Wednesday, 12th July 2017, 22:36 by watertreatmentRL
I don't really agree that the balance on direct damage spells has been significantly disrupted by the removal of the conjurations school, but I don't think it's worth fiddling with if it has been.
From what I understand, permacharms are coming. MP reserve mechanics offer a better model for essentially all crawl spells than the one-cost/cost-per-use model of DCSS. For one thing, the DCSS model is heavy on regeneration and luring. That is a problem that is baked into the cake and can never be fixed given the commitments of current dev consensus, at least as I understand it. Another piece of the problem is the crazy formulas involved in determining fail rates. Fail rate removal is a real possibility with MP reserves.
I've heard people refer to permacharms as somehow like equipment, as though that's a bad thing. Equipment is actually handled reasonably well in terms of interface and usability. Throwing or firing things works pretty well. Hitting things with melee weapons works really well. Once you have an MP reserve mechanic that takes armor into account, as I think is the current model, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to bring the spells formerly known as conjurations into that picture. The picture that most appeals to me is spells that produce a literal item that lives in the inventory, for their duration, equippable as a weapon, subject to the usual swapping and tabbing interface niceties. The potential advantages are considerable. For one thing, you're no longer asked to switch among various possible modes of attack literally every turn, since switching costs time. You no longer need to optimize the expense of killing each individual monster, lure and disengage to manage mp for spells you cast repeatedly in every encounter. Having a lot of different elemental attack flavors has a more straightforward cost, so you can think about whether spell levels make sense as a mechanic. (Hint: they don't.) You also eliminate this business of killing popcorn with zero skill melee. Direct damage spellcasters become as playable as melee characters.
You also hasten the way for corpse removal. Necromancy spell interactions are about the only remaining reason for corpses to exist in hellcrawl. Of course, these could always be given death channel mechanics, but death channel is a pain in the ass with DCSS spell mechanics. With permacharms, eyyy...
*Lana Del Rey voice* , video games...