The Tavern

At least its one-school.

Ddoor helps you kill exactly nothing, requires more skill investment on all races with positive trloc apts, and leaves you with a pittinance for hp (and no cblink)... And yet it is used. This isn't too far off.

Remember, shatterninja is a thing. I have personally cleared an entire zig with Gravitas before the insubstantial update. People do weird things because they're fun, not optimal.

my interpretation:

YOU CAST THE SPELL

The player character evaporates and reforms as N clones scattered around the location. These clones can go into statues, beyond walls, out of sight, but not onto tiles occupied by monsters or allies. Clones are immobile.

At the very edge of maps, any clone that goes beyond the 1-tile wide frame of unnaturally hard rock surrounding every level is essentially out of the picture. Its only contribution is to the N number. Thus no technical difficulties need occur.

INCOMING DAMAGE REDUCTION

Monsters regard every clone as a valid target. When a clone is attacked/tormented/hurt, the damage is calculated normally, then divided by N and subtracted from current HP.

Under almost all circumstances, this results in taking less damage. It also makes damage taken less variable: for example, if all your clones end up tanking Cerebov's firestorm, you'll basically take the average of N damage rolls.

In some cases you can take more damage: for example, you are facing Cerebov alone, and cast Hyperphase, and then not only does Cerebov manage to hit all clones with his firestorm, but a clone of yours falls into LOS of a balrug and gets smited.

(This makes the spell sound overpowered, so OP suggested every clone taking 2/n (AKA double) damage. This is a straight-up pre-emptive NERF. And there is any number of nerfs you could give the spell; this one may not be the best. Maybe it's overwhelmingly powerful to the point of being boring. But, let's look at how this spell could function without NERFS. It is, after all, a level-9 spell, so it should be very powerful.)

EXPANDED LOS

All your clones have shared LOS. If any clone can see a tile, so can the player. Total "LOS" can thus become very large and irregularly shaped, even fractured.

ACTIONS

Smite-Targeting: any tile that any clone can see is eligible. As usual, use small LOS radius for e.g. conjure flame, Ru jump. Same goes for mass smite-targeted effects: immolation, holy word, recite, disaster area, ozo's refridgeration, discord, animate dead, and so on.

Ranged throwing/firing: disabled, unless PProj is on.

Beams and bolts: disabled. Even heal wounds and tele wands!

Teleport: the spell ends when teleport kicks in.

Melee: disabled.

Fog/Shatter/Tornado/Disjunction/Silence/Irradiate/RoF/etc: who knows whether these player-centered effects should be forbidden or get the "/N damage" treatment, but they're easy to allow by having it cast at each clone's location.

PoG/recall/apportation/passwall/etc: disabled.

Most summonings: disabled. (But what happens if you draw a summoning card? does it get suppressed so nothing happens?)

Buffs and transmutations: mostly allowed, but Haste and Invisibility are not allowed in spell form because those are beams.

Controlled blink: you pick a tile any of your clones can see, and blink to it, ending the spell.

Uncontrolled blink: the tile you blink to is randomly selected from your huge LOS, ending the spell.

Movement: disabled, although the abilities menu lets you select a clone (if it's not in a wall/statue/tree) or any empty space adjacent to a clone, and end up there in one piece again, ending the spell.

Alternative to the last 3: there is a no-cost-to-activate ability in the ability menu that lets you control-blink to any unoccupied tile in the expanded LOS. I think this is what Hurricos has been saying since my last post in this thread.

HEXES

When a monster successfully hexes any one of the clones, you get the enchantment it was trying to give. For damage hexes like Flay and Disintegration, the damage is divided by N. Fear and mesmerize don't change: fear works by blocking out a section of your LOS for blink purposes and mesmerize works by limiting your LOS to a rectangle for blink purposes.

ALTERNATIVE: EPICENTER

You retain more control of the original char at center of where you cast Hyperphase. You can move that character around like normal. Summonings and bolts emanate from that character. You still have increased LOS.

I oppose this approach: it feels more like clones are summons rather than diluted copies of yourself. It means you need more exceptions and rules for clones. It also has more questions to answer: what happens to the clones over time? do they move? do they time out? maybe pop in and out of existance? should monsters somehow prioritize the epicenter, or the clones? it's just so much weirder with an epicenter. It loses universality, and with that, an intuitive feeling for the spell's functions.

Daggaz seems to be playing a hypothetical Crawl where death is directly correlated to noise, and chain-waking groups of monsters can be perfectly avoided.
Take it away Hurricos, I hope this helps.

Pollen_Golem wrote:Daggaz seems to be playing a hypothetical Crawl where death is directly correlated to noise, and chain-waking groups of monsters can be perfectly avoided.
Take it away Hurricos, I hope this helps.

That hypothetical version of Crawl is just Crawl.

Further, despite saying "no pre-emptive nerfs," your interpretation of the spell is massively different and weaker than anything that's been said so far. You interpretation of the spell is that the player's LoS is massively increased, they cannot effectively attack, and they can't move. The only buff you gave the spell was that literally any useful action ends it, since that actually lets you get back to doing things.

Hurricos wrote:Ddoor helps you kill exactly nothing.

Does your spell suggestion does any damage(that i may have missed it)?
Because otherwise it helps you kill exactly nothing.

