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One bee would be relatively reasonable, but I think bees only generate in swarms. And yes, I'm not saying there's *never* a situation where a character can survive encountering a bee swarm on D:2, in fact if I could choose which consumables to have randomly found by that point in the game, I'm certa...

You'd have to be pretty lucky to get a consumable that would save you from a bee swarm before finishing D:2, and if you stayed close enough to stairs to be able to escape the much faster than average bees, you'd likely never discover a stairwell down to D:3. Most characters do not start with nets, a...

Most characters on D:2 won't have the tools to successfully fight or flee from a swarm of killer bees. This scenario involves no meaningful decisions and no relevance to player skill, and as such does not meet the design goals.

My folder name contains 0.23-a0-577, so I guess I should update. Thanks.

I liked the dispersal traps until I stabbed a sleeping Sonja who happened to be generated on one, meaning I couldn't collect the loot. I approve of the revealed traps idea in general, but at this point Ashenzari should really be either reworked or removed. A big part of the god's identity is providi...

Not every threat needs to work against every character build, though. The whole point of having a variety of threats is so that if a character is built to negate some of them, there will still be others that are harder for it to deal with. I do agree with your point about the ranged ability giving m...

It's more that I just think gaze attacks aren't very interesting, and between that and how the existing petrification attacks are ranged, *if* a new one were to be added, melee would make for better variety. Btw, if melee status effects are almost never good because they're too easy to avoid, does t...

if Snake should get a new petrifying monster, especially a fast one, I'd rather see a petrifying bite that bypasses magic resistance than another petrifying gaze that you render harmless with magic resistance.

I don't think portal vaults even need timers, really; there's still the fact that they close when you leave in order to pressure players into deciding how much of it they're willing to risk trying to clear. Also, the strategic decision about when a character should risk entering one is more interest...

It's true in theory, but not so much in practice... particularly when you consider that not every background even starts with spells. The degree to which Spellcraft is trained can have a huge impact on the hunger costs of spells, and investing skill xp into magic schools instead of Spellcraft can ge...

One change I would still make is to greatly increase the number of destruction cards compared to summoning/escape - by their nature, a single destruction card does less than a single summoning/escape card. Currently the weights are 5:4:2 destruction:summoning:escape, which is 46%:36%:18%. I think i...

I like CBoE in theory, but I never end up using it in practice. The idea of gambling on MP recovery is appealing, especially when average results become more favorable with increased skill investment, but the confusion and INT damage are much bigger deterrents now that amulets of clarity and rings o...

+1 to duvessa's advice, and I'll add that I make a point to chop up at least one corpse at the end of every fight that leaves one, regardless of my nutrition level, and that I generally don't eat a ration until I'm at least nearly starving, if not starving, now that it only takes 1 turn to eat a rat...

Using Necromutation to circumvent spell hunger strikes me as highly inadvisable. If you can't find or acquire a staff of energy, +INT gear and Spellcasting (which any magic user that cares enough about MP to consider using a CBoE should want to train anyway for the increases to max MP and global spe...

But with ripostes, the frequency of procs scales with the number of melee attackers. Using faster weapons can't replicate that scaling, and moreover, choosing a weapon that you can swing faster often involves sacrificing damage done per hit (and, consequently, in some cases, the chance of proc'ing a...

Okay, it appears I did misremember one point... apparently the chance to trigger a riposte is not tied to the Long Blades skill (though, of course, the chance of actually connecting with a riposte swing is). Maybe more people would appreciate the riposte mechanic if the proc chance scaled with long ...

That idea never occurred to me, but when I requested permission to be able to edit the wiki, I never got a reply, so thoughts of contributing to the wiki haven't exactly been on my mental radar.

I don't know why anyone would think they can add 10 EV and start dishing out mad riposte damage, but if people actually think that, then that's all the more reason to put the actual chance a monster has to hit you in the log. Again, if you're relying solely on Dodging, you're going to have a bad tim...

I seldom even find long blades near the dungeon entrance, but if one of my spellcasters did find one and wasn't worried about it being cursed, I would probably equip it until I found something better. In the early game, unskilled melee attacks aren't even worthless (at least, not against everything ...

Short blades are already OP when used correctly; giving short blade stabbing bonuses to long blades would just be overkill. Building characters around riposte is not a newb trap; the first character that I actually bothered to win the game with was a riposte-oriented skald. Ripostes aren't limited t...

As someone who has also had an autoexplore-into-paralysis death, I agree that they're rare, but I think part of that rarity comes from players generally prioritizing AC over EV/SH, which is at least in part motivated by the desire to survive paralysis. Funneling players into a single strategy hurts ...

I consider the CBoE + lichform to be a very niche example of a more widespread problem, which is that instant total loss of player control is entirely non-interactive, and an exceptionally unsatisfying way for a run to end. In fact, I'd say that the CBoE + lichform is probably the most excusable exa...

Wands of healing wouldn't help you if you get confused in lichform, as you can't zap while confused. The removal of amulets of clarity is what really hurt, but lichform characters at least have an option for prevention that mummies don't... they can play mutation roulette in hopes of getting the Cla...

To which the correct answer is almost always "no", because if the skill is worth having, it's worth training even without a manual.

Option 4: Remove manuals from the game entirely. If you're training a skill, you carry the manual... if not, you don't. This is a complete no-brainer decision. At best you could argue that in the rare case where a desirable manual is generated in a shop, the player has to make a decision about when ...

That reminds me of a post I saw here a while back but can't seem to find now. Basically, someone tried playing a game making excessive use of exclusions to minimize the number of unique tiles stepped on as a trap avoidance strategy and after winning reported the strategy to be effective but painfull...

