Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 6454
Joined: Tuesday, 30th October 2012, 19:06
Revamp Scarves
I think limited-utility items are particularly annoying if they're long-swap equipment choices, it just encourages you to carry one around and then break from the action to spend time swapping it in/out in the small number of cases where it applies, at least rings and amulets can be swapped in-situ as needed, so it's not *as* tedious to carry one around for swapping.
The missing AC (compared to using a cloak) is actually impactful for a significant portion of the game, and in the portion of the game where the AC is no longer quite so important, you've already got plenty of other options that supersede or obviate the abilities that Scarves provide.
So I would, personally, like it if either you sacrificed less AC or the abilites were more distinct and also generally useful, or both.
Some possible suggestions:
1. Make scarves enchantable, like hats.
2. Remove the amulet of spirit shield so that was more unique of a scarf ability, I guess unrands are rare enough that the bear hat can stay, it's probably fine if a couple races don't have any use for one type of scarf.
3. Combine cloud immunity with the resistance cloak limit it to being immune to cold/fire clouds, the rF/rC are generally useful, but not interesting, and the cloud immunity is interesting, but not generally useful, maybe the combination is both (or is it neither?) If Qaz didn't exist (or even maybe while he does) I would say that you could make it passively *spawn* random clouds along with the immunity.
4. Remove the rMsl scarf, or make it interestinger to not overlap so much with dMsl/just more EV (repelled things are reflected? There's too much reflection already though, that would really only work if we got rid of the other sources)
5. Come up with some new scarf egos (or recycle old discarded egos, clarity and stasis were always problematic as an amulet, in part because of swapping, if they were scarves, would that make them reasonable?)
6. Make some subset of races able to wear scarves, but not cloaks (this makes hats somewhat more distinct from helmets), Possibly make some mutation(s) prohibit cloaks, but not scarves (Spiny comes to mind, but that's a demonspawn-only one)
Note that as an aside I do feel like hats have this problem with helms (the non-uniqueness of egos) to a lesser extent, but there's at least a significant minority of cases where I'll wear a hat, for scarves that minority is vanishingly small.
Some (possibly stupid) alternate scarf egos I just came up with off the top of my head, and some existing effects that might be nice to move to a scarf:
Scarf of the Hypnotic Eye: All creatures within range 3 must move towards you before attacking, they can use their normal abilities outside this range, or when adjacent.
Scarf of the Deep: Your scarf gives you a slappy aux attack, that can constrict, like an octopus tentacle, it can't wear a ring though.
Scarf of Blood: (remove amulet of harm and move harm to this amulet)
Scarf of Glitter: Randomly causes distraction on monsters in LOS (like gozag's gold effect)
Scarf of the Spider: Makes you immune to spider webs, & nets, can sometimes randomly web things that hit you.
These are all pretty powerful (possibly overly so), and probably would need more fleshing out, I more provided them as examples of things to think about stuff, then as things to put forward as advocated proposals. Possibly some of these would be better suited to scarf unrands, rather than scarf egos.