[proclick] new fork, hellcrawl


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Post Friday, 21st July 2017, 15:42

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

bel wrote:Eh? AE has lots of direct damage spells: Magic Dart, Static Discharge and Fulminant Prism. It's not at all like VM, because few or no monsters resist electricity.


I could have probably improved on the phrasing, but by 'direct' damage I mean without having to wait for things(like prism to explode or mephitic to confuse monsters) and magic dart/discharge don't seem to be strong enough to handle things that a FE/IE at the same stage would scoff at, but I am really crappy at playing magic-users that aren't straight-up OP or spam summons or tend to have some sort of really strong melee option.
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bel

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Post Friday, 21st July 2017, 15:52

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I suggest that you are not using Fulminant Prism correctly. See this thread for some pointers on how to use it. It's out of date a bit because monsters now attack the prism instead of pathing around it. But it's still pretty good.

They are even easier to use in hellcrawl: their explosion is pure elec damage, and prisms are elec immune. So if you need to put two prisms close to each other, you can, because one explosion wouldn't affect the other (unlike normal crawl).

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Post Saturday, 22nd July 2017, 21:31

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I've been playing some more book backgrounds, and they are surprisingly much easier to play than heavy melee. My best run so far(HuFE^Ru) has gotten 1 rune and died in slime after killing the royal jelly and then getting swarmed by the leftovers.

Is the easier strategy to just get your 1st rune, and then go to depths and Zot, rather than bothering with slime? And is there a training wheels combo that can beat hellcrawl easily? I'm assuming it's MiBe but honestly melee in this fork doesn't feel very powerful at all.

From what I'm gathering a strong book background + god with early benefits(Ru,Hep,Gozag) tends to get you pretty far but I can't seem to seal the deal.
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Post Saturday, 22nd July 2017, 22:34

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Winning a 3 rune game should be pretty easy. In my opinion, the strongest combo in current hellcrawl is TrFi. Go Makh.

edit: re: other questions, in my opinion less than 2 rune completion wins are harder than 2 or more, since you get more loot and xp. Lair rune + vaults is significantly more demanding tactically than a normal game dcss, but much easier than no runes. It took me a while to win no-rune, no side branch even in casual mode. I would be kind of impressed if someone pulls it off in normal mode.
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bel

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Post Sunday, 23rd July 2017, 16:12

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Vajrapani wrote:I've been playing some more book backgrounds, and they are surprisingly much easier to play than heavy melee. My best run so far(HuFE^Ru) has gotten 1 rune and died in slime after killing the royal jelly and then getting swarmed by the leftovers.

Is the easier strategy to just get your 1st rune, and then go to depths and Zot, rather than bothering with slime? And is there a training wheels combo that can beat hellcrawl easily? I'm assuming it's MiBe but honestly melee in this fork doesn't feel very powerful at all.

From what I'm gathering a strong book background + god with early benefits(Ru,Hep,Gozag) tends to get you pretty far but I can't seem to seal the deal.

I usually do Lair Branch + Vaults + Slime for three runes. Skipping Vaults probably would weaken the character too much: there's a decent amount of XP and loot to be had. If you don't want to do Vaults:3, the entrance to Depths and Slime are at the center of the floor when you take the stairs. Slime is relatively easy after Vaults:3 (probably after Vaults:2 as well): so why not do it for the loot? I also do Elf, but not Pan (usually).

I find (any) caster of Vehumet to be pretty smooth. DEFE of Vehumet can get Fire Storm castable (it's now single school) in Depths and Zot, which makes a big difference. I found the orb run through Hell to be the most difficult part for casters. I also tried DEAE, DEEE and so on: all were pretty smooth, except for the orb run.

For melee, there are many decent characters to play. MiBe of Trog, or TrFi of Makhleb or something should be winnable. Trog has been nerfed a bit in hellcrawl: the piety decay is faster. But it's still very strong.

For all characters, Zot is a bit brutal if the character doesn't have enough damage. I had problems with some characters with one-handed weapons in Zot, because I wasn't able to kill stuff fast enough. Though it's still doable. A tip: polymorph or otherwise hex plutonium crabs.

