Remove wands of flame

[Sprucery]

Now that wands of magic darts and frost are gone, we are flooded with wands of flame. This is boring. I suggest they be removed.

This also fixes the problem that Artificers have with Dith. Ar can be given some other wand instead, e.g. slowing. If they must have an attack wand, give them a wand of lightning with a few charges.

Wand of flame is currently the most common wand in the hands of monsters in the early game. If we don't want to give them other wands instead, some of them could be made followers of Makhleb to hurl minor destruction.

[duvessa]

I suggest that wands of slowing, confusion, and lightning should go as well. They just duplicate spells, like frost/fire/cold.

[tabstorm]

Why not remove wands? They're all pretty problematic except acid and iceblast, and maybe paralysis and polymorph.

[Sprucery]

Why not remove wands? They're all pretty problematic except acid and iceblast, and maybe paralysis and polymorph.

That would make the game more boring.

As to what duvessa said, imo lightning could go but slowing and confusion are interesting mechanics and having them in spellbooks only would make them much rarer, which would be a loss imo. Then again, if you put their share of the wand distribution in polymorph/paralysis/enslavement, that could be something.

[tabstorm]

Well, enslavement is problematic because it's a wand of death for at least one enemy. Polymorph is obviously problematic. Make acid bolt and ice blast into spells - All wands are now problematic or useless. This is a good reason to remove them all. Then we can remove the evocations skill, because all the other evokers are problematic (all elemental evokers, box of beasts, sack of spiders, phantom mirror) or useless (most rods) and thus problematic.

[Rast]

crawl is problematic

[tasonir]

I already generally avoid all evocables, except for wands of teleport/heal wounds. Those are great, and they also don't require any evocation skill. Sometimes a zap of iceblast/acid/lightning can be useful at 0 evo, but pretty soon you'll be strong enough to not need that either.

[Tiktacy]

crawl is problematic

Your mother is problematic.

[Sprucery]

Well, enslavement is problematic because it's a wand of death for at least one enemy.

Thanks for the tip! I will from now on save all my enslavement charges for the most dangerous foes in the game, so I can instantly kill them!

[tedric]

pretty much the only thing I use wands of flame for is to create steam clouds that break LOS with and/or kill electric eels, but I really like that I can use them this way

[PleasingFungus]

they're also pretty useful for ar, or anyone else lucky enough to find one very early

[dynast]

Lucky?

[PleasingFungus]

luckier than finding one later!

[genericpseudonym]

Their problem is that they just become totally useless past the early game. It might be nicer if they had some kind of minor utility affect in addition to their minor damage so that players have a real reason to keep them around. Not sure what that would be though... Wand of steam? Could be cool but maybe OP.

[Sprucery]

In my current game (D:12, L:4), 16 wands have been generated so far. 5 of them are wands of flame.

[PleasingFungus]

the average game has a total of 2 wands of flame across D + Lair. have you considered investing in lottery tickets?

[TonberryJam]

most of the wands are great for early/mid game.
They can disable uniques, and early tough foes like eels or bees.
That fire wand can burn trees and boil water for cover.

and lots of them can deal with that first annoying hydra like cold and drain.

[Sprucery]

the average game has a total of 2 wands of flame across D + Lair. have you considered investing in lottery tickets?

Yeah well if I would have some statistical backup for my suggestion I would have posted in GDD :)

[TonberryJam]

It feels like the game is being slowly broken by these "efficiency" changes. Apparently most of the elemental wands are being replaced by acid and freeze. As people only found utility in the hex wands for the monsters with low resists.

Wouldn't it be better to improve the user interface? Make it more easy to set toggles, so people can ignore stuff they don't want. Oh, wait...

[HardboiledGargoyle]

TomberryJam, the shouldn't offer you stuff you don't want like that. You can't say how efficiency changes break the game, because otherwise you would. One of the reasons I took a long time to win was that the game offered so much stuff, so many levels, with so much repetition, it was awful.

[ZoFy]

IIRC high-tier damage wands were removed not because of being unwanted/useless but because they were too similar to each other and existing conjuration spells. RIP.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I'm in favour of preserving wands of lightning. They provide a limited supply, low skill investment option to hit monster without clear line of sight.

Although I can see how an argument could be constructed against giving easy access to pseudo-smite attacks.