The Tavern

To use this special combat move, just find a book of Fire or the Tempests, train Fire Magic skill way higher than the optimal level of 0, and memorize the spell called "Ignition". Then you can use the 'z' key to use this new combat move. It's best used when there are 224 hostile monsters on the screen, being inferior to bolt of fire unless there are at least 3 adjacent monsters. Discuss this new combat move here.

I don't care that training magic skills is bad, Ignition sounds sweet as hell.

Show this post to your parents and then think about what you did.

bad idea sounds exactly like ignite poison

Looks like worse duplicate of shatter.

Level 8 spell? I'd rather cast fire storm with little more investment of xp.

Yeah it's a pretty useless spell, just wanted to remove delayed fireball

OP, before doing things like this, look deep within yourself and ask: is this the kind of person I want to be? Is this really the kind of person I want to be?

who would want to be the kind of person who posts things about video games on the internet??

and yet here we are

I just saw that it knows where invisible enemies are in LOS even if you don't.

It doesn't leak information about that; you still have to press 'Z' to cast it if the only enemies in LOS are unseen, just like refrigeration. But also just like refrigeration, it still works on unseen enemies.

Also, do you guys just pick GDD threads at random to moved to CYC? I made this thread specifically and explicitly to discuss a spell that I designed and added to DCSS. Do I have to include a terrible feature request for a thread to stay in GDD? Bring back grey elves.

Don't know the details. I assume it does a bit less damage than a fireball. So if you have a pack of ugly things, it can kill them all with a single cast perhaps?

Might be good in mega-zigs. If one assumes that all squares are filled, each monster would take damage from 9 explosions (a 3x3 square).

It can be only useful in somewhere like Vaults:5 or megazigs.

Could be good vs TRJ.

Seems a bit odd that the caster & allies are immune: Crawl doesn't generally protect you from your own spells (see ball lightning.)
But I guess it would be a lot harder to use if it damaged you too.

Also, good to see a non-conjuration fire spell, though I'm not sure it's enough to stop a FE training conjurations more than fire because of all the other options that gives access to.

So its basically ozo's refrigeration. Good job.

Wasn't me that moved this, but it honestly reads more like a joke thread in Advice.

@duvessa: if you want to discuss the design aspects of a new spell in GDD you'll have better luck if you tone down the joke level. I thought from your post that you thought it was a dumb spell and were making fun of whoever designed it; I honestly never would have guessed it was you.

Something like:

"Hey everyone, I thought delayed fireball was weird and bad, so I designed a replacement called Ignition. Here's how it works..."

would have made it clear you wanted to have a discussion about the spell instead of wanting to crack jokes.

And regarding the spell itself: when people say the caster and allies aren't affected, this just means they don't explode, right? Casting this while adjacent to a hostile is like casting fireball while adjacent to a hostile?

When duvessa mentions an opinion I cannot tell whether duvessa holds it or scorns others for holding it.

It is a dumb spell. It's really weak and impractical. Delayed fireball just desperately needed replacement.

No, the caster and allies can't take damage from it. The caster can't take damage from it because otherwise, A. it's a pain in the ass to use, B. it instantly kills you if you have a lot of monsters adjacent to you. Allies can't take damage from it because otherwise there's all sorts of wacky stuff that can happen depending on the order in which effects apply (think about death channel, for instance).
Note that if the spell ignited allies it would be significantly stronger for most characters, since you could use it in conjunction with summon butterflies to make lots of explosions against a single hostile monster. If you require the player to turn the allies hostile first then you need to use something like Haunt for that tactic to work (it's nearly impossible to turn more than one butterfly hostile at a time as they have 1 hp and 0 ac).
You could "solve" that by making it not work against summons at all, but aside from being horribly awkward, that fix removes what little use it has in places like Tomb.

What about making it level 7 Fire/Earth and making it do partly irresistible damage like magma bolt?

So it's really good for undead with butterflies and a source of torment?

I tried that, Torment won't anger butterflies because they have 1 HP and thus are unharmed by it.

You could spam s2s or something instead to get a nice horde of more durable and tormentable fuel going, though

If you think it's weak, that's generally an easy problem to solve. As long as the design is good (it sounds good to me, at least) adjusting the power level is just a numbers game - up the damage, or lower the level, etc. Probably want to up the damage since it's meant to replace delayed fireball and thus it needs to stay in that level range. Is it exactly 7? Single school fire, or? Maybe I should play a caster...

No it didnt, extra 5mp and a free action was a great spell.

It really wasn't.

It was level 7 so I guess you could make the argument that it comes after the hard parts of the game, but anything that you can do without any time cost is very good.

Delayed fireball, due to its 0 aut cast time, it was the most strategically important spell I never memorized.

i had a dream last night that this thread was locked

also i know delayed fireball was overpowered, broken spells often are

FR: buff the damage, limit the amount of fireballs, have it replace fire storm as L9 spell and rename it meteor swarm

FWIW it was overpowered and *also* broken, a less powerful version with the same mechanics would've been just as broken, in this case "overpowered" and "broken" happened to coincide, but weren't really related.

I thought that was the point of spells, to be overpowered and possibly broken, since you gonna break your character playing a mage anyways.

No spell is overpowered as long as Trog exists.

Disagree, I feel like no combination of melee and ranged combat can replace the sheer terror that is Summon Horrible Things.