The Tavern

Because you can't leave Gammafunk to be the only one to wield the wild power of meme creation.

Very recently, something happened in the Crawl world. All the good wands are gone. Part of the player base revolted, so here are some words to explain the inexplicable.

For quite a while it was realised that HW, Haste and Tele are too close to each other than is good for well-differentiated variety. In other words, developers agreed that cutting a wand of the three would be an improvement. This was not urgent; that’s why it isn’t announced on the quinquennial plan or anywhere else. However, it is also not a big change, so when we got the details ready in a session or two, we commenced with the wipeout, we got a bit overzealous, and deleted all three.

First, theme. Heal Wounds are sacrosanct by DD’s protection. Even if you don’t like the DD, there is no way we would get rid of DD as a player species, so we just bypassed the problem by giving them an ability. Choosing between Haste and Tele, the lot hit the former. The reasons are less forcing than with HW, but are reasons nonetheless: Haste has a potion equivalent whereas Tele has not (the scrolls cannot be read while silenced). Tele has an ancient mythos behind it (Star Trek, Spok, the beam thingy) as well as a Xom vault in the game. Haste on the other hand is the archetypical Monday morning-style rush, which in my book is a severe demerit. Then we took Tele away, because, why not?

Second, aptitudes. Removing a wand does not happen in empty space. It might have impact on nearby wands, and it certainly did so here. A table of the old and new wands for Mi, HO and old MD isn't at the end of this text, because I didn't feel like editing a table. The summary is this: new HW ca be used by DD in certain areas (e.g. when wounded, rotten, almost dead, but not if they are dead). Hill Orcs are the usual smug bastards.

Third, to dispel a myth. We didn’t use winning rates, or number of games played in order to make a decision, you foolish mortals.

Anyway, with some luck and effort, 0.10 will see more interesting Demigods.

Let me know when you start developing the game more towards survival, and i'll pat you on the back.

well this is mystifying

meh whatever, I don't think I will be paying attention to what happens in 0.20 its fixing up to be one of the worst versions, maybe the worst I have seen. Claiming that Mf or Te are replacements for HE is just really poorly thought out, when HE are quite good at the spell Apt Te are bad at and same is true for Mf and the fact that HE are a much higher stat species than anything other than Dg. Ripping 3 major wands out without making a number of other changes to account for the cascading consequences. The really poorly justified removal of one of the only Archmagi items when put into the context of the overall enhancer vs spell power situation, not that this is an important item, but its poorly thought out when put into context. The whole thing is just extremely poorly reasoned.