Pollengolem's interpretation of the spell is largely the same to what I was proposing; he's correct. I don't see how this information was not available from my expansive descriptions to the rest of you; I assure you that no communication was made over other avenues.

Some changes I'd make:

* Use the Epicenter idea: The idea of the spell is that you're tearing yourself out into space in order to reduce effects pertaining to your location, but you can also make some very firm guarantees about being partially in the center at any given time, and are frequently enough in the center that it is not possible for your central existence to phase through walls.

* Let melee from the epicenter continue to function as normal, or even better - give all weapons while in this 'form' the eVoke option as Spears do, and construct a target area based on that (in circles around all of your phases). This would be incredibly useful to start attacking things before they could start attacking you, and is pretty much the only way melee would make sense.

* Make the damage taken be closer to (30 / (pow+100) + 1)/N, so as to give a slight malus for using the spell unintelligently, but also give a (pow + 100) / 1000 chance of not being present in the place you were when an attacker's attack is made (hex etc); it would be understandable behavior if this were to absorb the beam, but /shrug.

* Don't end the spell when CBlinking or Blinking, but perhaps cause minor contam when Blinking.

* Change the interaction with PoG: Interact with it as currently, as a trap; if one of your phases enters it, we have a chance of dodging the "trap" ((pow + 100) / 1000), but when one of your phases enters it, all of you enters it. Be aware that one of your phases using it may land you on a square that will interact with another trap (including another Passage) so using this spell with that one may be somewhat chaotic.

* A solution to beams: Allow the form to empower Portal Projectile to work for *any* projectile, even spell projectiles, wand Zaps or eVokable Hellfire. This would be limited to the spell's original range, so no hyperaccurate edge-of-LoS Crystal Spears, unfortunately.

dynast wrote:
Hurricos wrote:Ddoor helps you kill exactly nothing.

Does your spell suggestion does any damage(that i may have missed it)?
Because otherwise it helps you kill exactly nothing.

Quite. It functions similarly to Death's Door in that it protects you greatly and helps you not take damage, so it doesn't exactly matter whether or not you take damage - the fact is that you enter a form that is protected and has some ability that others do not. Necromutation, Death's Door and Statue Form are three spells I can think of that protect you through a form or status light; this would be a fourth one, which would be astoundingly good for the species that need it but could cast it easily (Fe, Sp).

Also, with concern to the unstealth problem that daggaz was bringing up:

Why has anyone won Qazlal? Anyone ever? I think the implied impact of being less stealthy has been made a little too serious; know well that this spell would not make you nearly as unstealthy as Qazlal worship.

If you wanted to make it actually powerful, you would leave all abilities enabled on your clones, and anything that you did to a monster would be repeated by all your clones if the monster was in range of the ability, however while powerful, that would also be awkward as heck to use.

I do see what you are going for here, but the downside is slightly worse than the upside unless you make some major changes to how reciprocal LOS and monster activation works, which seems a lot to ask for a single level 9 spell.

I dont wanna go into qazlal subjective derailments because i never dared worship qazlal so i just wanna jump to the most obvious thing about this spell: Its too much work to implement. Its clear this spell was designed based on what it would look like and not on what it would actually do.

I've read this and given it some thought and it's a really complicated spell proposal. It's a neat and flavorful idea, but explaining it and its uses and downsides is tricky. It feels like it'd work really well in a pen-and-paper RPG (it has great narrative potential) but not so well in something like Crawl (where communication is limited and mechanical clarity is important).

Also, so much of Crawl is designed with "there is one player and many monster characters" that I think breaking that rule would be very problematic.

If you had this create Rashaka-like clones that would mirror your actions but were allied monsters it might be more interesting? But it starts to step on Dith's toes then...

Hurricos wrote:Also, with concern to the unstealth problem that daggaz was bringing up:

Why has anyone won Qazlal? Anyone ever? I think the implied impact of being less stealthy has been made a little too serious; know well that this spell would not make you nearly as unstealthy as Qazlal worship.

As a person who's won Qazlal recently, the noise DEFINITELY puts you in some really bad spots, but in exchange for that Qazlal gives you: significant defences, resistances, an aura of passive damage that does a pretty good amount of damage and is good when you have to deal with groups, the ability to kill most things smite targetted in two turns, and the ability to annihilate nearly everything in your LOS in one turn.

This spell gives you: some defenses, kind of, some resistance, kind of, an escape that isn't quite as good as cblink, and no actual offensive benefit.

And to reiterate, Qaz noise puts you in some REALLY BAD situations, more the further you get in the game, and this would definitely wake about the amount of stuff you wake with Qaz if I'm imagining the ranges correctly. Qaz levels of noise aren't something I would ever willingly choose to take on a non-meleedude, and anything that is doing lvl9 spells is very likely to not be a meleedude.

Edit: By the way, to provide context for Qaz noise, Qaz at max piety is quieter than any of the following: shatter, singing sword, scroll of noise, shield of the gong, alarm traps,

and critically for illustrating the importance of LOS: Qaz is quieter than a dragon shout.

Qaz at max piety is about as loud as constant <tt>s when you have between shoutitis 2 and 3 (yes, the mutation makes your shouts louder). I think people are overestimating exactly how loud the equivalent in noise this would cause, but considering the spell should be silent after casting and that you can be perfectly undetected even when things see you, it's not really any noise at all.

