FR: eVoke Giant Clubs to knock back

[Hurricos]

I'm just about done with my posting flurry. Just let me finish this one last rant.

GCs are stupid and not used much outside of Skullcrusher. There's no real reason to use them on the races you can use them unless you can't find a spiked club or find a fanTAStic GC (like Skullcrusher).

Here's my suggestion to put them to use - let them be eVoked to knock back creatures.

This wouldn't work with GSCs because the spikes get them stuck. Logic.

[Skrybe]

Since there seems to be a desire to give the weapon types different "placement based" abilities (reaching, cleaving,) I'm surprised all M&F haven't been given evocable trample. Could have a success rate based on damage dealt, so a spriggan with a club wouldn't be pushing things around as easily as an ogre with a GSC.

[dpeg]

Having to evoke for a melee action is very clumsy. Yes, reaching sets a bad precedent here, but at least auto-fight is of some help. With trample as a melee move, it's harder.

[Sar]

Trample as a passive effect will be detrimental to the player in well over 99% of situations. That's why it was removed from Dragon Form.

[dpeg]

Sar: Obviously. What is your point?

[duvessa]

his point is that trample is bad for players so it is pointless to give it to them

[Sar]

@dpeg: I wasn't replying to your post (sorry), the poster above you suggested giving trample to M&F as a passive... wait, no, he actually was not. My bad!

[dpeg]

his point is that trample is bad for players so it is pointless to give it to them

This is wrong. It is often, but clearly not always, bad to trample as a player. We could quibble whether optional trampling would be used in 10% or 1% or 0.1% of cases, but having the option will be useful at times (compare with cleaving on axes).

The point about the interface is that players will simply forget the tactical option if it used so rarely (it's a given that tramping should not be automatic).

[Hurricos]

This also wouldn't be trample at all ... it would be a one-tile-range force lance effect, which is significantly different.

Trample would push monsters away while pushing you forward as well, which is basically only useful if you're a monster trying to get a player off the stairs or out of a corridor.

Why exactly does 'v' for evoking weapon set a bad precedent? Isn't the entire point of 'v' that you use the function of the item you have in your hand?

I really don't get it at all.

[Wahaha]

Because it's tedious to press two keys per attack (v enter) when you could be pressing one. Although reaching is worse than 2 keys because of targeting.
Maybe if the knockback was a fighting stance that you could turn on and off that would be better, but I'm not going to judge what is acceptable and what isn't.

[Hurricos]

Because it's tedious to press two keys per attack (v enter) when you could be pressing one. Although reaching is worse than 2 keys because of targeting.
Maybe if the knockback was a fighting stance that you could turn on and off that would be better, but I'm not going to judge what is acceptable and what isn't.

For what it's worth, if you knock an enemy back you can't exactly do it again unless there were an enemy directly behind them preventing them from moving away from you anyways.

[crate]

Knockback is completely unacceptable anyway as a melee effect because it means that you are very rarely going to actually get attacked by enemy melee (you make them take the last step to close the gap, then knock back before they can attack you, so they move again, etc.).

Trample is not unacceptable in this way, but is of course mostly negative.

[Wahaha]

I thought it would be a chance to knockback and not guaranteed. But regardless of chance to knockback, after knocking them back you would press . to wait and then evoke the knockback again. This makes it three keys per attack.

[chequers]

I tried to make them more useful by reducing their required skill for mindelay. They're currently better than gsc until you hit ~15 m&f, which is an admittedly small window.
Might be easiest to just reduce that number further (and damage) so they have a longer window of value. Or remove them entirely.

[dpeg]

As far as tactical effects go, I think that trample is more interesting than knocking back a melee enemy: if you can knock back by more than one square, then you can disengage from battle more effectively, which may not be desired (also, a giant club user should have little interest in getting monsters far away, but rather in getting them to close). On the other hand, trample can be used to resolve situations where several enemies are around. This is why I spoke of trample rather than knockback.

Brogue has an ego ("force") that does knockback. But Brogue also has way fewer monsters and combat, and force weapons apply extra damage if you send someone into a wall.

[Lasty]

I agree with crate's analysis on knockback melee (and the same argument applies to most forms of repeatable knockback-on-damage).

As for trample, I think duvessa is correct that always-trample is bad for players, and dpeg is correct that trample-on-demand-only is sometimes useful for players. I don't particularly want to add trample-on-demand-only to any existing crawl attacks, but if we did add it at least the rarity of wanting to do it would offset the irritation of the extra keypresses needed to activate it.

[Siegurt]

Hmm, the op didn't mention the knock back effect doing damage, So I was originally thinking it would not.

A no damage single square push back effect has slightly more possibilities than a damaging one (which isn't feasible at all, because as previously discussed it lets you kill the creature without suffering any attacks at all)

Its major flaw that I can see would be that you could use it to tediously regen, which I would solve with an exhaustion meter.

If it was done so that it had decent situational uses (pushing a critter into shallow water for chances of success, pushing critters into clouds or traps, allowing one creature to swap places with another) It might be ok as an ability.

That being said, I completely disagree with the op's rationale, its a bit like demanding we add some sort of enhancement to maces because flails exist.

I don't see any reason for doing as the op suggests, but I can imagine that we could potentially create some kind of push back ability at some point which could be balanced and interesting if we found some compelling situation in which we wanted to add it.

