The Tavern

In CXC chat Charly told us that one of his recent chars got instant 200 damage by shatter. Well, that's especially painful when the actual HP were below 200.



We don't know if Charly thought "Wus dat?" when he noticed the pan lord...

Full morgue is here.

Hard to comment on this without swearing.
Reminds me of Angand comics talking about Angand etiquette.

DCSS etiquette: You are allowed 1 minute of swearing after a Panlord has killed you with 200 or more damage.

IMHO this proves that either panlords or shatter (or both) are bad design. 200 surprise damage despite AC 38? What is expected play? Quaff flight when any panlord is in view and then find that the panlord has airstrike???

If you're going to use statue form in Pan you should be maintaining flight at all times, yes. Ideally you'd do so outside of Pan too because of ghosts. Gee what a great design for a monster spell.

The character from OP did not have boots of flying nor evocable flight so this is not even an option.

I think the best solution would be to remove shatter interaction with flight for PC and then decrease monster shatter damage.

Some details of the above mentioned morgue file:


17029 | Pan | Noticed Mnoleg
17052 | Pan | Killed Mnoleg

17488 | Pan | Noticed Cerebov
17703 | Pan | Killed Cerebov

17817 | Pan | Noticed Wus Dat the pandemonium lord
17818 | Pan | Killed from afar by Wus Dat the pandemonium lord


Yet another unfair death.

I don't see how that pan lord could have been more aptly named

I suppose it all depends on whether you think the whole concept of "sudden death" is exciting. It's all kind of arbitrary whether one gets one button press or ten or twenty before hitting the "danger" zone... But Pan Lords and high level spells generally just all up the ante on "Oops, I didn't really mean to do that" as I say when I find myself getting too nervous and hitting a step completely by accident while trying to figure out what's going on.

It certainly isn't just Shatter that's high-powered, anyway. Even Force Lance for example, can do some pretty hefty damage if you get thrown into a metal wall...

I'd be in favor of removing shatter's interaction with flying/stone things (statue/gargoyles). Especially for the monster version - if you want to keep it being weak against flying targets for players so that it doesn't just handle all monsters, fine. But honestly I think a level 9 spell should be usable to kill all things; firestorm already does this.

Also it always struck me as odd that a gargoyle on the ground takes double (or was it triple) damage as a human on ground, but if they're flying, it's exactly the same. You'd think the gargoyle would take double (or triple) the reduced flying damage, but instead it completely removes the whole "I'm a gargoyle" part.

Remove Shatter from pan lord spell lists

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/9 ... 6fb5ee6999

Thanks, MarvinPA!