All of the combos took me a fair few tries though: I would not call any combo easy in hellcrawl.
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Post Sunday, 23rd July 2017, 18:13

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:'ve heard people refer to permacharms as somehow like equipment, as though that's a bad thing.

It is a bad thing. Crawl already has equipment. The only possible advantage you get out of "permacharms" is that you need a second skill to use the equipment, which isn't enough of an advantage to justify adding another layer of complication to spellcasting and MP costs.

The picture that most appeals to me is spells that produce a literal item that lives in the inventory, for their duration, equippable as a weapon, subject to the usual swapping and tabbing interface niceties.

Lvl 9 spell, Summon Scroll of Acquirement.

Seriously though, this sounds like an interface nightmare. I won't bother digging up the thread, since it's a dead idea that clearly is going nowhere, but moving charm effects to equipment/artifact prefixes is my preferred solution, and I think it'd work even better in hellcrawl.

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Post Sunday, 23rd July 2017, 19:37

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Thanks for the fork! It's fun to play something high-power and still challenging again. But the score bonus for nine rune win might be excessive. :p
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Post Sunday, 23rd July 2017, 21:28

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

archaeo wrote:
watertreatmentRL wrote:'ve heard people refer to permacharms as somehow like equipment, as though that's a bad thing.

It is a bad thing. Crawl already has equipment. The only possible advantage you get out of "permacharms" is that you need a second skill to use the equipment, which isn't enough of an advantage to justify adding another layer of complication to spellcasting and MP costs.

The picture that most appeals to me is spells that produce a literal item that lives in the inventory, for their duration, equippable as a weapon, subject to the usual swapping and tabbing interface niceties.


[...]
this sounds like an interface nightmare. I won't bother digging up the thread, since it's a dead idea that clearly is going nowhere, but moving charm effects to equipment/artifact prefixes is my preferred solution, and I think it'd work even better in hellcrawl.


Actually, it is a good idea. This would not add a layer of complication to spellcasting, it would eventually remove dcss-style spellcasting entirely and replace it with something else. DCSS spellcasting mechanics do not work on any level. Duration spells have the well-known recasting issue. Direct damage spells have the luring and regeneration problems, as well as cognitive load and tedium issues from optimizing mp use and constantly switching between very similar attacks. Corpse-based necromancy has the corpse interaction problem. All of them are solved by bringing the vast majority of spells under the permanent buff/mp reserve system. There may be a handful of spells that make sense as having an instantaneous, one-time cost. They could be removed or off-loaded to items and consumables.
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Post Monday, 24th July 2017, 02:26

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Well hey, speaking of permabuffs, pretty soon we will be able to settle the debate once and for all. Permabuffs is up on gnollcrawl.tk. Here's what it looks like so far:
  • Buff spells reserve maximum MP equal to spell level/success chance^2. The amount of mp reserved is displayed in the second page of the spell screen, though the actual amount taken is saved as a double instead of an int until all the buffs you have active get added together (not sure this extra complexity is really necessary, but just rounding them all down individually seemed like it would introduce too many breakpoints; it's easy to change this later). The amount of mp reserved is recalculated every turn, so it will account for equipment and skill changes.
  • If you have any buffs, you can release them (via an ability) to restore your max (but not current) mp. Ideally, you'd never have a reason to use this in combat. Your buffs will be released automatically if your fall below 0 max mp.
  • The following spells have been transferred over to this model, some with other adjustments:
    • Song of slaying: goes from minimum of 1 slay to a max of 12, decays over time with spellpower-dependent speed
    • Repel missiles
    • Deflect missiles
    • Regeneration: The regen amount depends on spellpower. It is significantly weaker than before at low power.
    • Ozocubu's armour: doesn't slow you, is not melted by fire, is level 4.
    • Cigotuvi's embrace: works sort of like song of slaying, granting increasing ac and sh as you kill corpse-leaving things. Decays over time, but much slower than before.
    • Aura of abjuration
    • Death channel: chance to raise a spectral thing depends on spellpower. Min 50%, max 100% at 200 power.
    • Ring of flames: doesn't give rc--
    • Darkness
    • Invisibility: is level 7, no contam over time
    • Haste: is level 9, no contam over time