If the LoS issue is removed (LoS is instead computed as the union of all phases' LoSs, limited to some distance from your actual position), weapons get V to attack anything near you, you get automatic portal projectile / smite targeting on all ranged attacks, targeted spells and evocations, and we more accurately specify how your phases act with respect to you (more often stay close than not in a normal-like distribution), this spell becomes much simpler to think about and to implement.

But even if it were to stay, I don't get what Qaz (15) being quieter than a Dragon / Hydra roar (18) has to do with anything, considering this spell makes no noise and most characters that will be casting it are extremely stealthy (Na, Sp, Fe +5 +5 +4. Yes, Na do get more out of Trloc than most species; who knew.)

I really need a resume of this spell's purpose in one line. I fail to understand why you would cast this spell on a race that relies on good positioning and want to be on as few bad places as possible.

Hurricos wrote: but considering the spell should be silent after casting and that you can be perfectly undetected even when things see you, it's not really any noise at all.

Sure, you *can* remain undetected after things see you, but it's not as straightforward as you've been making it sound. Even a bloodless Vp--^Dith with a stealth value well above the maximum displayed on the ++++ chart will still have monsters wake up and know exactly where it is depressingly often. More stealth makes it more likely that they'll forget where you are, but the larger LOS makes it harder to get away from them so they'll forget. I do think the spell is a neat idea, I'm just not sure it's right for Crawl, or that anyone would be willing to put in the work to make it happen.

dynast wrote:I really need a resume of this spell's purpose in one line. I fail to understand why you would cast this spell on a race that relies on good positioning and want to be on as few bad places as possible.

I'm glad you asked, and I'll see what I can do.

The purpose of the spell is to strip away the fact that you're all in one place (and the implications that has). This is the general purpose of the translocations school - manipulating positions with utility or defensive intent, except this is much more abstract (in this case complicated).

The effect is vaguely similar to being invisible - if Fannar knows you're there, he may not be able to reliably BoC you, but he will be able to reliably hit you with Ozocubu's Refrigeration, as regardless of where you are, it will target you.

The mechanism is as follows: You are split into a power-dependent number of entities that will surround your original position in a two-dimensional normal distribution with pow-dependent sigma. These duplicates of you can occupy any space not occupied by a monster - empty space, walls, you name it. When one of your phases takes damage, you take damage, and their HP pool is your HP pool; however, the damage they take is reduced by the number of them there are (which is equivalent to saying "how much of you the damage actually attempted to affect").

Its effect extends also to being able to fudge your position through walls or space (compare quantum tunneling), and to do so immediately without extra MP cost (as the energy is already there, and you are already "at" your destination). The spell is just increasing the energy of your state so your position is uncertain (is that even realistic? I'm not a physics person ...)

The actual use: As an example, a room full of Daevas could kill any PC in less than a few terms, but if the smites do not actually target all of you, they only do damage to some of you, which in the context of this spell implies that they'd only do partial damage. Hellfire is less obvious and requires more power to avoid, as it affects a large area, but at max power I'd expect you could reduce the potency of hellfire to about 25% of its original strength by being mostly outside of the range of any blast

For AoE attacks, where you are is less important because the area they affect is larger.

prozacelf wrote:
Hurricos wrote: but considering the spell should be silent after casting and that you can be perfectly undetected even when things see you, it's not really any noise at all.

Sure, you *can* remain undetected after things see you, but it's not as straightforward as you've been making it sound. Even a bloodless Vp--^Dith with a stealth value well above the maximum displayed on the ++++ chart will still have monsters wake up and know exactly where it is depressingly often. More stealth makes it more likely that they'll forget where you are, but the larger LOS makes it harder to get away from them so they'll forget. I do think the spell is a neat idea, I'm just not sure it's right for Crawl, or that anyone would be willing to put in the work to make it happen.

You needn't be too concerned about things waking up if you can avoid taking much damage anyways. The larger LOS won't make it harder to get away as one of the major functions of the spell is ending it, which allows you to choose any location of the many you are currently at - which means a huge jump far out of many monsters' LoSs. There could / should also be a stealth modifier based on the number of your phases that can see the monster - I mean, the idea is that you're partially in that location, so there's a partial chance you'll be detected. It's similar to invisibility but does not rely upon trickery that can be detected, because you're literally only partially there; the less of you that is present at any given location, the less easily you can be seen.

The spell's supposed to stop you from being in one place, and should follow all the implications that has.

So the purpose of the spell is to shave damage by putting illusions of yourself trapped inside walls so they cannot be hit? Or to put them on the other side of walls so you can blink through it?

dynast wrote:So the purpose of the spell is to shave damage by putting illusions of yourself trapped inside walls so they cannot be hit? Or to put them on the other side of walls so you can blink through it?

Both. Actually, you don't even need walls to shave that damage; those just help you avoid being where you are (in sight) by putting part of you away from where you are (in the wall, out of sight).

The way it shaves damage is by splitting you apart, making it hard to damage all of you at once.

Remember: Most attacks have a limited AoE; melee generally has only a one-square or cleave-square attack size.

Hurricos wrote:but you can also make some very firm guarantees about being partially in the center at any given time, and are frequently enough in the center

eh, why make strange "mostly but not completely" exceptions like this when you don't have to?

