than "use only non-magic gear or risk getting stuck with something cursed." "Finding loot you can use on the first five floors of the...

Example B definitely used to multizap both locations -- have the actual mechanics changed?

I don't like the idea of making charms permanent, personally. Feels like bad design, cramming a strategic advantage (such as that afforded by gear) into the spell system, which is specifically designed for tactical usage. I know people are trying to shift the design in that direction, but it looks ...

Sprucery wrote:Note that you don't have to take down orbs of fire.

I always found the advice to avoid them odd -- if you leave them wandering around, they are far more capable than most monsters of totally ruining your day by reappearing at an inopportune moment.

Haste was bad because "no-brainer strategic decision". In other words, if the Charm is universally good for every melee character, demanding steep XP investment is not good enough for the cost. I bet that's not true. If your not zigrunning, is your CPA wearing MiFi really going to learn H...

Necromutation also helps for food reasons if your character is set up to spam lvl 8/9 spells. I know I've had Spriggans spam Tornado/channeling enough in extended that I would have run out of food if I had to cover the food costs with permafood.

Ah! I think the focus on trying to prevent people from keeping a charm active all the time is a red herring -- instead, the focus should be on the problem* that people want to use their charms every fight. I imagine if people usually want to not use a charms in fights, then it would probably follow ...

Before we go too far down this path... is this fun? Self-inflicting temporary mutations to get various effects sounds more frustrating than enjoyable. (unless you're in the mood for randomness) Also, it doesn't sound like charms; it sounds more like chaos magic or some sort of sacrifice-flavored mag...

I would not define "fun" == "uncomplicated" Neither would I. But more to the point, neither would I define "fun" == "complicated", nor "complicated" == "complex". I feel like we're not really talking about the original prompt "UX is e...

An excellent game that's no fun to play is not an excellent game. Fiddly bits are only good if it's fun fiddling with them.

It is very hard to balance game when players can cast Haste as often as they like (80-90 times in my 3 rune games). Contamination does not matter with enough patience as Haste itself gives you a way to escape from 99% fights and then you press 5 several times. No it's not; for starters you could ju...

In my opinion, the concept of charms is primarily interesting in the form a strategic choice. If you find a book on D:3, the decision to be a charm user comes at the cost of wearing lighter armor and spending XP on the Charm skill (and relevant secondary spell skills) rather than on things like impr...

What does gameplay with good charms look like? --- I think that's the most important question to get a handle on; it doesn't make sense trying to design charms if you don't know what result you want! (I have my own vision, but I'm pretty sure it's diametrically opposed to what dpeg wants to see in g...

Seriously, I just want to have the upper bound of damage for a given weapon shown to me. Or at least give me the formula here, because AFAIK the damage formula is a simple 1dX matter that grows linearly. It's not! In the simplest case, the damage roll for your weapon is (1d(X * (1 + (2/39) * 1dY)) ...

Two shots of tornado in the open will kill TRJ and most/all of his splits; all you have to do is stay nearby not die. Mainly, that boils down to having a decent EV score, Deflect Missiles and knowing how to move in a Tornado to keep from being surrounded. (the main danger source with this approach i...

Remove Charms. Add "Alchemy" skill that functions as a crafting system, and strew aroud herbs in the dungeon that PC can collect. This way we'll have a truly strategic buff system. And introduce herb seeds and Gardening skill and make herb growth follow the rules of Conway's Game of Life....

Won't trying to make tactical decisions with extremely incomplete information based on small sample sizes induce a much larger cognitive load than doing so with more known information? Let's pretend you are a player who has never used Sequell data or the wiki in your life. I think the point is supp...

Big LOS is better when things are only scary nearby. Small LOS is better when distant things are scary.

To be clear, that post was addressing hurkyl only, and only because he felt he knew the dev team's motivations better than members of that team do. The motivations don't really matter so much to me, it's the actions. I don't think the the devs intend to be ideologues -- I think it's an emergent pro...

But listen to what I'm saying: no one is starting from "let's hide all the numbars!" People are trying to determine as best they can which numbers to show directly and which to show as ballparks and which to not show at all. It's not evident to me. But, admittedly, after being told so man...

As for the science behind this, this discussion isn't about science. It's about user experience, and how to present information to a player in the ideal way to allow them to best interact with the game. AFAIK, no one is obscuring the numbers just for the sake of obscuring them. The question is &quo...

AC also matters to characters prone to firing around magic darts and hitting things with poorly enchanted short blades.

The ballpark feedback the game gives you is enough to make good decisions in most cases. How much science is behind this? While I recognize the noble intent, my impression of the actual execution is that obfuscation is done for the sake of having obfuscation rather than being tuned for usefulness -...

I personally find playing centaurs interminably boring due to the constant kiting and ammo retrieval, but I accept that they are objectively a powerful race. I'd rather think of this as a difference in taste rather than a failure in game design. It's not really the same thing. Choosing a game varia...

duvessa wrote:That sounds awfully complicated.

Although the mechanic looks complicated, it's not obvious to me that the gameplay effect is complicated.

I started with SpEn, so unseen horrors were just a large pink chunk of exp with no danger attached.

For non-permanent charms that augment melee damage, at first glance there are two viable main categories: ⋅ Charms that ultimately outdamage a single casting of a comparable conjuration, but this is balanced by the fact you only get the damage if you spend the next X turns doing melee &sd...

duvessa wrote:Uh, no. Monster AC and player AC have the same effect. If you were talking about EV or SH, sure, that would be a good argument.

But the qualitative features of the player damage roll are different than the monster damage roll.

(also, do monsters get GDR? I don't know)

It is obvious to me that Swiftness is the best-designed charm spell in the game right now: It's a powerful short-duration buff immediately followed by a powerful short-duration debuff. You can't have it up all the time (non-passive), you can't cast it multiple times in a row (non-spammy), and you h...

I met a player ghost on Vaults 1 and it had "AC ********" What does it mean? Please display it as "AC 40-45" so I can compare it to my own AC and monsters with AC 10-15 which I was fighting before. Comparison to your own AC is not helpful, because the mechanics of PC hitting mon...

My instincts are that for this line of thought to work well, we have to get to a point where players are expected to have charms up which, while I think is a good place to be, is currently an anathema to the dev position.

CypherZel wrote:
duvessa wrote:
nago wrote:I think duvessa posted long time ago a full spoilery list of what brand are elegible for each weapon, but I can't find it.
It's here, but it's out of date. The silly monster equipment cases are still a thing, though.

Wtf is a hammer

Only crazy people collect them.

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