TODO: clean up bugs, balance adjustments, change spell descriptions for clarity, convert some other spells to this model. Dispelling bolt might need a rework as well; it doesn't interact with permabuffs in any way. Some spells that won't work well on the permabuff model might need to get cut outright; I'm thinking of infusion and shroud of golubria here, but it's possible that I'll think of something better to do with them. Would also be good to add power dependence for the spells that don't have it yet like haste, invis, ring of flames. Once this gets into a more complete state, I plan to push it to the other servers along with some other unrelated bugfixes I've been putting off.

E: there is a pretty bad bug with slow in the current build, gonna try to get a fix for it by tomorrow.
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bel

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Post Monday, 24th July 2017, 04:05

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

One can also make forms work like permacharms.

More radically, when I was thinking about this a few months ago, I didn't see any real obstacle to making summons work like permacharms as well (you can always keep a hound with you, for example). Though that's a bigger leap.

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Post Monday, 24th July 2017, 04:38

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Permasummons were a feature in dcss-ca. Coincidentally, I borrowed part of the implementation for reserving max mp from there. I think there are a few summons that this model definitely wouldn't work for; summon forest, lightning spire and malign gateway are the obvious ones, though they could get reworked or removed I suppose. Overall it would be an improvement to not want to summon things out of combat or at the start of every combat all the time, so it's still worth considering. Transmutations will for sure move to the permacharm model, but probably keep a separate ability to cancel form without canceling all other buffs.

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Post Monday, 24th July 2017, 05:05

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Summon Hydra would also perhaps not work well in a permacharm implementation, because of its extremely short summon duration.

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Post Monday, 24th July 2017, 12:35

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Summons are just a kind of duration spell, so it is natural to move them to the permacharm model. A few charms and most summons could benefit from a uniform spellbreaking mechanic. Mainly I think of shroud on the charm side, though I am not convinced shroud is worth keeping around. Basic idea of spellbreaking would be a condition, like with shroud, where the effect goes down, but automatically comes back up later. In the meantime, you don't get your reserve mp back. For summons, this would be like the hepliaklqana ancestor respawning mechanic.

For conventional summons, I would like to see the summon spamming style eliminated by introducing a total summon cap that is quite low, perhaps summoning level dependent. I would say 1 or 2 for low level characters and nonspecialists, max 3. I suppose summon spamming would still exist via Nemelex and evokers, but at least you're using something theoretically limited there. Something should be done about summoning since you currently get full experience from ally kills. You probably need to give summoners recall for free if you have permasummons. Low summoning cap with ancestor respawn probably doesn't totally fix summons but it's a lot better than the way it works now.

While I think the kill-all-spells when max mp becomes too low to sustain them thing makes sense, since there isn't a clean alternative that comes to mind, it is probably worthwhile to be able to cancel them individually. I think you also want bringing spells up and down to be non-combat actions, so long casting/canceling durations like armor switching.
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Post Wednesday, 26th July 2017, 13:59

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I prefer playing offline so when can I expect a download for the new updates?

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Post Sunday, 6th August 2017, 00:39

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The rest of permabuffs is going live on all servers shortly.
  • Infusion and Excruciating wounds move to the permabuff model. Instead of being really loud when cast, excruciating wounds is really loud when you hit something, sometimes (less often at high power).
  • All form spells move to the permabuff model. Voluntary transmutations from the spells will last indefinitely; involuntary ones still expire after a duration.
  • Added abilities to cancel individual permabuffs, except excruciating wounds since you can just unwield to remove that one. Might still be good to add one for excruciating wounds I guess.
  • Good forms are no longer restricted from using wands.
  • Spellcasting penalties of Spider Form and Blade Hands no longer apply to form spells.
  • Hydra form heads get recalculated every turn. This introduced some bad power breakpoints every 10 power and I'm not really happy with it so I'll probably rework it again.
  • Repel missiles and deflect missiles have spellpower dependence. Rmsl power cap is raised to 100 and it only does something 50% of the time at 0 power and 100% at max power, increasing linearly. Dmsl acts as deflect missiles 50% of the time at 0 power and 100% at max power, but acts as repel missiles otherwise so it remains strictly better than rmsl.
  • Xom no longer casts a couple of the permabuff spells on the player.
  • Wielding or wearing a -cast item will dispel your form and any permabuff effects.
  • Shroud of Golubria is removed.
  • Sticks to Snakes is Transmutations/Summoning (and still not balanced in any way).
  • Made some balance adjustments to Cigotuvi's Embrace and Song of Slaying.
  • Tweaked some early dungeon monster weights.
  • Bailey can't appear in Orc any more.
  • Changed the scoring formula so it's less likely to overflow from someone winning really fast. Will probably update it again and ask to wipe the server high scores fairly soon.