Hurricos wrote:* Don't end the spell when CBlinking or Blinking

give the message "eh, that's really not necessary" when you try to cast blink or Cblink, since you get a free CBlink from the ability menu after casting the spell.

Throw stealth modifiers, melee, and hex resistance out the window for the interim, and focus on designing a simple, functional version of this spell.

I'd recommend disabling player-centered effects (fog, shatter, irradiate, etc) completely because they could be exploitable in unpredictable, possibly broken ways, whereas smite-targeted and full-LOS effects would be "exploitable" in a predictable and intended manner.

I actually find very few situations where you would want to avoid using this spell, namely when your HP are so extremely ow that even heavily reduced damaged can kill you easily, or when you are alone just trying to regenerate / wait off contam. But that's like saying Firestorm is bad for attacking adjacent monsters. Like, duh.

There's little merit to counterarguments in this thread. For example,

njvack wrote:Also, so much of Crawl is designed with "there is one player and many monster characters" that I think breaking that rule would be very problematic.

No, I don't think there would any problem with that - except maybe how hostile monsters prioritize one clone over another, but it wouldn't make a difference how the clone is chosen, because the damage (or enchantment) would be the same. Restrictions against what the player can do ensure that you would never do an action that one clone can do, but another can't. Or,

dynast wrote:this spell was designed based on what it would look like

This spell doesn't have to look like anything special at all.

Here's how an encounter with a tormentor might go:
There's one tormentor around, you have 100 HP, no rTorment and no rN. You cast Hyperphase and split into 5 clones, 3 of which are within LOS of the tormentor. The tormentor torments, and you take 50/5 damage 3 times for a total loss of 30 HP. Less than what you'd take without casting Hyperphase.

Most of the reason I want to guarantee being in the center is to avoid having to up the complexity.

The PC should not be able to walk through walls; terrain checks should remain the same. However, they should be able to collapse their state to be on the other side of the wall ... but loitering in walls is a bad thing.

PC should not be able to collapse state within a wall, agreed.

You may like to guarantee that PC can always collapse right after casting the spell, i.e. so that not all clones are fully surrounded by walls and at least one empty tile is in view. However, you could just allow re-casting Hyperphase to make a new set of clones, using your last collapsed position as the center of the distribution, so that even in the most cramped spaces you could eventually collapse state and escape. And reading tele is always an option.

Otherwise, I see no reason to guarantee a clone being in the center, especially one that is somehow privileged. How would being in the center avoid having to up the complexity?

Pollen_Golem wrote:PC should not be able to collapse state within a wall, agreed.

You may like to guarantee that PC can always collapse right after casting the spell, i.e. so that not all clones are fully surrounded by walls and at least one empty tile is in view. However, you could just allow re-casting Hyperphase to make a new set of clones, using your last collapsed position as the center of the distribution, so that even in the most cramped spaces you could eventually collapse state and escape. And reading tele is always an option.

Otherwise, I see no reason to guarantee a clone being in the center, especially one that is somehow privileged. How would being in the center avoid having to up the complexity?

I expect the PC to be able to move while this spell is active. If there is no center clone that is stopping you from passing through a wall ... well, it could also be done artificially too.

It makes sense that the most concentrated area wouldn't be able to pass through a wall without making that jump, I guess.

Most importantly though, this spell should not allow you to walk through regions of stone with no problem (or camp in them). I can think of a number of ways to abuse that.

Pollen_Golem wrote:Here's how an encounter with a tormentor might go:
There's one tormentor around, you have 100 HP, no rTorment and no rN. You cast Hyperphase and split into 5 clones, 3 of which are within LOS of the tormentor. The tormentor torments, and you take 50/5 damage 3 times for a total loss of 30 HP. Less than what you'd take without casting Hyperphase.

Yup. Exactly how I was thinking of it.

Oops, I wasn't thinking very clearly when I wrote that.
Torment damage is calculated successively, so...
First clone's tormenting makes you take 1/2 of 100 damage, divided by 5, leaving you with 90 HP.
Second clone's tormenting makes you take 1/2 of 90 damage, divided by 5, leaving you with 81 HP.
Third clone's tormenting makes you take 1/2 of 81 damage, divided by 5, leaving you with 72.9 HP before rounding.
So you'd have a total loss of about 27 HP, not 30.

Here's how an encounter with a tormentor might go:
There's one tormentor around, you have 100 HP, no rTorment and no rN. You cast a spell that does damage. The tormentor dies, and you take 0 damage 0 times for a total loss of 0 HP. Less than what you'd take by casting Hyperphase.

Same remarks can dismiss a whole lot of spells: Leda's, battlesphere, stoneskin, passwall, butterflies, forest, petrify, necromutation, dragon's call....

duvessa wrote:Here's how an encounter with a tormentor might go:
There's one tormentor around, you have 100 HP, no rTorment and no rN. You cast a spell that does damage. The tormentor dies, and you take 0 damage 0 times for a total loss of 0 HP. Less than what you'd take by casting Hyperphase.

The spell isn't meant to stop torment. Torment is a full AoE.

Compare a Hell Sentinel at the edge of LoS, which cannot be for sure killed by any spell in one turn regardless of power. If you had this spell up, you could begin dropping Fire Storms on it without taking nearly as much damage from Hellfire as you might otherwise. Or PProjectiling with a XXXbow.

