Pandemonium Purger
Posts: 1283
Joined: Thursday, 16th April 2015, 22:39
Radical consumables 1 by 1 changes
Proposal to overhaul consumables in DCSS. Focus is on potions, scrolls, and wands. The goal is to promote clear and transparent game mechanics, to reduce overlap between consumables in terms of usefulness in any particular situation, to eliminate clutter items that find little use, and to make consumables better. Here I list most of the consumables, with issues, and solutions.
POTIONS
cancellation
ambrosia
curing
lignification
heal wounds
all strategic and harmful potions
These are all fine, no problems with them.
magic
This one's weird. Running out of MP is a big deal for many casters, so they inevitably develop ways to deal with situations where they run out of MP. Channeling is sometimes so strong it's on par with quaffing this potion. For these casters, it's actually a disruption of their habits to simply quaff a potion of magic. Why should they constantly keep in mind, "hey! you don't need to channel/sublimate/etc like you always do, just quaff magic"?? Compare this with the urge to quaff Heal Wounds in dire situations. Hell, a wand of MP replenishment would be a less-bad idea. You know what? Make !magic weak and more common, like curing. It should be just enough to let you blink away or pop off a fireball. P.S. beginners probably confuse this potion with brilliance, and if we have this pot, it should be called mana or essence.
berserk
It's better to get rid of berserk potions because even though going berserk right after downing a shot is really funny, all other sources of berserk are renewable. Without potions, berserk is either something you have indefinite access to, or something you can't have at all. Let's keep it that way. Berserk is extremely powerful and using it wisely takes getting used to.
haste
Haste is a central status effect and the implications of having it are both immense and clear, so everybody has it in mind. It's fine to have it available in so many forms because it's easy to track all your sources of haste, given its importance.
invisibility
Unlike haste, invisibility can also be evoked from items. Three renewable sources of invis, if you include the wand, make invis something you either have or you don't, continuously, not to mention shadow form. If you're not stabbing, invis is a moderate buff, whereas if you are stabbing, potions of invis are rare enough that you would only quaff one to kill an out-of-depth sleeping monster, which you can typically ignore instead.
agility
Agility potions are bad - they exactly fall from the sky, so if you haven't quaffed many of them, it's hard to tell what they do and how much they will help. Not one bit of !agility is part of berserk, so quaffing agility and going berserk for the toughest fights makes perfect sense, but is somewhat spoilery considering that haste and might are part of berserk. It's not great design to accomodate extreme-max buffing like this. Remove agility, the potion. It could live on as a nice card effect, though. This would solve one of the issues with having consumables like might and agility: you might estimate that both consumables are helpful in a fight, but you'll only need one. In this case you can't know which one is better, so you arbitrate by e.g. quaffing from the larger stack.
might
Might is slightly more forgivable because it is one of the components of berserk... although it takes a bit to figure out that "You feel mighty!" from going berserk and "You feel very mighty all of a sudden." from quaffing !might mean the same thing. Its primary effect is increasing melee damage, so it should be simplified to give a Slay+10 status effect. The potion itself would be better named "potion of slaying" or "potion of bloodlust". Nobody cares about +5 strength. Has anybody ever quaffed might to get a spell castable in armor, or to prevent imminent collapse?
brilliance
Ridiculous. This pot gives FOUR different effects simultaneously, all of which affect your spellcasting and nothing but your spellcasting. The calculations involved make it very hard to predict what your spell success rate will be, and how relevant the power boost will be. No way a normal person can tell when quaffing brilliance will make shatter or DMsl castable, other than maybe a buttload of experience. Seriously, give Vehumet a high-cost invocation that grants brilliance, or get rid of potions of brilliance.
In short, might/brilliance/agility potions are bad, because each seems to only give a little boost one of your stats. In older versions they didn't even display a status effect, lol. Too much trial/error/experience is required to get a grasp on their usefulness. Even a potion of augmentation, temporarily increasing each of your stats by something like 10 would be better, considering that the player already has to make many decisions about stats.
potion of flight
The mechanic of flying as a whole has issues... this potion could turn you into a bat instead.
resistance
This pot could frankly use a rework. It feels like a cheap cheat that works around bad luck finding resist items. When encountering a dangerous source of elemental damage it is natural to think "okay, so... since I don't have resists for this enemy, it is quite dangerous, therefore I should treat it as a dangerous enemy" and proceed to treat it as any dangerous enemy. Having to remember that you can neutralize the reason an enemy is so dangerous in the first place is unnecessarily taxing, mentally, and just leads to an accounting problem where you weigh !resistance vs other consumables. We don't want people thinking "maybe !resist?" every time they see a potentially threatening element. There are simple cases like Nikola or an early volcano, but what if Asterion spawns with a weapon of elec and you don't have rElec - do you quaff !resist or use other consumables to fight him? I once had an early centaur start zapping me with a wand of lightning, and I had !resistance identified. Quaffing it immediately was obviously the right decision, and it was fun to consider my luck in having that potion, but this kind of situation doesn't happen all that often.
There is room for a consumable that grants resistance, just not in potion form. In line with the other ways of getting resistances, which are non-expiring or renewable, its availability should be of strategic import. Make it a rare foodstuff that gives rF+, rC+, rElec and rCorr for hundreds of turns after eating it. How about... faerie dragon meat ration? Screw spriggans! And if there is to remain a potion of resistance, its benefits should at least be standardized with the Hat of the Alchemist to also give MR+, rN+, and rMut.
