blowgunify venom brand?

[HardboiledGargoyle]

The amount of poison delivered by poison needles now scales with skill. From what I understand, at max skill and with a +9 blowgun, poison needles are 7 times stronger than they used to be. I think it may be interesting to copy this mechanic for the melee/ranged Venom brand. Calibrated correctly, this should slightly nerf early-game Venom while keeping it competitive later on.

Making one melee brand depend so unusually on skill might be considered odd or spoilery (tho it can be communicated: "This weapon applies an amount of poison that depends on your Axes skill." Interesting flavor.) but look at it this way: we already have the "poison needle" brand; might as well just use it for the venom brand, substituting the appropriate skill, instead of inventing a whole other 'spoilery' venom brand! Poison needles have better symmetry with some poison brands like Strong Poison that use monster HD rather than physical damage to determine amount of poisoning.

[PleasingFungus]

turning a brand from "useful early-game" to "useful nowhere" seems like a bad move, OP

[Rast]

So why'd you do it to blowguns?

[duvessa]

players complain a lot when you remove stupid things. but players only complain a little when you make stupid things useless. that's why the changes were made to cboe, poisoned needles, etc. instead of removing them

unfortunately at some point a dev missed the memo and made cboe sorta useful again. but usually it works

curare is still useful but i think that's just because curare has an aura of amnesia. similar to how players always forget they're carrying curare when an ettin shows up, lasty forgot curare existed when he changed poisoned needles

[Rast]

Nobody complained about lantern of shadows getting axed.

[lethediver]

players complain a lot when

No one cares about that from what ive seen

[HardboiledGargoyle]

Does it have to be always useless? Blowguns are actually better now if you have 8+ skill. Needles deliver a large total amount of damage, main problem being that it is spread over a long time and hard to monitor safely. The rate at which poison does damage is proportional to the total amount of poisoning, so if poison is stacked really high then it can do a lot of damage turn by turn, on top of having value from hit-and-run tactics and Ignite Poison. Maybe the formulas are still too flat. The amount of poisoning doesn't have to increase linearly with skill, it can increase faster than that. Pain is another example of a brand that does damage based on skill.

[genericpseudonym]

So why'd you do it to blowguns?

points in throwing are still useful for non-blowgun stuff like nets or eventually javelins of penet

points in shortblades on a mace character are almost entirely useless after you outgrow your dagger of venom

[Xion350]

So why'd you do it to blowguns?

points in throwing are still useful for non-blowgun stuff like nets or eventually javelins of penet

points in shortblades on a mace character are almost entirely useless after you outgrow your dagger of venom

Poisoned weapons shouldn't give you a free ride to Lair and beyond, anyway.

[duvessa]

elec and drain are already better than venom even in the earliest early game, anyway

[Lasty]

curare is still useful but i think that's just because curare has an aura of amnesia. similar to how players always forget they're carrying curare when an ettin shows up, lasty forgot curare existed when he changed poisoned needles

I didn't forget about curare. I considered it and decided I didn't have a strong feeling about how it fits into the game and whether it should change, so I wouldn't make a change at that time. I didn't nerf 0-skill poison needles because I wanted to "soft remove" them. I did it because I thought they'd be a more interesting thing in the game if they required and rewarded skill.

There are a lot of things about blowguns and needles that might be worth changing (like the overlap with hexes and hex wands), and I expect that some of these changes will come through in 0.19. If you have a strong argument about how they should be changed, I'd be interested to hear it.

[duvessa]

i was making fun of rast's ridiculous attempt at a clever rebuttal, not making a serious design commentary. the change to poisoned needles is good (actually I think it doesn't go far enough, 0 skill poisoned needles are still too useful for my liking)