pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm


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Post Wednesday, 19th April 2017, 12:53

pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

Both of these requests might be of interest to people. They each look awesome to me.

I especially want to flag Overwhelming Strike, since details aside I think this sort of thing is the way forward re: charms. Charms should be the school that lets melee characters with more Int/MP than the standard MiBe take advantage of these resources to improve their tactical options; the new spell does this in what imo is a pretty neat way.

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Post Wednesday, 19th April 2017, 13:35

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

Strike looks completely worthless as is.

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Post Wednesday, 19th April 2017, 13:52

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

Well now let's just give Halflings innate rMut3. If you don't want the mutation game, play Ha. Takes care of Ha's uniqueness problem, too.
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Post Wednesday, 19th April 2017, 14:15

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

Idea for OS: Have it do a flurry of blows instead, up to 4, each using 1/4 of your remaining MP. This way, if you kill an enemy on the first strike, it doesn't feel like a huge waste.
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Post Wednesday, 19th April 2017, 17:46

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

TeshiAlair wrote:Idea for OS: Have it do a flurry of blows instead, up to 4, each using 1/4 of your remaining MP. This way, if you kill an enemy on the first strike, it doesn't feel like a huge waste.

For the love of GOD, please let this work with unarmed.

I just read it. Omfg... how many restrictions and caveats does a level 7 spell need?
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Post Wednesday, 19th April 2017, 17:56

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

I hope strike doesn't get merged. Crawl doesn't need even more overelaborate conjurations, especially ones that pretend not to be conjurations. The Zin change would be nice though.

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Post Wednesday, 19th April 2017, 18:38

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

I don't think it's a conjuration in disguise just because it does damage but I also don't think it sounds very good. If the damage were high enough to instantly kill some high HP dangerous enemy, maybe it would have situational use, but at level 7 and consuming all the caster's MP (ie taking away escape and followup options) it really had better be amazingly good.

Damage is given by:

+ // strike_power is set when the overwhelming strike spell is cast
+ const int pow = you.props["strike_power"].get_int();
+ const int dmg = roll_dice(you.magic_points, div_rand_round(pow, 10));
+ const int hurt = defender->apply_ac(dmg);

Maybe someone more familiar with crawl code can help us out here (what does div_rand_round do??? :\ )

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Post Wednesday, 19th April 2017, 19:05

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

duvessa wrote:I hope strike doesn't get merged. Crawl doesn't need even more overelaborate conjurations, especially ones that pretend not to be conjurations. The Zin change would be nice though.


All things that do damage in any way are Conjurations in disguise, that is true. This includes melee weapons.

yesno wrote:I don't think it's a conjuration in disguise just because it does damage but I also don't think it sounds very good. If the damage were high enough to instantly kill some high HP dangerous enemy, maybe it would have situational use, but at level 7 and consuming all the caster's MP (ie taking away escape and followup options) it really had better be amazingly good.

Damage is given by:

+ // strike_power is set when the overwhelming strike spell is cast
+ const int pow = you.props["strike_power"].get_int();
+ const int dmg = roll_dice(you.magic_points, div_rand_round(pow, 10));
+ const int hurt = defender->apply_ac(dmg);

Maybe someone more familiar with crawl code can help us out here (what does div_rand_round do??? :\ )


div_rand_round is dividing the first number (in this case spellpower) by the second number (10), and randomly rounding to the closest whole number based on the remainder (so 10.5 would 50% round up to 11 and 50% round down to 10).

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Post Wednesday, 19th April 2017, 21:40

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

Disclaimer: This is based on the read of a commit message and not actual play testing!

I'm not sure it'll be good enough to be used if it takes all of your mana for one strike. Either let it apply damage in several strikes so you will usually end up with some mana left, or have the status last longer and let it take 5-10 mana per strike for less damage?