The epicenter ascpect is misguided because it fundamentally muddles the mechanical clarity of this spell.
Sometimes, your clones are all doing the same thing at the same time. Other times, the epicenter is doing all the work.
This makes Hyperphase have a lot in common with Summonings. It no longer has the essense of a pure translocations spell.

As you make distinctions between the epicentral clone and other clones, you introduce potentially confusing elements.
Let's see how this epicenter aspect plays out:

Epicenter does not walk through walls.
Epicenter can melee normally ("or better", with clones helping).
Epicenter has special-cased interaction with PoG involving avoiding it as a trap and collapsing the spell if you fail(?)
Epicenter can blink. Can your epicenter blink without collapsing state? Does only the epicenter blink, while the other clones remain stationary?
What happens to the clones as you walk around? Do they follow you around? If so, how? - is a new set of clones redistributed every 6 or so turns?

There is no evidently good answer to such questions, which is why it would have to be arbitrated by a dev rather than guided by universally accessible reason. And thus the spell would come with an arbitrary list of things you can and cannot do, rather than being guided by the simple principle that you "strip away the fact that you're all in one place (and the implications that has)... you're tearing yourself out into space in order to reduce effects pertaining to your location."

You sometimes talk about your phases doing stuff, like tunneling. That part is actually not clear. As well as the following, which sounds like the epicenter may have to cast passwall to get to a clone, promptly collapsing the phases and inducing an uncontrolled blink:
"When you're at the point you'd wish to escape through (usu. a wall), you wait a bit until you phase in on the other side of the wall, then collapse state and effectively blink to the other side of the wall. "
That noone asked about it shows that this is so confusing that it's not worth formulating a question about it. Then you mentioned having a free controlled blink to anywhere, and whatever you had said before was forgotten.

Instead of trying to find a reasonable resolution, how about just not have an epicenter.

And there are rational ways to dictate design. Look at, for example, how Ru's sacrifice Love and Artifice work. Each has a whole list of things that work and don't work, but it all makes sense in a way so you're not surprised about spectral weapon v tukima's.

Furthermore, if your epicenter can walk far from the other clones, that's extremely unbalanced. Because if you cast Hypershift in a safe place near stairs, and go away, you'll be getting huge damage reduction while the epicenter goes off and does its thing, and if you somehow face danger despite the damage reduction, you can collapse back near your safely deposited clones. So you'll need MP drain, or an arbitrary time limit on this spell's duration, or some clunky distance mechanic that limits how far your epicenter can go. Whereas with no epicenter and no movement, Hypershift can elegantly be allowed to stay activated indefinitely.

This spell appears to be a cornucopia of special cases. For example, how do you target something out of your LOS, but not your clone's? How does fog work?

fog is a player-centered effect and I suggested upthread how those are to be treated

kuniqs wrote:how do you target something out of your LOS, but not your clone's?

you use arrow keys to target the tile you need, then press "." or "enter" or "f".

It's funny: note how easily hecklers could have ridiculed Hyperphase as waaay too powerful defensively... but the first posters nudged at the "it's too weak" route, and that's the direction it snowballed.

So far i have only seem "degenerative" uses that would make this spell useful, like placing clones on the other side of walls so you can blink through it, pick whatever rune is in there, take reduced damage from whoever is guarding it, then blink back or use passage of golubria. Or just using it for scouting in general, which enters ash territory. Otherwise this spell has no use, unless of course you ignore you gonna have cblink, dispersal and disjunction from the same book.

I don't think that it's easy that a spell that has the potential if not the assurance to make you take more damage is too strong defensively.

Also, I think you are confused at the intent of the critics of the spell. It's not that it's "too weak," as that implies that making it stronger would fix it. It is that the spell, as designed, actually creates more problems than it solves.

Finally, if you have to read a short manual of how all the special cases for a single spell work, I don't think that is something that will or should be implemented in crawl.

Pollen_Golem wrote:Furthermore, if your epicenter can walk far from the other clones, that's extremely unbalanced. Because if you cast Hypershift in a safe place near stairs, and go away, you'll be getting huge damage reduction while the epicenter goes off and does its thing, and if you somehow face danger despite the damage reduction, you can collapse back near your safely deposited clones. So you'll need MP drain, or an arbitrary time limit on this spell's duration, or some clunky distance mechanic that limits how far your epicenter can go.

Note that you can already do this, right now, in a stable version of the game, for less MP than it would cost to cast Hyperphase once, MP drain or no.

1) Read or evoke tele.
2) Cast Passage of Golubria, a level 4 spell in a starting book.
3) When you arrive, cast Passage again.

Tabstorm said that you had 30 turns before the first portal goes away; that's 30 turns where you can "collapse back" to safety, and most **Wr can do it before Lair. A lucky Wr who found Book of Geomancy (or an EE who found Spatial Translocations) on the floor could also get through walls before too long as well. In other words, by the time a character is capable of casting level 9 spells, they have so many cheaper means to navigate levels/defend themselves than Hyperphase that it wouldn't be worth the investment. I think that's what the "hecklers" are criticizing.

that's just for *rock walls*, and EE can hop rock walls without finding Spatial Translocations so I'm not sure what the point of that is.