Not 100% of what I wanted to accomplish but it seems to be working well enough. There will likely be some more balance changes and spell reworks in the future. I will try to get a download available soon. Shping (the yiufcrawl guy) has been doing those but if he's not around I might try to learn something and do it myself. Lots of cool/stupid changes still to come, I'm going to try and push some big stuff before the hellcrawl 1 year anniversary.

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Post Sunday, 6th August 2017, 06:51

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

How do transmutations work? I have 12 current MP and get "You don't have enough magic to cast this spell" for Ice Form.
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Post Sunday, 6th August 2017, 13:14

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The mp reserve cost is (spell level)/("success rate")^2. So it's like twice the spell level around 30% fail and quickly becomes so expensive there's no way you have enough mp past that.

edit: lol success rate, not fail rate...
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Post Monday, 7th August 2017, 10:14

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Permaforms are too powerful, like they were in circus animals before introduction of expire on hit chance. How about similar thing - give a chance to expire. Currently I am encouraged to cast red failure Tm spell without monsters in view.
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Post Monday, 7th August 2017, 13:07

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

This is no different from the situation in dcss, except that in dcss you're encouraged to do it before every encounter which is terrible. The criticism that a spell is often cast out of combat draws its force from the "often" part. If the spell is cast only a few times in an entire game, the tedium of optimal play argument is gone. It feels powerful because it plays so much faster than dcss, but you can't really get away with using higher fail rate duration spells than you do in dcss. If it seems that you get permacharms online earlier than dcss charms, this can be fixed by adjusting spell levels, the capabilities of the forms, or reducing mp availability.

It's the spells that do really new things that present a balance question. Cigotuvi's embrace is essentially a new spell now and it's actually good, like a defensive song of slaying. Similarly, song of slaying is pretty different from the dcss version with a slower decay and lower plus, it encourages you to move quickly from encounter to encounter. There's a lot of potential in mechanics like this, but right now it falls victim to bad dungeon layouts. As with linearizing the dungeon, linearizing layouts offers some potential gains.

As a digression, here's an sketch of how to get crawl layouts to a better place, with the caveat that I don't know a whole lot about current generation outside of what its results look like. Layout linearization can be accomplished by more deliberate stair placement and through use of vaults, possibly needing some extension of vault placing functionality. The general idea is to place long, thin vaults that go from the edge of the level (I believe there's a vault placement directive that makes vaults place flush with an edge of the level) that extend over half the width of the level. They could be as simple as single tile permanent wall, but there could be embellishments. You may want to break up the part of the level available to normal layout generation so that you get zigzags, C-shapes, maybe spirals filled with the usual layouts but having essentially just one direction to go in a level. Schematically, you're looking at something like:

  Code:
+---------------------+
|.....................|
|....@................|
|.....................|
+------------------...|
|.....................|
|.....................|
|.....................|
|....-----------------+
|.....................|
|..................>..|
|.....................|
+---------------------+


Here, the places where you see .'s would be filled in by normal dungeon generation. You can see that you get a "lane" that defines the large scale structure of the dungeon with the player starting at the "beginning" and stairs appearing at the "end." Of course, you could have other stairs generate closer to the beginning, say one near where the player drops so the player has a diving option, and two more at about 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through the level so that the player has the option of bailing if things go wrong. The lane is wide enough to allow some lateral structure, but narrow enough that exploration is fast and keeps you moving into new encounters, not a lot of areas that have been effectively cleared of monsters by general depopulation as happens currently.

