The Tavern

Not that I think they need a buff, but it sure is convenient that they zoom into melee range instead of hanging back and blasting you. Why don't they act like a foo-taur or an orb spider? Is this too a leftover from when they were "Swords"? If this would be too cruel to melee tanks, then just make them a little slower to compensate. It's odd that of all the monsters that specialize in ranged combat, the toughest one is the one that offers itself up to your pointy things so earnestly.

Because devs created stupid AI of OoF.

mod edit: removed an (admittedly minor) insult, please criticize ideas, not people.

"Fuck you, I'm an orb of fire. My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I'm just ferocious."

They do act like a foo-taur. They don't act like an orb spider for the same reason centaurs don't: it would be horrible.

If you want monsters to camp against you try playing 4.1. Generally people get tired of it pretty fast.

stupid people

It's literally a big glowing ball of flaming stuff. Why are you questioning its motivations?

So that when the fight goes badly, you're fucked when you try to run away.

I really hate monsters that keep distance or forcibly reposition you away from them. It just ends up being annoying, I don't care if it's "interesting".

Monsters that stay away from you just make "reasonably strong/very good ranged attack" more of a hard requirement, than how it is currently a "helpful addition". I'm extremely not fond of red devils for their hop back in 0 aut move, which is just frustrating, especially because they show up so late they're almost never a credible threat (perhaps only in the lair:8 hell ending are they dangerous). Orb spiders are a bit annoying too, but I feel like they at least have a unique attack and they can't hit you through other monsters so you usually have time to deal with them. Plus it's one of those rare monsters where shields are very useful, so hey.

I think the more I play crawl the less patience I have for characters who are not set up to tab through packs with ease, it takes too long to go through the mid game as a stabber. Mages are inbetween, somewhat more tolerable, but still annoying. I killed off my recent stabber trying to turn it into a statue form melee dude just because I wanted to do that playstyle, even though it was entirely ridiculous to try that conversion. Almost got away with it

...Okay, how on earth are shields useful against orb spiders?

shields can block orbs of destruction?

Yeah, but when would you ever actually get meaningfully hit by an orb of destruction in the first place...

duvessa wrote:Yeah, but when would you ever actually get meaningfully hit by an orb of destruction in the first place...

I assume you have a secret tech how to avoid an ood (other than the obvious "corners" answer). Please share it with us.

Temporal Distortion guarantees avoid to OoD.
Or summon butterflies is nice if locations of butterflies are good.

Magipi wrote:
duvessa wrote:Yeah, but when would you ever actually get meaningfully hit by an orb of destruction in the first place...

I assume you have a secret tech how to avoid an ood (other than the obvious "corners" answer). Please share it with us.

i do. i call it "moving" and its a great way to beat a lot of monsters, including orb spiders

duvessa wrote:
Magipi wrote:
duvessa wrote:Yeah, but when would you ever actually get meaningfully hit by an orb of destruction in the first place...

I assume you have a secret tech how to avoid an ood (other than the obvious "corners" answer). Please share it with us.
i do. i call it "moving" and its a great way to beat a lot of monsters, including orb spiders

cryptic minmayism Nr. 8185

It's not really cryptic, orbs are pretty easy to bait into walls, Spider is full of walls and corners. Plus, if you use a blowgun (like you probably should), you can just put some poison on the spider and move out of los before it even finishes weaving its first orb, most of the time. I mean, I can't say I never get hit by spiders' orbs, but my movement game is far from perfect.

Sar wrote:It's not really cryptic, orbs are pretty easy to bait into walls, Spider is full of walls and corners. Plus, if you use a blowgun (like you probably should), you can just put some poison on the spider and move out of los before it even finishes weaving its first orb, most of the time. I mean, I can't say I never get hit by spiders' orbs, but my movement game is far from perfect.

Yes, I always use walls and corners and blowguns, that is okay. But "when would you ever actually get meaningfully hit by an orb of destruction in the first place" because of "moving" is still cryptic.

duvessa wrote:
Magipi wrote:
duvessa wrote:Yeah, but when would you ever actually get meaningfully hit by an orb of destruction in the first place...

I assume you have a secret tech how to avoid an ood (other than the obvious "corners" answer). Please share it with us.
i do. i call it "moving" and its a great way to beat a lot of monsters, including orb spiders

It begins with "moving" and ends with "the goalposts".

Magipi wrote:
Sar wrote:It's not really cryptic, orbs are pretty easy to bait into walls, Spider is full of walls and corners. Plus, if you use a blowgun (like you probably should), you can just put some poison on the spider and move out of los before it even finishes weaving its first orb, most of the time. I mean, I can't say I never get hit by spiders' orbs, but my movement game is far from perfect.

Yes, I always use walls and corners and blowguns, that is okay. But "when would you ever actually get meaningfully hit by an orb of destruction in the first place" because of "moving" is still cryptic.

If an iood is coming towards you and you move out of the way, it doesn't hit you. If it's an adjacent monster hitting you with iood, then it does pathetic damage, and iood is such a broken mechanic that it still misses diagonally adjacent targets sometimes.

