So, they just made Shoals harder...

[pratamawirya]

Here's a story: There was a n00b called John Doe, who had absolutely no clue what kind of watery hell Shoals are, especially the new ones.

If John Doe bravely entered Shoals without stocking up on these things:
1. flight source;
2. MR (loads of it);
3. tele source;
4. fog source;
5. ranged weaponry;
how would, then, he survive this... "stuff":

(For console players, that's a siren who summons the new drowned souls.)

Should he just, you know, kill the character?

[Klown]

devs y u so mean?!

at least it isn't like the underwater ToME levels where your air runs out and you have to keep finding bubble patches to breath.

[Piginabag]

I see people complain about sirens and it kind of bothers me. After experiencing (or dying to) the threats in any given branch, you are expected to plan ahead, learn certain spells, equip the right gear and bring the consumables and evocables necessary to overcome or at least avoid whatever killed you last time. You wouldn't go into spider, die to poison from your first redback, and then come here and complain that poison is OP. So what counters mermaids?

1. Magic resistance
2. Scroll of fog
3. Clarity
4. Scroll of noise
5. Random blinks, and teleportation
6. Wielding a lantern of shadows
7. Shooting the mermaid with a wand
8. Be an octopode
9. Self banishment via unwielding a distortion weapon
10. Any source of flying
11. cntrl+q > Yes > enter
12. Shoot yourself with arrows of dispersal
13. Be an octopode
14. Shoot the mermaid in the face with arrows or spells

And the list goes on. Point is, plan for them ahead of time. If you die to it because you didn't take enough precautions, its your fault.

[Magipi]

So what counters mermaids?
(...)4. Scroll of noise

How?

[Piginabag]

So what counters mermaids?
(...)4. Scroll of noise

How?

Imagine you're a sexy mermaid and you see some hapless adventurer wandering around, so to get his attention, you use your Human Call:

♪My mershake brings all the boys to the yard...♪

...and then BLAM CRASH KABLOOEY, the smashing of pots and pans interrupts your most beautiful song

[pratamawirya]

By all means, sirens should never position themselves on a deep water tile like that while mesmerizing the player.

It (drawing the player towards deep water) makes sense and it could be fun in a game where you could FRICKIN' SWIM, but this is Crawl where deep waters are frickin' deadly.

@Piginabag:
You don't like to read the 1st post in the frickin thread, do you?

[Amnesiac]

Um, you won't drown. You could just use your wand of draining, btw.

Maybe use some good polearm with high enchantment/good brand, so that you don't need to invest.

[Piginabag]

By all means, sirens should never position themselves on a deep water tile like that while mesmerizing the player.

It (drawing the player towards deep water) makes sense and it could be fun in a game where you could FRICKIN' SWIM, but this is Crawl where deep waters are frickin' deadly.

@Piginabag:
You don't like to read the 1st post in the frickin thread, do you?

Point is, plan for them ahead of time. If you die to it because you didn't take enough precautions, its your fault.

[pratamawirya]

Goddammit, read the frickin' 1st post, please. My point is, the new Shoals are a stupid newbie trap.

And can't you see how many times I have posted in the Tavern? Of course I know how to deal with sirens.

[Amnesiac]

This whole game is a newbie trap. Are there a lot of situations in the game, when you don't have any means of escape, anyway? No.

[Piginabag]

Goddammit, read the frickin' 1st post, please. My point is, the new Shoals are a stupid newbie trap.

And can't you see how many times I have posted in the Tavern? Of course I know how to deal with sirens.

After experiencing (or dying to) the threats in any given branch, you are expected to plan ahead, learn certain spells, equip the right gear and bring the consumables and bla bla bla

From my experience, every branch is a noob trap.

[pratamawirya]

It's one thing to die from orc priests' smiting, it's another to get locked out of winning because you don't know how sirens work.

[Sar]

You don't actually need rPois to do Spider or Snake as long as you didn't quaff your curing for nutrition or something.