Sure (though note the timer on PoG) and that's not an argument against the spell. Note you can already do what Firestorm does, right now, with a level 6 spell:

1) cast poison cloud one or more times
2) cast ignite poison, a level 3 (!) spell admittedly not in a starting book
3) repeat as necessary

Or for that matter, instead of casting LCS you can cast stone arrow, a level 3 spell in a starting book, for much less MP and with better range. Or who would learn chain lightning when you have static discharge. Or haste when you have swiftness, etc. By the time you can cast level 9 spells, you have much cheaper ways to navigate levels and defend yourself that it wouldn't be worth the investment......

RBrandon wrote: the spell, as designed, actually creates more problems than it solves

you have to read a short manual of how all the special cases for a single spell work

as I pointed out, there are few situations where you would actively want to *avoid* using this spell, so it doesn't create more problems than it solves in almost all cases

you don't need to read a short manual. It would be pretty self-explanatory when you cast it a couple times after learning. Passage of golubria is similar - if you only describe the portal system in words, it sounds awful, but then you try it out and everything falls into place. Do you have to read a short manual for how a single exotic Ru sacrifice works?

archaeo wrote:Tabstorm said that you had 30 turns before the first portal goes away; that's 30 turns where you can "collapse back" to safety

That's actually rather spoilery. Most player-created effects are much less effective when out of view. Summons don't attack enemies. Clouds dissipate faster. Then PoG takes this trend and breaks it.

Pollen_Golem wrote:that's just for *rock walls*, and EE can hop rock walls without finding Spatial Translocations so I'm not sure what the point of that is.

LRD's in the starting book, yeah? A bit of wizmode testing suggests that even modest training (12 Earth, 12 SC, 17 Int) is enough to get LRD to 50 spellpower, enough to break through stone; at 15/15/25, you can start breaking metal.

Note you can already do what Firestorm does, right now, with a level 6 spell...

Snipping here, as you kind of take this argument past its logical conclusion. Firestorm is more mp efficient than pcloud/ignite poison, just like LCS will do more damage than stone arrow, etc. Hyperphase, on the other hand, seems like it would be relatively inefficient in the majority of cases, except for the occasions where it offers a largely risk-free and boring way to break endgame vaults.

It would be pretty self-explanatory when you cast it a couple times after learning.

I'm not sure how this is true. It's a complicated spell that requires special consideration for lots of items. What happens when the player's wielding Lantern of Shadows? What if you evoke a rod? If you summon something, where does the summon spawn? If you shout, where does the noise come from? If you berserk, does everything in the swarm zerk? How does Tornado work with this? How do other tloc spells play with it? God abilities? There seem to be a lot of special cases you'd need to handle.

In your post upthread, you suggest just outright restricting a lot of this stuff; what's the point of casting a spell if it takes away my ability to do anything else? Especially when a lower level necromancy spell makes me outright invulnerable instead of harder-to-hit-except-when-you're-easier-to-hit, or a lower level tloc spell enables me to immediately get away from any dangerous situation, all without restricting my ability to perform actions?

Pollen_Golem wrote:That's actually rather spoilery. Most player-created effects are much less effective when out of view. Summons don't attack enemies. Clouds dissipate faster. Then PoG takes this trend and breaks it.

I mean, it isn't only PoG, but malign gateway, all undead allies, and god allies; there are probably some things I'm forgetting. You're correct that it'd probably be better if all of these were made consistent with other effects.

Pollen_Golem wrote:It's funny: note how easily hecklers could have ridiculed Hyperphase as waaay too powerful defensively... but the first posters nudged at the "it's too weak" route, and that's the direction it snowballed.

Perhaps you should focus on the fact that it's ridiculously complex and nigh-impossible to implement, rather than worrying too much about balance or hecklers or how nobody understands how amazing and visionary it is.

For one thing, I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the extremely basic and fundamentally unsolvable problem with increasing your LoS in any way: everything you can see has to fit on one screen. Period. End of story. No exceptions, ever. If you can see a single tile that's currently off-screen, you are required to press shift-x every single turn to go look at it -- I mean, what if an ancient lich wandered into it? -- which is unequivocally unacceptable. And I know you're thinking "but there's plenty of space, look at my screen, most of it's dark!" but console still exists, not to mention ultrabooks and small windows and whatever. In case you don't know, under circlelos the visible area extended right up to the edge of console's viewport; under squarelos there's one tile's worth of extra space, since squarelos is radius 7 instead of 8. So theoretically your LoS could expand by one tile, back to 8. But it's patently clear that you guys expect to have, like, 5-6 extra tiles in various directions, if not more.

For another, you've spent a whole lot of words making effusive statements about hyper-position and phases and stuff, so let's boil down what actually happens in play.