As it is it seems very narrowly useful - you'd pretty much only use it against a single target you're trying to kill in as little time as possible. So uniques, maybe something like juggernaut/iron giant. But this would hurt you if there were any additional monsters, so you'd only use it when you have a proper 1:1 engagement, which is already the easiest way to win. Seems like it would be a "win more" spell, since it doesn't help you when things are going poorly. And a win more spell at level 7 in charms isn't going to be worth the experience to go towards. Compare the mana cost - if you're draining ~30 mana from the player, that's like dropping 2 freezing clouds and shooting 3 bolts. Spending 30 mana to remove a single target doesn't beat spells which will take out a whole group of enemies for that cost, and not require melee range. Charms is single school and the mage might have to learn 2-3 schools of magic, but overall the cost isn't that much different - the charms user probably has a heavier weapon than the caster, more fighting, etc.

Imho to be worth it should be something of a use often for increased damage spell, similar to infuse, but uses a lot more mana. The damage could either be added to the attack or separate like infuse is, since overwhelming strike's damage should be high enough to get through AC, unlike infuse.

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Post Thursday, 20th April 2017, 01:52

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

Everything about Overwhelming Strike seems bad and poorly thought out to me.

It's a melee range nuke that takes two actions entirely to force it into charms, that's intentionally less efficient than actual nukes, that knowingly is as effective as dumping two iron shots into the target (for less mana, same number of actions, at range), and is extremely high level. And there's already a better spell if you want a melee range nuke: irradiate, which is like an iron shot you get early that can't miss!

For Massive Strike to be useful it'd need to be like Level 4, one action, and slow and/or exhaust and/or drain you after use, with similar damage; then it might actually be useful as a ludicrously unsafe single target spell for melee characters.

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Post Thursday, 20th April 2017, 08:16

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

Level 4 strike would still be terrible even with the excessive drawbacks removed.

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Post Thursday, 20th April 2017, 16:06

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

I am also +1 on the zin proposal and -1 on overwhelming strike.
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Post Thursday, 20th April 2017, 19:19

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

So while this is CYC, since floodkiller already posted here I'll propose a high level design for a spell like overwhelming strike which would be worthwhile being high level:

Flurry Strike: Charms, level 7.

Flurry strike is instant (it requires 0 aut to cast). It has no immediate effect, but sets the "flurry" status.

Flurry status: On your next melee hit, you first perform the normal melee action, and then check for additional strikes. Based on spellpower, you could from 2 to 4 additional strikes. Strikes are a normal melee attack which take no additional time, and each cost 7 mana. If you kill the target or run out of mana, you stop performing additional strikes.

When first brought online the spellpower should be somewhere around the 2 extra strikes level, and 3 strikes should be somewhat easy to reach with high int or some extra charms. 4 strikes would probably require an archmagi effect. For example if 100 spellpower is 2 strikes, 125 is 3, and 150+ is 4, then if someone had 110 spellpower they'd have a 60% chance of 2 additional strikes and 40% chance of 3.

Instant effect is important because it means casting it during a fight isn't a large dps loss, and means it isn't optimal to try to cast it while out of combat to keep the status light on as much as possible. Technically that's still optimal in that it will let you start to regenerate the 7 mana cost for the status light, but this is a minor concern because the attack is designed to not be mana efficient, so the character that would use this is probably not going to try to abuse casting it out of combat just to regenerate 2 mana. This is also counteracted by flurry status timing out quickly.

It also won't instantly drain you to 0 mana - I assume most characters won't have archmagi and will get 2-3 strikes, which means 7 for the initial cast and 14-21 for actually using the strikes, for up to 28 mana. Huge cost, but presumably you'll have ~10 mana left if you need to cast a spell to escape.

If you hit a monster with any additional strikes, the flurry status is lost. If you attack popcorn and kill it with your normal melee attack, the flurry status remains active. Flurry status should time out in a relatively short, fixed amount of turns, say 5 turns.