[Amnesiac]

it's not like you are at a stalemate or something... But I would agree that sirens would be less annoying if they wouldn't step two tiles away from the shallow water, but I guess it would be less flavourful

[Siegurt]

By all means, sirens should never position themselves on a deep water tile like that while mesmerizing the player.

It (drawing the player towards deep water) makes sense and it could be fun in a game where you could FRICKIN' SWIM, but this is Crawl where deep waters are frickin' deadly.

@Piginabag:
You don't like to read the 1st post in the frickin thread, do you?

Just for an FYI, sirens *always* position themselves like that now, and never come to shore, if you don't have a ranged way of killing them or a way to break the mesmerisation, you can just sit there forever trapped against the shoreline (or until the drowned souls they summon kill you)

I think really, what mesmerisation needs is a duration, you should be able to break free *eventually* without one of the magic buttons, a couple turns to try to duck out of LOS or something would make it significantly less miserable.

[Hirsch I]

thats some nice equipment you have here, pratama.
now, thing is, newbies must learn. and newbies learn from experience. I think after the first time getting messed by a siren, the player will know how to deal with it, and this will not happen again, probably.
my fist siren was in the sewers. I died.

[daggaz]

Serious they stay two tiles out? I thought rockworms got deleted because they sucked, but now I see they got a boob-job and some summons. Ugh.

[Hirsch I]

ahhhh..... no.
sirens are not invulnerable, they just keep their distance. rock worms were awful because almost nothing could touch them, while they hit you for a negligible amount of damage.

[twelwe]

trunk on online tiles has resulted in the worst, most absolutely pitiful threads ever

[Hirsch I]

now you are being unnecessarely mean, twelwe. what is the point?

[Leafsnail]

I think there are actually two problems here.

1. It's sortof spoilery that there's a monster who will unavoidably kill you if you don't have certain items. Sure, any experienced player will have them, but a newbie might not and there's no reason for them to expect a monster like that to be in the Shoals. I would like to single out the Scroll of Noise option as particularly awful - the description of the Scroll of Noise implies that it's a completely useless item, so unless you've read about the secret effect or randomly read noise at everything you wouldn't know about it.

2. Being stuck in a perma-lock and then poked to death incredibly slowly is a lot worse than just being killed fast. It feels incredibly cheap and boring.

[Amnesiac]

ahem... you can see that prat(sorry your name is too long) is not at a stalemate and not having options like teleportation scroll(as common as remove curse and identify) is probably a result of a bad play and you'll die soon anyway(in shoald even more likely) Sirens have never killed me even the first time I've seen them. I guess this might be a possible situation, but I don't like the idea of removing all the fun monster just for noobz.

ps: I liked rock worms!.. Well, not really. but I didn't mind them that much.

[Hirsch I]

prat(sorry your name is too long)

yeah, "prat(sorry your name is too long) is much shorter than Pratamawirya.

[dpeg]

Sirens are not a new feature. Drowned souls are, but I don't see how they suddenly make Shoals unbearable.

Next, stop using "spoilery". You never do your point a favour by using this term. If you enter a branch for the first time (and uninformed), then bad things can happen. That's not what "spoilery" is generally supposed to mean in this context. You can see how the various monsters act, and can adapt to it.

Finally It is not a design goal that you can "unspoiled" conquer a branch the first time you enter it. Dying in new branches, and dying in branch ends you fight for the first time, is completely acceptable. The design goal is that you can pick up enough information *on your own* so as to fare better next time.

[That's not to say that sirens, drowned souls and/or Shoals are sacrosanct. My post just refuses the OP's point.]

[Leafsnail]

Isn't the Scroll of Noise thing the very definition of spoilery though?

[dpeg]

Leafsnail: I don't think so. We could mention the scroll's effect (in the monster description, and in the item description; both of these are not very helpful, I just had a look).
However, even so that does not make Shoals or new sirens the mess the OP claims it to be. Yes, given the current state, someone might die there, perhaps unnecessarily so. Is this really such a big deal? (Answer: no.)