1. You cast the spell. I guess a bunch of random tiles near you are filled with a copy of your player sprite. You seem like you haven't decided whether one is picked out as the central one, or if they are all interchangeable. Apparently you intende that your LoS include all tiles within 7 squares of any clone. As above this is 100% impossible, period, so I'm going to ignore the (many, many) problems that it would cause even if it were.
2. Clones can be in walls and features, but the central one can't. Okay. What happens when you do the most basic thing ever, i.e. press a direction key? Be specific, not poetic. Does the central clone move? Do the others? What if a monster is in the way of some clone? You implied at some point that clones can go outside of the level boundary. This is 100% impossible, period; units placed outside of the bounds cause crashes (and for good reason).
3. What can you now do, aside from move? Again, be specific. Pollen_Golem seems to have sort-of understood the fact that nearly every action is now either a) impossible to implement, or b) requiring of ridiculous special casing, but apparently you mean for the player to still be able to fight effectively in this state. When you want to fire a spell or arrow, does it always originate from the central clone? If not, then from where? Are you seriously suggesting we rewrite every single targeter in the game (and there are dozens) to accommodate picking a clone to fire from? "Any clone that can see that space" is not sufficient, because often the path of a missile matters. If any clone can make melee attacks, what's the weapon swing based on? Can you use items? If you read a scroll of blinking, what happens (you suggested this would be pointless, but what if I want to go somewhere no clones are?)? If you teleport, what happens? If you cast this spell again, what happens? What happens if you cast Passage or Dispersal or target a clone with teleport other or a clone gets hit with Banishment or the abyss shifts or Xom acts or you use Lucy's Corruption or get constricted or get thrown by an Octopode Crusher or...
4. You get some amount of effective damage reduction. You've made a big fuss about this and how it interacts with AOEs, but the vast, vast majority of attacks hit one target, so for most purposes you just take 1/n times normal damage. How does your AC apply if multiple clones get hit? EV? If a firebolt hits three clones, does that count as three blocks with your shield? If a clone gets hit with malmutate, or confuse, or blink-other-range, what happens? If a clone enters miasma, what happens?
5. You can end the spell with an ability, and when you do you pick a space a clone was in and then you're there. I suppose you can't pick ones that are in walls.

Now, before you quote my post, slice it into tiny chunks, and write pithy answers to every one of my questions, the bottom line here is that there are all these questions. Every single one of those questions is going to need a special case, regardless of your answer, and each of those special cases needs to be coded and tested. Every single one is going to be at least a little counterintuitive, regardless of your answer. Every single one makes the spell harder to implement, harder to understand, harder to use. And in exchange for all this effort implementing the spell, and the burden of understanding it we place upon the player, the only real effects of the spell are that you take less damage and get a free weird CBlink (again, increasing LoS by more than one tile is impossible).

Compare to CBlink. Here is how CBlink works: you pick a tile you can see. You are moved there. You get some contam. Period.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade, and it's always good to have people think up new spells, but I think you should go back to the drawing board on this one.

Moved to CYC, since as ontoclasm and others have described this really isn't something that will (or can) be implemented.

archaeo wrote:LRD's in the starting book, yeah?

I thought you meant passwall, not LRD, because you talked about getting through walls, which is different.

archaeo wrote:Hyperphase, on the other hand, seems like it would be relatively inefficient in the majority of cases

And yet the opposite is true. We have explained this upthread. You just don't build your character solely around beams if you want to fight with Hyperphase on. All you have to offer is "seems".

It would be pretty self-explanatory when you cast it a couple times after learning.

archaeo wrote:I'm not sure how this is true.

You're not sure because you're not actually casting it, you're reading a thread about it instead. And visualizing it in a vacuum is more difficult. You probably wouldn't be sure how it's true of Passage of Golubria if you kept reading threads about Passage of Golubria, never seeing it in action.

archaeo wrote:It's a complicated spell that requires special consideration for lots of items. What happens when the player's wielding Lantern of Shadows? What if you evoke a rod? If you summon something, where does the summon spawn? If you shout, where does the noise come from? If you berserk, does everything in the swarm zerk? How does Tornado work with this? How do other tloc spells play with it? God abilities? There seem to be a lot of special cases you'd need to handle.

All of these can be broken down into 3 types. (At least, I think it's 3. I`ll explain them even more clearly later.) Lists are not impressive. Throw almost any question like this, including almost all of ontoclasm`s concerns (the rest I deal with below), and it can be broken down like that. And each type gets treated according to one defining principle. There may be a special case here or there, but not a lot.

Here's a legitimate special case, for example: what happens if a monster tramples a clone stuck in a 1x1 patch of wall - is the clone allowed to be dislodged and if yes, does the monster stay in place instead of moving forward into the 1x1 patch of wall? A special case is probably required here, but it's no special case nightmare.

Here's another: what if you get banished? You might think - collapse state immediately, right before banishment gets processed. But, that's a bad approach, because you should always look for the consistent alternative: once you take a gate out of the abyss, you return to your Hyperphase state! Now that's better. In any case, banishment during Hyperphase requires some code.

archaeo wrote:outright restricting a lot of this stuff; what's the point of casting a spell if it takes away my ability to do anything else?

Answer your own question. You can do it. What's the point of casting blade hands if it takes away your ability to cast spells and wield a weapon while reducing your defenses?

archaeo wrote:I mean, it isn't only PoG, but malign gateway, all undead allies, and god allies;

I know about malign gateway, but that spell kind-of forces you to figure it out, and the tentacle reaches beyond your LOS on its own accord. But all undead and god-given allies can attack out of view?! O_O That is the most spoilery crap ever. Why would a servant of makhleb be able to attack things out of view, but not the same demon when you use the Summon Greater Demon? This sounds so ridiculous I doubt it's true.

ontoclasm wrote:You implied at some point that clones can go outside of the level boundary. This is 100% impossible, period; units placed outside of the bounds cause crashes (and for good reason).