SCROLLS
immolation
noise
random uselessness
teleportation
torment
vulnerability
These scrolls are fine, I see no problem with these or the strategic scrolls.
holy word
Bad scroll. It is underwhelming considering how rare it is, since it mostly just does some damage to holy/demonic creatures in LOS. They're likely to be hoarded and never used. By the time a character hits extended they're not even worth carrying. For instance, it takes at least 4 readings, but likely twice as many, to bring down a greater mummy. If there must be a scroll of holy word for some reason, it should cut current HP of all demonic/undead creatures in LOS by half. Then it's appropriately transparent and predictable for such a rare item, awesomely similar to torment, and even consistent with what happens to undead/demonspawn player characters when they read the scroll.
magic mapping
The use of this scroll is way too automated: read it when you're on a level with a timed portal, and on the bottom of rune branches. We don't want the game playing itself. There are combat situations where you want to know the terrain around you, like when you're forced to retreat into unexplored territory, but there are always better ways to spend a turn when you have monsters in sight. Furthermore, this scroll cheapens the benefit of having partial magic mapping through mutations or Ashenari. Better scroll: temporary telepathy. Great in zot, abyss. Good for avoiding clusters of enemies while scouring a level to find a timed portal. Can still be used for guessing location of rune/treasure vault. Even better for that than magic mapping in Shoals:$, where the rune shack is always stuffed with nasties. Magic mapping can remain a card effect.
fog
This is an intricate scroll, and not as common as I'd like it to be. After all, it doesn't make enough fog to immediately block LOS in all directions, so it's not OP for a consumable, and yet it's about as rare as scrolls of blinking. It should be at least as common as scrolls of teleportation. Let noobs get all the fogging practice they need!
blinking
Extremely useful scroll; too good, even, for something this common. You could quite easily have enough of these to get you out of every single could-die-next-moment situation in one game. But it is perhaps the most boring, least inventive ways of getting out of trouble. Which is why it may need to go, despite being so clear and elegant in its function. Especially since controlled blink is now a level 8 spell. We don't want something like Death's Door to be a scroll, do we?
summoning
Well at least it's better than when it made an abomination, what was up with that idea? But casting shadow creatures a couple of times is not particularly impressive, so it doesn't make sense why this scroll is among the rare ones. Let's make the summons durable, and incapable of leaving the branch or level. That would make this a strategic, rather than emergency, scroll. It's a bit of a gamble too, since how can you know where you'll need same-branch allies most?
fear
Scrolls of fear would be great if you could see the chance of affecting a monster... but the interface for "pointing" a scroll at a monster would be horrific. Hey, this could be a single-target "scare monster" wand instead! Not as strong as the scroll, which can be used to de-surround yourself, but hey, you could get many zaps out of it. The only thing I'm not sure about is whether the wand should be evocations-independent, which would be odd, but consistent with the scroll (which would be removed).
silence
Scrolls of silence are too rare for an effect you can get from a relatively low-level spell, and if you're with trog you can't cast silence but you have anti-magic melee. It is problematic in the same way as potions of resistance, see above. What's with the spell-replicating scrolls anyway? If there's a spell that's wanting of a scroll, it's mass/aura abjuration. Too often summonings are trained just to have this spell.
Here's something to replace scroll of silence: scroll of dissent, which shuts down the ability to use divine abilities. This could stick a status effect on everything in sight, like ?vulnerability, or it could be an aura centered on the player character, like silence. It should also prevent the player from using active god abilities, as well as freeze piety gain/loss, permitting e.g. Zin followers to mutate themselves, or Chei followers to use haste. This would avoid duplicating a spammable spell, and it's a more interesting/niche item that would provoke players to pay more attention to various special ability flags.
WANDS
random effects
hasting
heal wounds
digging
disintegration
teleportation
polymorph
enslavement
paralysis
There is no problem with these wands, they are classic. The last 3 are fun hex wands more unique or debilitating than any hex spells. Enslave and polymorph the spells were removed, this is good.
confusion
This wand is way too common for such a good effect, and there are too many sources of confusion in the game. Why should every character be capable of easily confusing monsters? It should go. With this wand gone, players would consider the trickier enslavement and polymorph wands more often.
slowing
this wand is really tricky because on the one hand, slowing an enemy is much like hasting yourself, if it's a 1v1 fight. On the other, it needs to defeat MR, and other wands produce far more debilitating effects than slowing, which makes this very much a junk wand if you find hex wands faster than you use them up. Alternative proposal: the wand of mutual slowing irresistibly slows its target and youself, like how chaos champions do it. This could be useful if you are slowed anyway, or if you have allies and the enemy doesn't. To be balanced it should be blocked by stasis and not work on magic-immune targets.
magic darts
flame
frost
fire
cold
fireball
lightning
draining
These wands are problematic because there's so many of them and they're so similar to each other and to low-to-mid level blaster spells, which conjurations-focused characters can spam. They basically allow you to become a blaster mage for a short while, if you find enough of them, all without costing MP or anything. Hey, even a Fire Elementalist would occasionally like to zap a Wand of Fire. They're very useful for sure, but keeping track of them is a pain. There are already many 'modes of play' (states of consciousness?) that are possible or optimal to switch between in the same game, e.g. melee/summoning/hexing/etc. Allowing a total blaster-caster playstyle into just about any character's game (even for a short while) threatens the kind of segregation that makes characters really different from each other, which is part of Crawl's charm. Rods don't face this kind of problem because they are integrated into your character as you find them, and you can be using them up in every fight all the time.
I would keep Magic Darts because of their simplicity, weakness, and perfect accuracy. I'd scrap all the other wands and replace them with Sticky Flame Ranged, Orb of Electrocution, and Corrosive Bolt. Note that these are not spells and only one is a bolt, down from 4 bolt wands. They're quirky and they'll stay good further into the game, and they would also be bad for getting at The Royal Jelly from behind its wall of summoned jellies.