You might worry that this makes withdrawing from fights less likely to result in the player running into additional monsters. If this turns out to be a problem, then one way to address it is to introduce monsters that spawn behind the player over time. Durably summoned spatial vortices would be a natural choice in my opinion, though you would not want them to be able to break out of the lane structure. There are lots of similar possibilities opened up by total linearization, since now you can define what "going forward" means in a much finer sense. In principle, these kinds of spawns could make a far more effective timer than anything that exists in crawl now.

From what I understand, you can get pretty close to this situation using existing vault directives, perhaps with some modification to guarantee a class of vaults like what's described above will generate on every level.
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Post Monday, 7th August 2017, 13:20

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Currently I am encouraged to cast red failure Tm spell without monsters in view.


Why not to give auto-success to permanent duration spells if no monster has been in sight for a certain number of turns? It could be signalled as a status like "FreeForm".
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Post Monday, 7th August 2017, 13:26

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:This is no different from the situation in dcss, except that in dcss you're encouraged to do it before every encounter which is terrible.


I am not sure. In DCSS I would not cast red failure spells at all, no matter if there are monsters in view or not. In Hellcrawl spell failure becomes almost unimportant (if you disagree, think about OpFi who found statue form late in the game, it does not care about MP cost at all, it can quaff a brilliance potion and play the rest of the game in statue form with low MP despite having only a few levels in earth/Tm). Spell power is unimportant for forms in DCSS because the spells are spammed so spell failure plays a very important role in DCSS. Hellcrawl removed spell failure importance while didn't make spell power any more important so Spider Form feels like a free spell now and I got Ice Form castable much earlier than in DCSS too.
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Post Monday, 7th August 2017, 13:34

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

One could make spells straight-up impossible to cast above a certain fail chance. Say 20%. You would still end up with a few higher level red spells, but would need to invest a significant amount of XP to get access.

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Post Monday, 7th August 2017, 13:39

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Also form should expire after some time if brilliance status was active during cast (so you still can use the potion to get a form earlier but just for a single fight).
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Post Monday, 7th August 2017, 14:02

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Does this not already happen? The mp reserve is supposed to update every turn and deactivate all charms and transformations when the mp reserve exceeds your max mp. If using brilliance allows you to cast and keep a transformation that is not otherwise castable, this is a bug.

edit: I just tested this. It works exactly as I said.
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Post Friday, 11th August 2017, 12:53

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

15 levels of D feel like such a drag. 10 would be nice :)

also why no infinite inventory? whyyyy :)

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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 05:54

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I found ring of magic power, now I am in Ice Form on D:4 and can keep it as long as I like it despite it has 43% failure chance. That's more powerful than ring of wizardry in DCSS.

Edit. Just killed 2 Ogres on D:4 in a single fight.

Edit. Blade hands on D:5. 41% failure.
Last edited by VeryAngryFelid on Sunday, 13th August 2017, 06:02, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 05:59

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Actually, it is not more powerful than a ring of wizardry in dcss.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 06:03

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I have Blade hands on D:5. 41% failure. Ring of wizardry wouldn't allow me to have it in every fight. I am a Naga so it is optimal spell for me.

Edit. Oh, I don't even need ring of magical power, I have 1 MP left without it.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 06:05

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Incorrect. You could use blade hands in every fight with a ring of wizardry in dcss if your fail rate without wizardry is 41%.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 06:20

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Please do something about cloak of invisibility. 71% chance to fail is not a big deal when you can evoke it unlimited times with impunity.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 06:21

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:Incorrect. You could use blade hands in every fight with a ring of wizardry in dcss if your fail rate without wizardry is 41%.


