The Tavern

Why do they still exist?

For the sake of ashenzari, let ash users get skill boost with uncursed equips.
To compensate, decrease the amount of boosting skill points for only low piety.

I don't know how hard his would be to code, but here's an idea which approximates current Ash with less annoyance:

With Ash, all filled slots are always bound. Make swapping items take an ungodly amount of time (say 5 turns even for jewellery/weapons) and drain the player.

Remove curses and rem curse scrolls.

YEAP.

Coding this would be quite easy. I think turn dragging would not be interesting, just (heavy) drain is enough.



Coding this.. would be a tedious chore.

I think the ID system is fun with scrolls and potions, and pretty much useless with non-artifact equippables, with maybe the exception of weapons.

I think the system is good gameplay.

Sometimes on a character that will likely die soon I consume un-ided things in hopes of a save. This has even saved me.

I make judgment calls about when to use ID scrolls on wands for efficiency, weapons to work around Distortion brand, amulets to work around Faith when I can't afford a piety hit, or potions.

I make judgment calls about when to equip-ID things in the early game vs. when I've passed the point that the chance of a game-impairing cursed item outweighs the potential benefit of a game-empowering item.

Meta: has papillo explained the motivation behind all the remove posts? Is this reverse psychology with the intent to enhance removal fatigue in the community so that less of it happens?

The reason of existence of id/curse system is to give risks to equipping/using un-ided items.

In "standard" roguelikes such as Nethack, cursed items have serious penalty so equipping/using un-ided items has severe risks.

However, in Crawl, the risks/penalties from cursed items are almost completely meaningless after early few floors (They're not significant even in early floors).

Every system should have their own strong validation to exist, otherwise it's better to wipe out them.

Perhaps the question should be then: what is crawl's ID/curse system supposed to achieve, and is it doing its job? Should there be fewer ID/remove curse scrolls? Should cursed items be more dangerous?

Yes! Someone gets it.

I think cursed items should blend in better, or come in more often. With amulets it's especially true: "Pfff, it's the amulet of inaccuracy, the one cursed amulet, who cares, the procedure of identifying it is done, no more cursed stuff from now on". It's the Smurfette of amulets, only it's cursed instead of being female.

Anectdote... Granted it was D:1 but I just picked up all of the following on D:1. Yes, I was feeling bullish enough to equip them all then too.

Ring of Strength -4.
Ring of Strength -2.
Some cursed blade -1 or -2.

And then I fell down a shaft for 2 floors.

I was playing a HESk btw.
So back to your point, I still managed to survive for a couple OOD dungeon levels (searching out stairs back up) and finally get a remove curse scroll. But that's not to say it was easy.

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It's not just Amulet of Inaccuracy. There is also Amulet of Harm (drain is not exactly nice), Ring of Loudness, Ring of Teleportation, Amulet of Faith if you don't want it at the moment. These can be downright frustrating if you don't have a Remove Curse, or get yourself drained say, especially around D:3 to D:6 or whenever you're just starting to beef up and the monsters are too.

If anything, I'd pick about the frequency of Identify and Remove Curse scrolls. I feel like there used to be fewer Identify scrolls (or is it just me)? I usually -- though not always! -- have plenty of Remove Curse scrolls by about Lair. If those were far tighter, then the cursed items would be downright difficult to deal with. As it is, they're more of a short-term bother... Unless that's just the moment you needed a little more oomph or run into some terrible unique. Hardly negligible.

Another take on it might be, say keep the scroll frequencies similar but add some new curses to the pool of cursed items.

And okay, perhaps some new amulets of all sorts? I have to admit, I often don't get around to amulets. One way I manage is by deciding what kind I want based on my background, and ignoring most of them otherwise until artifacts start popping up.

Still, i wouldn't quite say cursed items are negligible as they are.

There might be some room to add more of them at deeper levels of the game?

we cant remove curses because then we will not have any inhibition trying on new armor, weapons, or rings in the early game. I agree with the devs on this one.

less drops & more cursed. Ash rarely uses his piety. Maybe make curse/uncurse piety based.