I suppose it is cryptic if you are unspoiled and therefore don't know how iood works, which I probably should have guessed given the context was someone unironically implying that iood is dangerous. Here is a partial explanation: The initial angle of iood is randomized, but after that its behaviour is deterministic. Its position has float precision, rather than being tied to the grid. It doesn't change in speed, it just constantly changes its angle of travel to face the target - but is slow at doing so. However, iood is special-cased to instantly turn (and almost certainly hit you as a result) if you try to dodge it en passant style when adjacent:

Code:: // Special case: // Moving diagonally when the orb is just about to hit you // 2 // ->*1 // (from 1 to 2) would be a guaranteed escape. This may be // realistic (strafing!), but since the game has no non-cheesy // means of waiting a small fraction of a turn, we don't want it.

Knowing that, in combination with the simple fact that IOOD's style of movement is completely broken when position and time are quantized (and Crawl makes position and time both extremely quantized), not to mention on non-Euclidean geometry (which is also something Crawl has) it becomes almost as easy to dodge as boulder beetles.

Blobbo wrote:It's literally a big glowing ball of flaming stuff.

Gretell wrote:orb of fire (*) | Spd: 15 | HD: 30 | HP: 150 | AC/EV: 20/20 | non-living, see invisible, fly, unbreathing | Res: magic(immune), fire+++, cold, elec+++, poison+++, rot+++, neg+++, torm, napalm | Vul: silver | XP: 8519 | Sp: b.fire (3d40) [!sil], fireball (3d43) [!sil], malmutate [!sil] | Sz: little | Int: human.

...You need your eyes checked? I'm sure big and little are opposites.

duvessa wrote:
Magipi wrote:
Sar wrote:It's not really cryptic, orbs are pretty easy to bait into walls, Spider is full of walls and corners. Plus, if you use a blowgun (like you probably should), you can just put some poison on the spider and move out of los before it even finishes weaving its first orb, most of the time. I mean, I can't say I never get hit by spiders' orbs, but my movement game is far from perfect.

Yes, I always use walls and corners and blowguns, that is okay. But "when would you ever actually get meaningfully hit by an orb of destruction in the first place" because of "moving" is still cryptic.
If an iood is coming towards you and you move out of the way, it doesn't hit you. If it's an adjacent monster hitting you with iood, then it does pathetic damage, and iood is such a broken mechanic that it still misses diagonally adjacent targets sometimes.

I suppose it is cryptic if you are unspoiled and therefore don't know how iood works, which I probably should have guessed given the context was someone unironically implying that iood is dangerous. Here is a partial explanation: The initial angle of iood is randomized, but after that its behaviour is deterministic. Its position has float precision, rather than being tied to the grid. It doesn't change in speed, it just constantly changes its angle of travel to face the target - but is slow at doing so. However, iood is special-cased to instantly turn (and almost certainly hit you as a result) if you try to dodge it en passant style when adjacent:
Code:
// Special case: // Moving diagonally when the orb is just about to hit you // 2 // ->*1 // (from 1 to 2) would be a guaranteed escape. This may be // realistic (strafing!), but since the game has no non-cheesy // means of waiting a small fraction of a turn, we don't want it.
Knowing that, in combination with the simple fact that IOOD's style of movement is completely broken when position and time are quantized (and Crawl makes position and time both extremely quantized) it becomes almost as easy to dodge as boulder beetles.

So I know all this, and can even derive how to dodge ioods just from watching a single position change most of the time, and I still don't dodge them nearly 100% of the time. I mean it is pretty frequent, but sometimes the spot you would need to move into to dodge is occupied by a monster, or a wall or something, or sometimes it is fired from a distance where you can't walk to the spot you would have to dodge quickly enough, or underestimate what the actual initial angle is (because you don't have enough information, perhaps because the critter fires from too close)

Also sometimes it isn't worth repositioning to avoid because the alternatives are worse (say if you would have to eat two melee attacks from emperor scorpions or something)

I mean if you are trying to say that ood is not as dangerous as other monster spells that have similar damage because you can often dodge it with smart positioning I agree, but if you are claiming it will never ever hit you in any game other than at point blank range I disagree.

Forgive my ignorance, I've only run into orb spiders a few times, so I know even less than magipi; I don't even know enough to say if they're dangerous or not.

I've survived my only encounters with them, but probably more by luck than by technique, so I'd like to learn better technique.

So this is special cased:

Code:: // 2 // ->*1 Orb is at *, moving in the direction of arrow, player starts at 1 and moves diagonally sideways and towards the orb to 2. Orb will hit player because of special case.

Would this be a safe move, then?:

Code:: // 2 // ->*1 Same as above, but player moves sideways instead of diagonally towards the orb.

It looks to me like the case is still applied in that situation, actually, so no.

Siegurt wrote:So I know all this, and can even derive how to dodge ioods just from watching a single position change most of the time, and I still don't dodge them nearly 100% of the time. I mean it is pretty frequent, but sometimes the spot you would need to move into to dodge is occupied by a monster, or a wall or something, or sometimes it is fired from a distance where you can't walk to the spot you would have to dodge quickly enough, or underestimate what the actual initial angle is (because you don't have enough information, perhaps because the critter fires from too close)

Huh. I guess it comes to some people more easily than others, I can't remember the last time I got hit by an orb of destruction unintentionally.

This conversation is getting weirder and weirder.

So please, someone tell us to deal with an OoD in open terrain, because I am getting really curious. (Just to be sure, "Tank it with your face" is not really an answer I am looking for.)

Go chei and use temporal distortion when the orb is about to hit you.

In a similar vein, Ru's Power Leap is very effective at both dodging orbs and also killing the orb spider.

The Tavern

Why do OoF not keep their distance

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