PSA: zero skill blowgun now useless

[le_nerd]

As of commit number 3ae59fa

Scale poison needles with throwing skill
Instead of having poison needles do a fixed amount of poison, now the
amount of poison delivered scales heavily with Throwing skill and slightly
less heavily with launcher enchantment.

The practical impact of this is that poison needles are worse at very low
skill, break even at around 8 skill, and then are better at higher skill.
And also blowgun enchantment matters.

Eg. zero skill blowguns are now useless against at least ogres and probably useless all around. Maybe time to revisit Assassin background skill distribution?

[Lasty]

Zero skill blowguns aren't actually useless, but they're significantly weaker, delivering only a very small amount of poison.

[le_nerd]

Main purpose of zero skill blowgun has been taking down ogres, uniques and orc warriors, since most everything else was either resistant/immune or not a threat, like rats/quokkas.

Hitting an ogre with 5 poison needles now will not even scratch its green health bar and was previously deadly. Meaning that it will also not scratch Sigmund/orc warriors, and will only slightly inconvenience Terence. Ofc I have only played very small amount of games with new blowgun, but I feel its use spectrum has been narrowed into uselessness.

[dynast]

So, more kiting.

[daggaz]

Hmm.. any reason not to just tie blowgun skill with your chance of actually hitting the target, rather than the effectiveness of the needle? Or if you want, a combination of both but let needles remain fairly effective as a baseline, and increase in deadliness as your aim goes up, meaning poison needles actually remain useful for taking down larger HD monsters if you put the skill into it.

In this way, your chance of landing 5 needles on an early ogre is lower, but if you manage to hit it a few times, you still do some damage. Kind of takes care of the cheapness of early blowguns against uniques etc, but still allows a player a fighting chance, especially if they use some tactics when targetting the monster.

[dpeg]

daggaz: I think it's okay that needles require some modest skill investment. As far as I understand the idea is that if you're a non-As and come across some early needles, then you may train the skill for a bit until you can use needles to kill ogres, orc warriors like you could before. We will see how it pans out.

[crate]

when do monsters get this change

[Lasty]

I haven't yet done any real analysis of the impact of this change on monsters; I didn't see monster blowgun use as particularly problematic so I didn't want to rock the boat too much; it's pretty much just kobolds, sonja, and spriggan riders that use blowguns right now, IIRC, so we'd have to see how the scaling impacts those monsters.

Do you have suggestions about what the blowgun effectiveness of those monsters should be?

[crate]

it was primarily a joke...

[dynast]

Well, you dont sit in front of a monster spitting needles until it drops dead. As daggaz pointed out, reducing accuracy would be a more interesting change, but i would rather see poison needles have a chance to poison dependant of skill to make it similar to the other types or needles or see them removed, leaving curare to do the job.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

could just universalize the mechanics of status-inducing needles? so that plain poison needles check HD vs enchantment+throwing in addition to checking rPois? seems neater... but overall I like that blowguns won't be such a godsend to any early game character

[daggaz]

daggaz: I think it's okay that needles require some modest skill investment. As far as I understand the idea is that if you're a non-As and come across some early needles, then you may train the skill for a bit until you can use needles to kill ogres, orc warriors like you could before. We will see how it pans out.

I agree, they should. I just think it should affect accuracy more so than the damage.

[yesno]

You are right blowguns totally suck Mods always nerf everything good absolutely no reason to use them now they are total garbage hahahahaha hah hahaha hahah

[daggaz]

You are right blowguns totally suck Mods always nerf everything good absolutely no reason to use them now they are total garbage hahahahaha hah hahaha hahah

Shhh..

[yesno]

what? i didn't say anything

[crate]

shoutless wakeups are already a nonthing, so no need to be quiet about it

[yesno]

since when? i did actually mention it a couple times in webtiles chat but no response, i wasn't sure if shoutless needle wakeups were intentional or not. i'll def miss them a bit

[crate]

idk, it was a somewhat recent change

[yesno]

oh well. that change probably will have way more impact on how likely i am to use blowguns than the change to their poison application

[Wahaha]

Is the point of this change to make blowgun damage scale with throwing level, same as other ranged weapons?

[Lasty]

Mod note: removed a derailing subthread and emailed the relevant parties.

Wahaha: That's part of the point. The other point is to make finding a blowgun and poison needles not sufficient to single-handedly clear d:1-d:10 w/o any investment.

[bcadren]

Side note: finding an additive brand (Elec, Drain or Venom) on a fast weapon (dagger or whip) is still tantamount to clearing d:1-10 without any investment.

[Siegurt]

So is a good-sized stack of javelins...

[Sprucery]

So what about curare needles, are they scaled with Throwing as well (I hope they are)?

[Airwolf]

Dare I ask why blowguns use Throwing and not their own skill?

[Sprucery]

Dare I ask why blowguns use Throwing and not their own skill?

FWIW they used to have their own skill until DCSS 0.6. I would support bringing back Blowguns skill. (Generally, I like "increase the number of places to spend exp" more than "cut exp from the game" as a solution to the perceived "too much exp" problem.)

[Airwolf]

Seems like a good start towards nerfing Throwing, too.

[Sar]

ur 2 slow: http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a=commit;h=a94d5ab7b7ba6168665dc288095cc9f791d610d0

[tabstorm]

Boy I sure do love running from unkillable monsters...

[amaril]

Does this nerf affect curare in any way?

[Moose]

So approximately what blowgun skill will one need now to get the former effectiveness?

[nago]

8, it´s written in the commit in the first post

[PleasingFungus]

Zero skill blowguns aren't actually useless, but they're significantly weaker, delivering only a very small amount of poison.

they're pretty useless.

[nago]

They´re still somewhat decent against early things susceptible to poison like ants or scorpions.
And I guess if you lack any form of ranged attack, engaging an orc warrior at 90% health is better than engaging one at 100%.
But yes generally they're pretty much useless.