You would not see any clones placed there. They would raise N but the clones would not appear on the map. The only way I see this potentially causing bugs is if non-mapped clones are allowed to be targets of player-centered effects not caused by any monster, like an explosive miscast. I understand this would require coding work because maps are not generated with extra space beyond the indestructible border, but even guaranteeing that no units are to be placed outside of the level boundary requires code.

ontoclasm wrote:For one thing, I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the extremely basic and fundamentally unsolvable problem with increasing your LoS in any way: everything you can see has to fit on one screen. Period. End of story. No exceptions, ever. If you can see a single tile that's currently off-screen, you are required to press shift-x every single turn to go look at it -- I mean, what if an ancient lich wandered into it? -- which is unequivocally unacceptable. And I know you're thinking "but there's plenty of space, look at my screen, most of it's dark!" but console still exists, not to mention ultrabooks and small windows and whatever. In case you don't know, under circlelos the visible area extended right up to the edge of console's viewport; under squarelos there's one tile's worth of extra space, since squarelos is radius 7 instead of 8. So theoretically your LoS could expand by one tile, back to 8. But it's patently clear that you guys expect to have, like, 5-6 extra tiles in various directions, if not more.

Well, at least this shows you're concerned about player convenience, which I am too. Tiles shrink when window size cannot accomodate LOS, as seen in the attached screenshot. So we got tiles covered. Glad to have got that out of the way.

Now for the console users. They will have to scroll if they want to use this spell and see the extended LOS, giving up the convenience of seeing everything at the same time. Well, console users amply demonstrate that they do not give a flying flappy bird about such conveniences. You forfeit a lot of convenience when you play console. As just one example, you have to use the x cursor every time you want to see monster enchantments, whether they're wielding anything, their health.

I'm not sure why some people prefer console anyway. I've been told that periphery vision problems and sensory overload have something to do with it.

ontoclasm wrote:So theoretically your LoS could expand by one tile, back to 8.

That's the vertical "limit"; horizontally you could expand by 9 tiles to 16. Even if console players scroll, scrolling up and down would be enough to see all of expanded LOS, if that's of any consolation.

My god.

Pollen_Golem wrote:But all undead and god-given allies can attack out of view?! O_O That is the most spoilery crap ever. Why would a servant of makhleb be able to attack things out of view, but not the same demon when you use the Summon Greater Demon? This sounds so ridiculous I doubt it's true.

If you play a game with Yred, you will get a lot of "You feel more experienced" messages as you travel through levels...

That's just permanent allies. That's different. Those aren't effects you create and sustain out of nothing, so they're not a spoilery exception the way PoG is. Archaeo said: god allies.

I see Sandman in PG.

Pollen_Golem wrote:Now for the console users. They will have to scroll if they want to use this spell and see the extended LOS, giving up the convenience of seeing everything at the same time. Well, console users amply demonstrate that they do not give a flying flappy bird about such conveniences. You forfeit a lot of convenience when you play console. As just one example, you have to use the x cursor every time you want to see monster enchantments, whether they're wielding anything, their health.

This is not a true thing for several reasons:
1. There's no "scrolling" in console, there's just nothing to scroll, or scroll with, it's not convenience, it's the essence of console play, everything you see is everything you can see.
2. You don't give up any conveniences, you have a list where you can see all the critters health all the time, and you can pull up a list of critters's with weapons and enchantments with one keypress, there are *different* conveniences, but you don't give up anything.

The increase in x usage in console didn't result from console users not caring about convenience, it resulted from some devs (and a couple of non-devs) being interested in adding their pet features (like reaching on every polearm, 20 new monster enchantments, etc) but not interested in console players' convenience. In fact, convenience is the main reason that most console players play console: it has less latency than tiles, is easy to copy from, works on more devices, doesn't require large downloads, and uses very little screen space.

Siegurt wrote:1. There's no "scrolling" in console, there's just nothing to scroll, or scroll with, it's not convenience, it's the essence of console play, everything you see is everything you can see.

There is as much scrolling in console as there is in tiles. Shift-x, scroll scroll scroll. Ctrl-f, locate something, scroll as much as you want. In previous days, activate tele with cTele active, scroll scroll scroll.

Now, while Hyperphase is on, scrolling would obviously be made easier by not forcing you to go into shift-x, since movement keys would not be useable for movement anyway, but I digress.

Siegurt wrote:2. You don't give up any conveniences, you have a list where you can see all the critters health all the time, and you can pull up a list of critters's with weapons and enchantments with one keypress, there are *different* conveniences, but you don't give up anything.

You can't see a critter's health or enchantment in console, even if the list tells you some critter's health/enchantment you have to use x to see if it's one specific critter with those statuses or another critter of the same species.
Oh my, a deep troll is hasted, I wonder which one it is, x lll kk hhhhhhh jjjj, oh how convenient.
In tiles, just from keeping an eye on the vincity around your character avatar you can tell WHAT is happening and WHERE.
The list you can pull up is available and useful with tiles too, but not nearly as necessary.

PG: You don't help your cause by dissing console. If whatever you propose does not work properly in console mode, it's not good enough.

The list referred to is ctrl+x. Also * and + cycle through things in x mode.

You really don't help your case dissing a console straw man.

The Tavern

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