cut Haste spell, replace with cooler charms

[luckless]

The point of getting Haste as a spell is that you can use it for all moderately dangerous fights (as opposed to very dangerous ones where you'd probably use a potion/wand anyway). In my opinion this is bad for at least two reasons: (a) it adds tedium, in much the way Phase Shift/Stoneskin did (especially when you factor in waiting out the contamination), and (b) making Haste a nonrenewable resource may make late game challenges a bit easier to design.

In addition to these benefits, and maybe more importantly than them, cutting Haste would open up design space for more interesting (and active) offensive high-level Charms. Ideally I think Charms should be for players who want to rely on melee for most of their damage, but want a more involved playstyle more like that of dedicated offensive casters. A few ideas:

• a spell that gave your melee attacks an AoE effect, maybe hitting a line past your target, or a cone like Sauron in LotR;
• a spell that let you bypass a portion of your target's AC based on spellpower, but quickly drained your MP;
• a spell that periodically teleported you to a random monster in LoS, but could be cancelled instantly & at will and had a chance of confusing monsters you ended up next to;
• a spell that moved a target monster next to you;
• a spell that gave you a chance to instantly cast a (random or preselected) Conjuration at the target of each melee attack (but at the normal MP cost), sort of like a combination of Infusion and Spellforged Servitor (or, really, Arcane Combat in ToME).

Thoughts?

[dpeg]

I agree with the reasoning about the Haste spell. Since it is pretty hard to reach agreement on a good replacement, so I'd suggest to axe first and discuss the replacement later.

[luckless]

Makes sense. Another possibility worth considering may be to just combine Charms and Hexes back into a single school.

[Shard1697]

Honestly, minus haste and some of the other "problem" spells which have gotten cut over the years, I could see it happening.

[duvessa]

Haste does suffer from the usual charm problems and should be removed like the rest of the buff spells. However, I'll point out a few things.
1. Both luckless and dpeg are assuming that a replacement is needed in the first place. I am not convinced it is. Divinations didn't need replacements. I don't see why Charms does.
2. Haste is not actually as bad as stoneskin/phase shift/ozocubu's/etc. because the contam prevents you from maintaining it while exploring. Waiting out contam is obnoxious too, yes, but much less so than maintaining buffs during exploration.
3. I do not believe removing the Haste spell specifically will make lategame challenges any easier to design; you should assume the player has access to haste whether the spell exists or not (it's a rare spell now, so there are already many Crawl games in which the spell doesn't exist). The difference between having the wand and having the spell is small.

[Siegurt]

I would personally like to see the freqency of potions of haste increased and the spell and wand removed along with the associated contamination.

Alternatively i would like to see a poste haste slow similar to post swiftness -Swift

[Implojin]

dang, I thought this was going to be a twelwe thread

[lethediver]

Is haste wand still going to be in the game?

[jwoodward48ss]

Haste is pretty cool, just a bit OP and overused. Reducing it to a consumable would do the trick. I don't think there's anything wrong with wands of healing/hasting/teleportation. The multiple choices are different and can induce strategic choice.