brainstorming: swappable amulets & unswappable rings

[Pollen_Golem]

So everybody was discussing why devs want to make amulets less swappable and this came up:

And why remove amulet swapping over ring swapping? Amulet swapping is significantly faster and smoother and less annoying than ring swapping because you're only wearing one so there's no pause and extra keystrokes to swap the new ring with the right ring. Especially with autoinscribing set up, amulet swapping is so not at all a hassle.

If you wanted to do a reform to reduce equipment swapping, surely the logical thing to do would be to consolidate swapping into the amulet slot instead of the clunker ring slots seeing all the swapping.

I don't understand the logic of these changes at all.

Why indeed? Mostly because of historical reasons. But hopefully we can surpass the burden of history, as we have done with item mass/destruction in the past, and might do with food in the future. So here's looking at how a system that discourages swapping rings and encourages swapping amulets might look. Some notes:

• Putting on (or removing? or either?) a ring incurs the associated penalty.
• The ring penalties I came up with are meant to be mild if the ring is not very desirable, e.g. you probably won't mind Exhaustion too much if you don't care for +Rage. Otherwise, nobody but noobs would wear-ID rings, and to deal with this, the devs would eventually have ring base type identified on pickup, like wands...
• Unless swapping penalty is changed and made the same for all rings or all randart rings, randart rings remain completely swappable for their secondary features if you don't care about the penalty, e.g. ring "Mibe" {wiz, rC++} if you don't cast spells.
• Octopodes are disproportionately affected.

EDIT: moved older version with philosophizing and ambivalence that no one appreciates to spoiler tags at bottom, and one more caveat necessary for this to work nicely:

• Ring properties that have a penalty can appear without penalties on non-amulet artefacts as usual, are blocked from appearing on amulet artefacts, and only one such property can appear on a single randart ring.

Rings with Penalties

ring of stealth
penalty: XP-gated stealth malus

ring of invisibility
penalty: XP-gated corona

ring of rage
penalty: XP-gated exhaustion

ring of wizardry
penalty: XP-gated anti-wizardry

ring of regeneration
penalty: XP-gated slow healing

ring of sustain attributes
penalty: XP-gated -str/-int/-dex, or degeneration effect

ring of magical power
penalty: special-cased to just drain all your MP when equipped/removed.

ring of ???
penalty: ???
(Need 1 more to have 8 unique properties for Octopus King. How about the sparkling-brand-new ~nothing~ property?)

Rings with Zero Penalty

These rings do not need to have a penalty because they are not very situational. Sometimes it might be ideal to swap some of these, to have an offense/defense ratio better suited for a particular enemy. In practice this is near impossible to figure out and nobody would bother. These would mostly be swapped with each other, so there's no point to giving them equip/unequip penalties.

ring of strength
ring of intelligence
ring of dexterity
ring of protection
ring of evasion
ring of slaying

Amulets

amulet of see invisible
amulet of flight
amulet of teleportation
amulet of stasis
amulet of clarity
amulet of resist corrosion
amulet of protection from magic
amulet of poison resistance
amulet of positive energy
amulet of protection from fire
amulet of protection from cold
amulet of fire
amulet of ice
amulet of faith (buff to give more than just +33% piety gain, since it would lock you out of much more swapping than it did in 0.17)
amulet of guardian spirit (due to amulets becoming more valuable and swappable with this change, the MP drain on equip should be removed IMO, except for DD of course)

Forgotten Properties

Dismissal
Resist Mutation
Warding
Inaccuracy
Loudness
Gourmand
Teleport Control

Unrands

rings of the Octopus King {<random ring property with a penalty> AC+1 EV+1 Str+1 Int+1 Dex+1}

ring of the Mage {Wiz MR++ Int+3}

ring of Shadows {Umbra +Inv rN+ SInv}

ring of Robustness {AC+8}

ring of Shaolin {EV+8}

brooch ring of Shielding {Ward rN+ AC+4 EV+4}

amulet of the Four Winds {Clar rN+ MR+++}

amulet of Cekugob {Ward -Tele rElec rPois rN++ rN+ AC+1 EV+1}

amulet of the Air {Inacc +Fly rElec EV+5 RMsl}

macabre finger necklace {Ward rN+}

amulet ring of Vitality {Regen+ HP+15}

problem with having a ring of Bloodlust {*Rage +Rage MR+ Str+2 Int-2 Slay+3 Curse} - you could just wear clarity amulet to neutralize *Rage, which you can't do if Bloodlust is an amulet.



draft version:

Spoiler: show

Rings

ring of stealth
penalty: XP-gated stealth malus

ring of invisibility
penalty: XP-gated corona

ring of rage
penalty: XP-gated exhaustion

ring of wizardry
penalty: XP-gated anti-wizardry

ring of regeneration
penalty: XP-gated slow healing

ring of dismissal
penalty: contam right now but I don't know... dismissal is a new property anyway....

ring of magical power
penalty: XP-gated low MP mutation special-cased to just drain all your MP when equipped/removed.

ring of sustain attributes
penalty: stat drain that bypasses SustAt, like quaffing a potion of degeneration. Because swapping to SustAt whenever you see a brainfeeder is boring, and rarely even worth the bother.

Wut

ring of clarity
penalty: perplexing. XP-gated MR-? *rage? *confuse? maybe just giving up the slot would be enough. Actually, this would work fine as a typically swappable amulet.

warding: don't know, devs seem to want to get rid of it.

faith: problematic. There are issues with stacking. Probably, this better remain an amulet, so that only amulet of faith blocks tactical swapping between non-artifact amulets, and this would not be that unbalanced since faith is just that good. But you'd be left with only weapon quick-swapping so... in fact you could buff faith in this system to make it fair.

guardian spirit - problematic, where would you put it? Probably amulet slot, and penalize swapping to it with MP drain. Then you could easily swap from it as necessary, and it remains a nice amulet to wear by default. Because if you wanted to make it as hard to swap as faith, that would call for a weird buff like faster MP regen or immunity to MP-draining attacks from e.g. ghost moths and anti-magic weapons. Guardian spirit is also available on hats and moon troll though...

Amulets

First, cherry-pick the most situational jewellery:
amulet of clarity
amulet of stasis
amulet of teleportation
amulet of see invisible
amulet of flight
amulet of protection from fire
amulet of protection from cold
amulet of protection from magic
amulet of poison resistance
amulet of positive energy

Wut again

Finally, here's jewellery that is arguably non-situational enough to be rings, with or without a certain penalty, but works alright as a single swappable too (I'm biased to thinking that most would work better as rings, just because there are more ring slots than amulet slots):
ring/amulet of fire
ring/amulet of ice
ring/amulet of protection
ring/amulet of evasion
ring/amulet of slaying
ring/amulet of inaccuracy
ring/amulet of strength
ring/amulet of intelligence
ring/amulet of dexterity

[Aethrus]

I don't wanna be punished for swapping at all. It's a cure worse than the disease, as far as I see. If players don't want to deal with equipment switching, they can worship Ashenzari.

There are also other unfun side effects to this sorta stuff. Jewellery used to nearly require ID scrolls to figure out what it did, but we made it all auto-ID instead and made scrolls only identify 1 item instead of up to 3. With this sort of stuff though, putting on beneficial jewellery can have more penalty than cursed items if it's not the one you want, and you'll get rotted / contam / drain or whatever.

[byrel]

I think this sounds fairly reasonable.