Do you mean ring of wizardry would make it 0% for 2nd, 3rd etc. cast in DCSS? Because this is what I have in Hellcrawl.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 06:43

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

What I mean is that in dcss a ring of wizardy will put your fail rate in the 20s, which is safely castable by any reasonable standard. There is no risk of dangerous miscast effects. Indeed, I tried casting blade hands with fail rates from 34% to 43% about 20 times and was unable to generate any significant miscast effects.

I believe the widely held view is that fail rates on duration spells make no difference in practical gameplay once you've gotten below about 20% because your odds of failing repeatedly are low and in the unlikely event that occurs, you can simply reset if the spell is crucial for the encounter. My analysis of the situation, then, is that it is a waste of the player's time to cast and recast the spell, possibly withdrawing from encounters to recast more (which in this instance the player can do reliably and essentially for free using sticks to snakes). It is a form of scumming. Removing this form of scumming does not alter the strategic or tactical depth of the game, it is merely a quality of life improvement.

edit: after about 50 casts, I got one 8 damage miscast.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 07:02

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

It's not only about damage, as a Naga I cannot reset fights easily and miscasting Blade hands not only wastes a turn with monster in view but also can leave me without MP.

Edit. Actually in this game I met a single hydra before my death on spider 1 and it took me 3 casts to get Ice Form (22%), hydra almost got adjacent.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 07:22

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Wow, that's a hell of a story.

You are mistaken about being unable to reset fights with a naga that has sticks to snakes. I am pretty happy with the way permacharms work mechanically. If it works out to be a net player buff, which I have seen no convincing evidence of, there is nothing sacred about the balance of dcss in the first place and in any case it is just one step in the evolution of hellcrawl.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 07:35

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:You are mistaken about being unable to reset fights with a naga that has sticks to snakes.


A NaTm doesn't have enough MP to fail Blade Hands twice and cast StS à couple times to get snakes and that can also fail or get one-shotted
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 07:42

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I have no idea why you are bringing in ring of wizardry at all.

If you want to argue that being able to semi-permanently cast blade hands or ice form at 40%, for a mostly non-meaningful cost of extra MP (for an early transmuter), is unbalanced, just argue that proposition directly. Whether it's better than a ring or wizardry or not is beside the point.

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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 08:16

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I believe ring of wizardry is important because it does similar thing in dcss: allows to cast a Tm spell earlier
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 08:18

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Fingolfin wrote:
watertreatmentRL wrote:You are mistaken about being unable to reset fights with a naga that has sticks to snakes.


A NaTm doesn't have enough MP to fail Blade Hands twice and cast StS à couple times to get snakes and that can also fail or get one-shotted
Also let's not forget about lack of upstairs.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 12:32

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I shouldn't let myself get drawn into this nonsense. You make all sorts of random, usually incorrect claims, then shift the argument when they're shown to be dubious or false. So for example here, you thank some guy claiming that a dcss NaTm can't miscast blade hands twice then cast some stick to snakes, obviously false or at best irrelevant given the original discussion was about an NaTm with a ring of magical power, then you shift the comparison from dcss to previous versions of hellcrawl with your talk about stairs.

It's true that you can get blade hands pretty early in current hellcrawl, just as it's true you can do the same in dcss. It is also true that you can get it a bit earlier, but not that much earlier, if you have ring of magical power. These are not surprising claims. What is surprising is your suggestion that there is a big balance difference here when in reality, using early blade hands in hellcrawl is going to cost a lot more mp on average than it will in dcss and there is plenty of use for extra mp for early Tm's since you've got sticks to snakes.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 13:18

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Blade hands is much sooner castable in hellcrawl(D:5), with magical power it becomes even more OP(D:4). I don't know how you play Tm but for me it is not summoner and I am usually out of arrows and not of MP.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 13:22

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

To make it clear, I suggest to nerf it and not pretend that current situation is ok because I have less MP for snakes, it's not enough of disadvantage. Grinder didn't have a chance, 2 consecutive early ogres didn't have a chance, ugly things didn't have a chance, one-shotting centaurs etc. Who needs summons or escape when you are unstoppable?
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 13:58

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Nothing you've said here adds up to a coherent argument.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 15:59

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Please do something about cloak of invisibility. 71% chance to fail is not a big deal when you can evoke it unlimited times with impunity.