If you ordered the allies to stand next to a single-space door, and the allies don't move to make room for each other to get closer, then a single command would get them to line up next to the door properly, but what about a 2-space door? Whichever space you picked, an ally would move from the oppos...

The trap avoidance argument makes sense for those with enough patience to not rely on auto-explore to map levels, but even the idea of preventing an occasional trap-induced death is not enough incentive for me to manually explore. Starvation and piety decay from characters looping around levels seve...

I just can't get behind that reasoning. I'd say it was worth it back when monsters could take items you'd seen from the ground and use them against you, but now, spending 1 MP to pick up an item a bit earlier just seems wasteful. Grabbing items from within the sight radius of some dangerous enemy I ...

Sif's amnesia ability is useful for changing your selected spells before entering a new area, but does nothing to allow a player react to a situation in progress (unless spell memorization was recently adjusted to no longer be a several turn, interruptable process). FR, give Sif Muna a "cast fr...

The way you worded the OP makes it sound like there are only a few decent Translocation spells that should be preserved, which I disagree with. I know there are a number of Translocations spells that some players consider useless, but which spells are deemed useless vary from player to player, where...

Will allies enter travel restricted areas? If not, then excluding the doorway in question seems like a simple solution to the bottleneck micromanagement issue and might generally be useful at controlling the degree to which allies draw aggro. I'm not sure how to handle the situation of a crimson imp...

***** ability, instantly memorize a spell from the library at the cost of nutrition and piety. Sif Muna worshipers are especially likely to hit the hard caps on spell memorization, meaning that the choice of which spells to memorize for any particular location become quite important. While these dec...

Currently, the '%' key brings up a character information screen that allows players to interact with their equipped items (but apparently not to equip items). Why not change the binding to 'E' for Equip and rework the hotkeys on that screen to consistently refer to the equipment slot rather than the...

I think the only problem with the Translocations school is that it's so weak in the early game. Apportation, the only level 1 spell, is pure utility which many players will rarely, if ever, want to use. Blink requires careful positioning and use of terrain to get it from being borderline suicidal to...

The identify game is only interesting in early on when items like amulet of harm, potion of mutation, and other major inconveniences still lurk. By the time a character gets to Vaults:5, chances are good they're only using identify scrolls on a subset of artefacts they find, but initially there are ...

Kobolds are more suited to Artificer than Deep Elves, if nothing else... though I haven't been interested in Artificer ever since decks became Invocations-based....

I'm pretty sure that's not the reason, as Jiyva ceases to exist if you kill TRJ, and an altar is often found right outside the Slime Pits.... It's generally more practical to collect the items you want and then switch to Jiyva once your mutations start getting out of hand, anyway. I often pick Gozag...

If you try to cast a dangerous spell, the game warns you and asks for confirmation... but only after taking your MP. I can't think of any good reason why the MP should be charged even if you choose not to attempt the spell cast, so I propose that the confirmation prompt should occur first, and only ...

Doubling your damage output is not exactly the same as being able to handle twice as many enemies at a time. Even if you can kill twice as many in the same amount of time, the 2X enemies will still be able to do more damage to you during that time than the 1X enemies would be able to. (I'm not going...

Well, I can't blame you for thinking that. Even I didn't expect it to work very well until I actually tried it.

What do you mean by "reliably and consistently"? If you mean a character that uses Leda's in every fight once it's available, I'd say that's a character that's played poorly. If you mean a character that makes effective use of Leda's in situations where it makes sense to cast, I wouldn't m...

Again, I don't advise using Leda's to kite. Sometimes Prism kiting is the superior strategy (especially against ranged threats), but there are also situations where it's advantageous to not have to kite. If you're going to be setting off loud explosions, being able to stand on a staircase and corral...

Right, that's why I like to lay down a wall with Conjure Flame first, and mix in other forms of damage like Fulminant Prisms. The extra turns that Leda's buys are perfect for mixing in other spells. Gell's Gravitas is the same, you won't get any decent damage out of it if there's just 1 or 2 monster...

I don't recommend using Leda's as a substitute for Swiftness. For one thing, it slows the player's speed as well, though on average to a lesser degree than it slows monsters. For another, the gradually decreasing radius means that after a while, the player will still be burdened with the speed penal...

I should perhaps mention that my general DEWz strategy is to put all points in INT and cap Spellcasting before finishing Lair, so I was able to get full LoS range from Leda's by the time it was gifted to me, every time. Also, the school skill XP required to get the failure rate down to 1% was quite ...

I consider spamming Cause Fear to avoid monsters while hoping to find ammo from the RNG god to be comparable to getting banished to the Abyss in the early- or mid-game. It's just a question of whether you luck into salvation (ammo or the exit) before you find yourself surrounded and out of panic but...

I can respect that. There is still a risk in engaging in melee with a leopard gecko using a dagger, it's just somewhat less of a risk than going in barehanded. Personally, I consider losing a character to a melee fight on D:1 to be preferable to losing a character later on due to running out of ammo...

Okay, if a dagger deals 50% more dps on average than unarmed combat, that means that monsters will survive combat 50% longer on average with a player fighting unarmed than with a dagger, in other words they have 50% more turns to reduce the player's HP to 0 before they die. Seems plenty significant ...

If memory serves, I played a game with no remove curse or identify scroll until ~D:6 earlier this week, but I agree it's not a common occurrence. Like, for example, leopard geckos. True, the dagger only has 1 more point of base damage than unarmed combat (though that is a 33% increase, so it's not n...

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