To me, spoilery is stuff that you cannot easily explain in the game. For example, hidden features of vaults. Mechanics that could be explained easily but aren't (like MR) is not the central matter: these could and should be addressed, and nobody getting around to doing it like laziness in bug fixing but not what spoiler information is really about. In my opinion.

[duvessa]

Sirens are not a new feature. Drowned souls are, but I don't see how they suddenly make Shoals unbearable.

You are forgetting that siren movement behaviour has changed. They move away from you much more now, and in fact, as far as I know, will never make a melee attack. Even an orb spider will occasionally bite you if you corner it!

In my experience drowned souls do nothing, and sirens do nothing but annoy you and force you to use ranged attacks. This isn't GDD but I strongly dislike the long-term push to make every character get ranged attacks, and it seems to have become much stronger in the last few versions, what with pretty much every monster touched by Grunt or DracoOmega.

[dpeg]

duvessa: Good point.

The personal attack doesn't help. It is much better for long-term design if people are trying to push the envelope again and again, with the inevitable reverts in between, rather than stating "we had enough, let's be done with it".

[duvessa]

???
I did not put any sort of personal attack in my post...unless "saying who added/modified a monster" is a personal attack, which I can assure you I did not intend it as.

[dpeg]

duvessa: It's alright (I didn't thank you out of spite). Just saying that in my experience giving names does not help to make a discussion more ... constructive, as everyone could see from my reaction already.

[Senban]

Why wouldn't loading her up to the eyeballs with curare work?
Or more frugally 1 shot of curare and if she takes that a sustained volley of poison arrows. If the mechanics are really sound curare's breathlessness will stop her singing too, unless it's the bikini that's meant to be causing Mesm.

[Leafsnail]

Leafsnail: I don't think so. We could mention the scroll's effect (in the monster description, and in the item description; both of these are not very helpful, I just had a look).

I guess, although that would kindof expose how odd the mechanic is. Why does a scroll which has no effect other than "attract more monsters towards yourself" in every other case (and which is, by default, regarded as useless by autoexplore) remove this one debuff? Heck, if you were to tell someone who didn't know this secret interaction that "There's a scroll other than fog/blink/tele which you can use to escape sirens" then I think most of them would guess Vulnerability rather than the scroll that is otherwise basically useless.

More fundamentally I don't think it's good to have consumables with such an incredibly narrow and specific use.

[Maynot]

I think it is bad for the game if you are locked in one spot and unable to do anything to get out of it. Sure you can come prepared, but if you are heavy armor, run out of ammo, wand charges, scrolls, levitate, etc and run into another Siren, you are basically dead with no chance of survival. You will just be relentlessly poked as you starve to death. Having a character stuck in one place starving to death is bad for the game and dull as heck.

[pratamawirya]

Why wouldn't loading her up to the eyeballs with curare work?
Or more frugally 1 shot of curare and if she takes that a sustained volley of poison arrows. If the mechanics are really sound curare's breathlessness will stop her singing too, unless it's the bikini that's meant to be causing Mesm.

Please read the 1st post more carefully. The problem is that a newbie named John Doe (or whatever) might not have any chance to kill the new sirens; and obviously that John Doe is just an example I created and I'm not him since my character in the screenshot has a decent randart GDA and loads of arrows and a +7 velocity longbow, and even a wand of tele just in case a band of merfolks with an impaler joins the party. (I probably should take a more representative screenshot, but whatever, you get my point.)

I think really, what mesmerisation needs is a duration, you should be able to break free *eventually* without one of the magic buttons, a couple turns to try to duck out of LOS or something would make it significantly less miserable.

Now this sounds like a good idea.

prat(sorry your name is too long)

yeah, you can call me that, my school friends called me that too...

[dpeg]

Leafsnail: or noise doesn't work anymore. I don't mind either way, and I still think that people are way too worked up over every little change.

[duvessa]

There's nothing special about scroll of noise for breaking mesmerise, by the way. It's broken by any >= 20 noise, and scroll of noise happens to be 25.