+inv items should probably just be removed.

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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 16:44

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Blade hands is much sooner castable in hellcrawl(D:5), with magical power it becomes even more OP(D:4). I don't know how you play Tm but for me it is not summoner and I am usually out of arrows and not of MP.

One can make a good argument that transmuters don't really need their MP in the early game, and so the extra MP cost is not meaningful in practice. As I said above, you should have simply made this argument. The ring of wizardry part (or ring of magical power) is a diversion.

Let's get some numbers to make the discussion concrete. Blade hands at 40% fail requires about 14 MP to cast. I used:
!lg * --tm recent place=d:6 / MP>=14
<Sequell> 463/2551 games for * (--tm recent place=d:6): N=463/2551
(18.15%)
!lm * natm recent place=d:6 / MP>=14
<Sequell> 73/468 milestones for * (natm recent place=d:6): N=73/468
(15.60%)

So I would guess that less than 20% of NaTm have enough MP to access blade hands on D:6, if they have it at 40% fail. Seems ok to me.

If one thinks that it is overpowered to have access to blade hands this early, there are various schemes one could use to fix it. The simplest one is to increase the MP cost for transmutations: for instance, one could use (success rate) cubed instead of (success rate) squared and multiply the result with a constant to fine-tune the cost. In other words, cost of transformation spells = alpha * (normal cost) / ((success rate)^3), for some value of alpha.

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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 17:06

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Sticks to snakes is really good, though. If you don't use it as Tm you're handicapping yourself for no reason

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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 17:39

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Yeah, I would be open to the idea that either blade hands should be higher level or that some increase in casting difficulty should be applied to permacharms. No one really understands how fail rates work anyway, so a tweak here and there isn't going to create havoc in discoverability or legibility of hellcrawl magic.

I reject the notion that permacharms as currently implemented are substantially different in terms of balance from dcss-charms. Talking about stairs does not help here. The guiding principle is to use experience with dcss balance to model changes that result in cleaner gameplay. It does not matter if permacharms without stairs is easier than dcss-charms and no stairs, what matters is the comparison with dcss-charms with dcss-stairs. Innuendo and posturing about such and such being too easy is not useful unless there is a clear, fixed comparison with dcss balance as a point of reference. To the extent this sort of thing is an argument for anything, it is for getting caught up in maintaining continuity with past versions of hellcrawl.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 19:53

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

bel wrote:So I would guess that less than 20% of NaTm have enough MP to access blade hands on D:6, if they have it at 40% fail. Seems ok to me.


You still miss my point, 20% is irrelevant as long as rings of magical power exist. That's why I mentioned ring of wizardry also. Maybe Hellmonk will see what I mean.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 20:32

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

If you assume a base max mp of 14 and a ring of magical power, you can get away with about a 55% fail rate. It doesn't take a lot of skill points to cover that gap. The impact is less than a ring of wizardry. It is true that rings of magical power can fill a role similar to a ring of wizardry in current hellcrawl, but I would argue that unless you're worried about miscast effects, they do the same thing in dcss by allowing you more failed attempts at duration spells before needing to reset for mp. I assure you, no one is failing to understand that rings of magical power allow you to cast duration spells a bit earlier in current hellcrawl. That is totally, totally obvious.

edit: It occurs to me that perhaps extra mp and wizardry should not be available on rings. This would draw a sharper distinction between characters that use support magic and those that use magic as a primary means of attack.
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Post Sunday, 13th August 2017, 21:15

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
bel wrote:So I would guess that less than 20% of NaTm have enough MP to access blade hands on D:6, if they have it at 40% fail. Seems ok to me.


You still miss my point, 20% is irrelevant as long as rings of magical power exist. That's why I mentioned ring of wizardry also. Maybe Hellmonk will see what I mean.

Yes, if you find an early +6 ring of slaying, the game becomes much easier. Or if you get an early amulet of faith, the game becomes much easier. I fail to see your point.

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Post Monday, 14th August 2017, 04:54

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I agree, you miss that blade hands is like slaying +10 i.e. unbalanced for a ring.
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