Mummy death curse change

[TeshiAlair]

"3fa685d | Shmuale Mark | 2014-06-15 12:29:22 -0400

Make mummies killed by summons curse the player.
It hardly stretches the imagination, given that enemy zot trap triggers
always hit the player, and it's an indisputable improvement in gameplay."

I can't tell if this makes mummies more annoying or less annoying. But I am going to hella dispute that it is an improvement in gameplay.

Ditto on the enemy zot trap triggers hitting the player (which I actually didn't know).

[jejorda2]

This change annoys me. By the same reasoning:

• Hitting a hydra with spells, ammo, or ranged weapons should remove a head and heal it
• Standing outside of melee range should not prevent enemies' melee attacks from hitting you
• Resistances should only be racial, and not equipment based

I think my point is that you used to be able to make a decision about whether to use tactics to avoid a curse while killing a Mummy, and now the decision is out of your hands. Wands of enslavement and all kinds of evokable stuff, in addition to spells and deities, provided Mummy solutions.

Cursing equipment is a lot like consumable destruction.

I have dropped good equipment and picked up undesirable equipment before killing a Mummy so that I will have a cursed club instead of a cursed staff of energy. This change makes degenerate gameplay more attractive.

[duvessa]

also you can still avoid the curse by just dropping your cursable items first so all this did was make avoiding the curses even more of a pain in the ass lol

[tasonir]

With 15 remove curse scrolls in your inventory, do you really need to avoid item curse death curses? I figured this commit was more for people doing actual tomb, who are avoiding pain curses, so that they don't die, rather than people on D:6 looking to not get an item cursed.

I still say death curses could just be removed, though

[Leafsnail]

Cursing equipment is a lot like consumable destruction.

I disagree, it is massively worse.

- It's mostly on slow melee-only enemies that are not at all hard to park, so if you want to avoid the death curse you can do so at the cost of screwing up your auto-explore
- It only curses one thing, so you can protect your important items by carrying junk
- Curses are not strictly bad due to Ash. You can gain a pretty sizable advantage by dropping all your equipment except your weapon, killing a mummy and getting your weapon cursed before joining Ash

The fact that you could avoid it by allowing a trash summon to deal the last point of damage to the mummy was also bad game design, and the fact that it helped mask the problem for some characters doesn't change that.

[crate]

Calling this change an "indisputable" improvement is definitely a lie, since I agree with minmay that this doesn't really improve things. It's like trying to hide a mountain under a rug.

I have considered getting the golden rune without ever killing a single guardian mummy (you can do this by leading them back to crypt to get them out of the way; they're slow melee-only monsters, after all) to prove a point, but unfortunately said exercise would be so abhorrently lengthy and un-fun that ... yeah.

[Sprucery]

It seems to be that when something is claimed to be indisputable, there actually is a hell of a lot to dispute.

I thought something was going to be done for the death curses to make Tomb *less* annoying.

[Patashu]

It seems to be that when something is claimed to be indisputable, there actually is a hell of a lot to dispute.

I thought something was going to be done for the death curses to make Tomb *less* annoying.

PleasingFungus I think had some ideas for it but hasn't gotten to toying with them. Probably we won't see any change until 0.16 because 0.15 comes out in August.

[Leafsnail]

All of the arguments for summons absorbing death curses are in fact arguments for removing death curses.

[Incarnal]

Honestly, I'd quite like to see death curses die. I think they're a perfect example of the kind of things that has been trimmed out of the game recently, as they're not so much difficulty increasing as annoying and tedious.

[jejorda2]

What if the Mummy marks you for a curse on sight, and the curse becomes effective if you break LOS without killing the Mummy first? That way you can use tactics to avoid the curse. You get to pick between multiple smiters in LOS or multiple curses when you break LOS.

[duvessa]

Then autoexplore could instantly curse you if you have more than 0 stealth.

[Patashu]

Then autoexplore could instantly curse you if you have more than 0 stealth.

I think the idea is that the mummy would now have a spell 'apply curse', and if it casts that spell on you THEN you break LoS then the curse takes effect. So in that sense it's no different than a sphinx appearing at the edge of LoS and instantly landing para/confuse.

[Leafsnail]

I think death curses should just be removed because they are so bad. If someone comes up with a replacement for them later, great.

[Sar]

but then people would stop killing themselves with AoE spells in Tomb and mummy zigs

I would miss that

[jejorda2]

Then autoexplore could instantly curse you if you have more than 0 stealth.

Yes. So you hit o, then you decide, "Do I want to kill this thing, or run away and suffer the curse." I'd even say NewMummies should have some kind of shadow-attunement exception such that they always pass a stealth check and always detect you when you come into sight.

For everything else, running away is safe, but has the opportunity cost of lost experience and leaving threats to deal with later. For these proposed NewMummies, running away could be more dangerous than fighting. If you can kill it without breaking sight, the curse doesn't matter.

[KoboldLord]

If you have determined that you have a problem, first see if you can make it worse. Give all monster mummies the ability to teleport themselves to an unoccupied tile just outside the LOS of the player if at any point the player cannot see them. They can do this even across stairwells and branch boundaries. Furthermore, they always treat the player as if the player is marked, and are therefore impossible to shake. That way, death curses can be made even more lethal and dealing with the fallout is still better than having all these mummies that just won't leave you alone.

More seriously, if parking chaff mummies is a problem, remove chaff mummies. By the time the player sees the entrance to Tomb, guardian mummies are purely decorative and can be safely substituted with another form of decorative undead or even an attractive empty tile. There are two mummies that are meaningful threats in the whole branch, which is not enough, but death curses could become meaningful if the level was re-designed in such a way that the player couldn't guarantee an easy escape route. More variant mummies that still present a meaningful level of threat would probably be essential, though.

[Leafsnail]

That would address one of the problems I identified with death curses. That still leaves the other two, and there's also the fact that it has all the same problems as item destruction (a feature that was removed). Indeed, I think jejorda's suggestion suffers from those problems too (except I guess you could actually get multiple curses for Ash rather than just one).

Removing chaff mummies isn't a bad idea in itself, though.

[and into]

Was a thread in GDD not too long ago on this topic:

https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=12219&p=171376

I agree that getting rid of the summonings workaround is a lateral move, at best. Arguably, it is actually worse than the status quo ante.