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Post Thursday, 20th April 2017, 21:13

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

That is significantly worse than overwhelming strike

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Post Thursday, 20th April 2017, 22:27

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

How so? I would assume that since it's instant to turn on, it's already well ahead of overwhelming in terms of power level. Overwhelming also fully drains your mana, which is dangerous. It's possible that doing 3-5 total strikes (one normal and 2-4 additional) is less damage than overwhelming strike's power, I'm not sure what the average damage for overwhelming strike is. But I'd think 3-5 melee hits should be enough to kill most dangerous monsters outright, unless they are very tanky uniques or you miss a few hits. It would be less effective with low damage weapons like short blades or even demon whips, but still reasonably useful. It is certainly biased towards heavy weapons, though. It'd be possible to rework that by having it generate "virtual auts" instead of a strike count, so instead of say 3 strikes, it generated 21 auts, and then attempted to do a weapon strike at your current delay until it could no longer fit an attack in. So if you had 21 auts and a 7 speed weapon, you get 3 additional hits, if you had a 5 speed weapon you'd get 4 additional hits (and 'wasted' one aut). With a quickblade, 7 additional hits (yay combat spam!). Mana drained would be the initial 7 for status, and then the number of virtual auts actually used.
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Post Thursday, 20th April 2017, 23:25

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

so how is this spell better than haste used to be considering that it is level 7? it seems pretty useless except as an experience dump for lategame melee characters.
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Post Friday, 21st April 2017, 01:16

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

tabstorm wrote:so how is this spell better than haste used to be considering that it is level 7? it seems pretty useless except as an experience dump for lategame melee characters.
So, not useless? Nice to have an alternative to going all the way up to 24 or 26 for the top shelf two-handers, especially for those of us who think shields are dumb but are too lazy to invest in another attack form.

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Post Friday, 21st April 2017, 05:19

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

tasonir wrote:How so? I would assume that since it's instant to turn on, it's already well ahead of overwhelming in terms of power level. Overwhelming also fully drains your mana, which is dangerous. It's possible that doing 3-5 total strikes (one normal and 2-4 additional) is less damage than overwhelming strike's power, I'm not sure what the average damage for overwhelming strike is. But I'd think 3-5 melee hits should be enough to kill most dangerous monsters outright, unless they are very tanky uniques or you miss a few hits. It would be less effective with low damage weapons like short blades or even demon whips, but still reasonably useful. It is certainly biased towards heavy weapons, though. It'd be possible to rework that by having it generate "virtual auts" instead of a strike count, so instead of say 3 strikes, it generated 21 auts, and then attempted to do a weapon strike at your current delay until it could no longer fit an attack in. So if you had 21 auts and a 7 speed weapon, you get 3 additional hits, if you had a 5 speed weapon you'd get 4 additional hits (and 'wasted' one aut). With a quickblade, 7 additional hits (yay combat spam!). Mana drained would be the initial 7 for status, and then the number of virtual auts actually used.


It would be worse than overwhelming strike because melee attacks have a very good chance of getting mostly or entirely blocked by armor even lategame, so 35 mana to hit five times is probably worse than 40 mana to automatically kill a monster.

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Post Friday, 21st April 2017, 17:07

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

Why would any character who would want to use either version of this spell (ie is in melee routinely and is willing to blow most or all of their MP on a kill) ever be willing to invest enough skill in Charms for a level 7 as well as equipment opportunity in lighter armour to be able to cast it?
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Post Monday, 24th April 2017, 22:16

Re: pull watch: zin change, overwhelming strike charm

milski wrote:It would be worse than overwhelming strike because melee attacks have a very good chance of getting mostly or entirely blocked by armor even lategame, so 35 mana to hit five times is probably worse than 40 mana to automatically kill a monster.


mattlistener wrote:Why would any character who would want to use either version of this spell (ie is in melee routinely and is willing to blow most or all of their MP on a kill) ever be willing to invest enough skill in Charms for a level 7 as well as equipment opportunity in lighter armour to be able to cast it?


You guys clearly don't play enough statue form unarmed characters. They hit often (huge accuracy due to high levels of unarmed/fighting and +8 from statue form), hit hard that enemy AC isn't an issue, and effectively have no body armor :)

That being said, if the balance of the spell is too narrow/weak, the numbers can be adjusted. The mana cost per hit could be reduced, the number of attacks raised, or even give the attacks a bonus to damage if you think they'll be too often negated by AC. I don't think AC would be a problem for any 2H weapon, but it certainly would be for things like quick blades, and it's arguable for mid-range weapons like demon whips/blades etc. Of course, as it only exists as an idea in this thread, it'll likely just never exist in crawl, which solves all design and balance issues :)

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