New scroll idea: Scroll of ego armour

[gdami1]

Hi

Here a proposal for a new scroll (I don't know if it's the right place to talk about it)

"Scroll of ego armour"

It's a scroll of brand weapon for armour. To make your helmet a helmet of see invisible, your ring mail a ring mail of poison resistance, yout big shield, a big shield of protection...

Troll and Dragon armours/hides aren't eligible.

[Pollen_Golem]

merge with scroll of brand weapon: "scroll of apply ego". You forgot to make crystal plate armor ineligible. It doesn't seem right for you to do this on a +10 plate of ponderousness you found in Orc. And probably most experienced players would use it on boots/barding until they got running.

[le_nerd]

Often been proposed before, not going to happen. Main argument (but by far not the only one) is that boots of running are like, 50 times better than any other ego (except maybe if you find super rare volcano boots of rF+ and no other resistance), so you'd always use on boots.

[xentronium]

Probably rehashing an old argument here, but it could be restricted to work on body armor only.

[prozacelf]

FWIW, I've been told that being restricted to body armor would be the only way it would get in.

[gdami1]

Or maybe making it very unlikely to give "haste" on boots.

Like "chaos" brand which occur only 2% of the time

[chequers]

Yes, I don't think it's a counter argument to this proposal to say "there's one really good ego so this scroll would be a no-brainer". If there was a 1% chance of running ego/99% chance of stealth on boots but a 66% chance of rF+/rC+/ 33% chance of MR+ on your hat, I would brand the hat every time.

The reason I dislike this scroll is that we already have enough scrolls in the game. I would only support reworking brand weapon into 'brand item'.

[duvessa]

I don't think making brand weapon into brand equipment would be an improvement. Any decision of which item to use it on would rarely be interesting - if you use your weapon as your main source of damage, and the scroll would improve your weapon, then of course you're going to use the scroll on your weapon, having good damage is way more important than the single pip of resistance or whatever you'd get on armour. If you don't use your weapon as your main source of damage, then of course you're going to use it on armour, and if armour egos aren't symmetrical then you have the boots of running problem. If they are symmetrical (but they aren't) then you just choose the armour that has the worst ego on it currently.

If there was a 1% chance of running ego/99% chance of stealth on boots but a 66% chance of rF+/rC+/ 33% chance of MR+ on your hat, I would brand the hat every time.

Keep in mind that brand weapon currently doesn't tell you what the chance of each brand is. The majority of players probably don't know vampirism and chaos are even options. If you try to solve the boots of running problem this way, you have a list of egos and corresponding chances for 5 or 6 different slots that the player would have to review every time in order to make a truly informed decision about which slot to choose.
Brand weapon can get away with having a weird ego list and different chances for everything because characters only use one weapon at a time. The questions are "would this scroll improve my weapon" (which is easy to answer) and "do I want to wait for a better weapon first" (which doesn't depend too heavily on the ego list).

[futacatgirl]

This is actually awesome idea.

If there was a 1% chance of running ego/99% chance of stealth on boots but a 66% chance of rF+/rC+/ 33% chance of MR+ on your hat, I would brand the hat every time.

Scrolls may have chance to curse gear instead of enchanting it maybe?

[daggaz]

I dont think its even necessary, tho admittedly I am one of many people who proposed the same thing when starting crawl.. There is so much gear tossed around that you can always find something useful, keeping in mind as well that 'scroll of ego armour' actually already exists in the form of ?EA + dragon hides, and here the ego(s) granted aren't even randomized.

Brand weapon is more necessary because as mentioned, a good weapon is essential to basically half the possible builds in the game. And more importantly, you don't have a generic "weapon" skill (like "armour") so if you dump points into a specific weapon type, you damn well want to end up with a quality endgame weapon or you are boned. This might not matter so much for something like longblades (where branded greatswords are as common as quokkas), but if you went for staves or shortblades or what-not, you might just need a little help getting a proper top-tier item. So here you can aquire/find a quickblade/lajatang/whatever and then pimp it as you delve deeper, eventually getting to +9 and a brand. Its a decent way to maintain variability in the game without causing too many tedious deaths because of that variability.

[bcadren]

I've proposed this before. Dozens of other people have proposed this before. It's not going to happen. Want better armour? Try ?Acq armour. Generally it won't work; but you can try it.