[Senban]

Please read the 1st post more carefully.

Shitdamn. Okay point taken.
But yeah, that guy would be properly screwed over, and probably royally deserve everything he got too.
That said I'd find it a little hard to believe he'd have nothing ranged at all, not even an un-ID'd wand he'd auto-pickuped and not got round to binning yet no mater how averse to ranged combat he was. Bound to happen eventually if you give enough kobolds laptops but I think most n00bz are probably spreading themselves too thin and running around with all kinds of chintzy glowing junk they'll never get any significant use out of rather than focussing their skills and treasure too narrowly, so on that front your hypothetical Darwin award candidate gets a quick salute just for being original.

Haven't tried trunk but giving them weak to moderate summoning capability actually seems like a good idea, on their own they can get perilously close to being boring, but they have great synergy with the branches other inhabitants (my first glimpse of shoal had me mesmerised in a fishing net while ignoring a sea-snake to shoot at mermen. That guy survived, but only by a hairs breadth. New branches are always educational.)

[nilsbloodaxe]

I have been playing Crawl for years (since at least 0.3.4) and never died to a siren (that I can remember), and I had no idea that scrolls of noise could break mesmerize.

[Hirsch I]

There's nothing special about scroll of noise for breaking mesmerise, by the way. It's broken by any >= 20 noise, and scroll of noise happens to be 25.

ha, found a use for Gong!

[daggaz]

The issue about forcing ranged attacks is what bothered me the most, hiding behind the obvious annoyance of the new movement behavior.

If I am playing a stabber, I rarely have a ranged weapon by the time I enter the shoals unless I got a seriously nice artifact. Sometimes a blowgun (i've abandoned normal poison needles by this point) if Ive got a stack of curare or sleeping needles, but tossing those into deep water for every siren is just ugh. Same thing goes for the usually short stack of noise scrolls Ive managed to find by this point. Those are for getting out of deadly situations on shoals:5 (or that new siren unique), not for quickly burning thru on every single siren in the whole branch. And thats the point really, there are a lot of sirens in shoals.

This is just skill taxing (hello traps) with an extra side of inventory management, if you ask me. For dealing with one monster type that is predominantly only found in one branch.

I guess I'll just stay out of shoals until Ive got flight up. That solves everything.

[Amnesiac]

i've abandoned normal poison needles by this point

Could have used that for sirens. 80 needles weigh like a loaf of bread.

[Arkhan]

There's nothing special about scroll of noise for breaking mesmerise, by the way. It's broken by any >= 20 noise, and scroll of noise happens to be 25.

Is it possible to shout loud enough under any conditions to break it? I wonder what things do affect shout volume. Never explored that.

[duvessa]

Dragon form: 18
spider form: 8
bat/porcupine form: 4
fungus/tree/jelly/wisp form: 0
other forms: 12
...shoutitis 2: 14
...shoutitis 3: 16

[Amnesiac]

I think other branches apart from spiders and shoals are made harder to a higher digree.

[dpeg]

Singing Sword buff!

[Leafsnail]

Spiders shout surprisingly loudly

[RBrandon]

I think other branches apart from spiders and shoals are made harder to a higher digree.

Spider is not harder because it was basically untouched, but shoals is significantly harder because of recent changes, sirens probably being the least of these.

[Amnesiac]

Yeah, but I think that swamp monsters beat the most crap out of me... You don't even want to go there without 30 AC+30 EV, it seems. Thorn-throwing plants even mini-versions hurt like hell, spriggan riders can see Invisible and have a lot of MR and poke with spears quite painfully, walking trees reduce your EV if you stand in one place for 2 turns (it seems or something like that(?) I need to see their behaviour once more to be sure) and hit like a ton of bricks. So you need invisibility for trees, mephitic cloud for spriggans(what could be better for those, besides fireball?..) and a wand of fire for plants and you would probably still want to use it even if you worship Death Mangos.

[Hirsch I]

just died in shoals. yep, it is harder.