[duvessa]

his point is that trample is bad for players so it is pointless to give it to them

This is wrong. It is often, but clearly not always, bad to trample as a player. We could quibble whether optional trampling would be used in 10% or 1% or 0.1% of cases, but having the option will be useful at times (compare with cleaving on axes).

The point about the interface is that players will simply forget the tactical option if it used so rarely (it's a given that tramping should not be automatic).

the only application of trample is to move at your attack delay instead of your move delay, and for that to be useful you need an adjacent monster in the direction you wanted to move, which is generally a bad thing, and you risk just missing or killing that monster. the situations where trampling is actually beneficial are so contrived as to be essentially nonexistent in practice, barring a series of staggeringly bad decisions by the player (like taking chei and then trying to zotwaltz or something), so i am very comfortable saying it is always bad to trample as a player, even though it is easy to imagine cases where it is good

[bcadren]

a Knockback ability on a weapon would rarely be bad (as in Knocks the target back without following them, not moving with them, like trample).

[ydeve]

his point is that trample is bad for players so it is pointless to give it to them

This is wrong. It is often, but clearly not always, bad to trample as a player. We could quibble whether optional trampling would be used in 10% or 1% or 0.1% of cases, but having the option will be useful at times (compare with cleaving on axes).

The point about the interface is that players will simply forget the tactical option if it used so rarely (it's a given that tramping should not be automatic).

the only application of trample is to move at your attack delay instead of your move delay, and for that to be useful you need an adjacent monster in the direction you wanted to move, which is generally a bad thing, and you risk just missing or killing that monster. the situations where trampling is actually beneficial are so contrived as to be essentially nonexistent in practice, barring a series of staggeringly bad decisions by the player (like taking chei and then trying to zotwaltz or something), so i am very comfortable saying it is always bad to trample as a player, even though it is easy to imagine cases where it is good

Um, duvessa, you forgot getting into a blocked corridor or getting to the stairs. That's not nearly as rare.

[Croases]

Alternate proposal: If the enemy is backed to a wall/another enemy, GCs deal extra damage by squishing them against each other a la Force Lance. Unlike Force Lance, GCs don't push back the enemy if there's empty space behind it.

Find a wall and get on with your melee doublezap!

[daggaz]

a Knockback ability on a weapon would rarely be bad (as in Knocks the target back without following them, not moving with them, like trample).

If by "rarely" you mean "any time you are attacking something that has a dangerous ranged attack that you would much rather melee, which happens all the time", then yeah, sure. Or did you mean an ability that has to be invoked by the player? In which case, technically its never bad because you only use it when its good, which is more than likely to still be almost never, considering that the enemy can just move back into melee with you and attack given the weapon delay on those things at anywhere but the highest skill investments (at which point it becomes broken as Crate described).

[Siegurt]

which is more than likely to still be almost never, considering that the enemy can just move back into melee with you and attack given the weapon delay on those things at anywhere but the highest skill investments (at which point it becomes broken as Crate described).

That isn't quite accurate, to move back into melee with you and attack an average critter needs 2 turns, so your delay for knocking stuff back with damage only needs to be less than 2.0 to get less than 1 attack per cycle, and you get fewer and fewer attacks until you get down to 1.0 delay, at which point you see 0 attacks on average (disregarding the occasional double move from energy randomization)

Note that even with no skill, a 2.3 delay knock back reduces the number of attacks you face significantly.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

this is why it would be alright to give an ultraslow weapon like Sniper knockback

[dowan]

his point is that trample is bad for players so it is pointless to give it to them

This is wrong. It is often, but clearly not always, bad to trample as a player. We could quibble whether optional trampling would be used in 10% or 1% or 0.1% of cases, but having the option will be useful at times (compare with cleaving on axes).

The point about the interface is that players will simply forget the tactical option if it used so rarely (it's a given that tramping should not be automatic).

the only application of trample is to move at your attack delay instead of your move delay, and for that to be useful you need an adjacent monster in the direction you wanted to move, which is generally a bad thing, and you risk just missing or killing that monster. the situations where trampling is actually beneficial are so contrived as to be essentially nonexistent in practice, barring a series of staggeringly bad decisions by the player (like taking chei and then trying to zotwaltz or something), so i am very comfortable saying it is always bad to trample as a player, even though it is easy to imagine cases where it is good

I can pretty easily imagine some cases, it's easy to imagine them because they are relatively common in the game. Such as: I am fighting in a corridor, 1 enemy shows up behind me. If I use a trampling attack on that enemy, I can kill him while pushing down the corridor, while the enemies on the other side can't hit me (because I moved). Or maybe I'm running from something down a corridor, and there's an enemy blocking me! Oh no, if only I could push them somehow...

With that in mind, there's any number of situations where hitting a monster AND moving in the same turn would be much better than not moving. Such as, pushing a monster off the stairs, and pushing myself onto it, pushing a monster into a hallway to allow myself entry into that hallway, etc. Or even if I'm surrounded by monsters, if I keep trample attacking, I end up after a couple turns with just the trampled monster able to hit me, the rest can only try to follow.

If anything, it seems a little too useful.

I think crate has effectively spelled out why damaging knockback melee attacks would be highly problematic.