Remove Bolt of Magma

[papilio]

Because it's meaningless and barely used

[Majang]

I disagree strongly - it is the only earth-related bolt spell, and a very necessary weapon for FE's engaging fire-resistant monsters. I use it all the time, even in the extended game. I certainly use it much more frequently than Bolt of Fire, even as a fire elementalist, because it is cheaper and hits everything in its way.

[NhorianScum]

Bolt of magma is a workhorse spell and may just be the best 3 rune bolt overall.

3 enhancer types and shared invest with fireball/LRD, common books that hold the spell all hold the big bad iron shot, and no "wasted exp" enemies means this bad boy can hold it's own against bolt of cold and LB. Though many users do eventually scale up to BoF for the range.

[Siegurt]

It's the only pre level 9 earth spell that attacks multiple things in a line who are not standing next to a wall, it's the only pre level 9 fire spell that does damage to fire-immune critters. I think it fulfills it's niche perfectly.

[KoboldLord]

There probably are too many bolt spells that have no meaningful differences other than the spell skills that you train to be able to use them. Magma has shorter range and requires more new xp investment compared to most of the others, but it's open to question whether this means that magma should be removed or a bunch of the others should be removed.

With respect to in-game use, the current use case for bolt of magma is basically that you're running a compatible build and it happens to be the first appropriate-element bolt spell that spawned for you. It's basically just a palette swap, and it doesn't matter all that much what color you pick.

[Siegurt]

There probably are too many bolt spells that have no meaningful differences other than the spell skills that you train to be able to use them. Magma has shorter range and requires more new xp investment compared to most of the others, but it's open to question whether this means that magma should be removed or a bunch of the others should be removed.

With respect to in-game use, the current use case for bolt of magma is basically that you're running a compatible build and it happens to be the first appropriate-element bolt spell that spawned for you. It's basically just a palette swap, and it doesn't matter all that much what color you pick.

I'm not sure why "does a similar thing to a few other spells" is a reason to remove an attack spell, I mean, there's a bunch of single-target damage spells, there's a bunch of multi-target spells, of which there's only a couple different ways you can arrange the damage.

Would Bolt of Magma be more interesting if we called it 'magma eruption' and gave it the same aoe as fireball? Is it interesting if each possible pattern for a damage spell is only used by one element? Would it be more interesting if area effect-ness or even "damage" spells were confined to a single spell school?

Personally I don't think so, training a bunch of fire magic comes with an incrementally increasing offense, but it also comes with a different set of secondary advantages than come with say, training a bunch of ice, or air magic (Each of which *also* comes with an incrementally increasing set of attack spells)

Trying to differentiate spell schools based on attack type is going to lead you to the conclusion that there's only so many different ways you can cause damage, but trying to consolidate down spell attacks to only a few fundamentally different spells results in throwing out most of the spell schools and with it all the secondary advantages that differentiate them. There needs to be some duplication because you want to be able to keep different things on the same power level.

Playing a fire elementalist is different from playing an ice elementalist, even though throw frost/throw fire, and bolt of fire/cold are mostly just palette swaps, that doesn't mean you should remove those spells, because they fulfill a needed role in those spell schools, which as a whole, play differently from each other.

[watertreatmentRL]

I think you're onto something in your second paragraph there. "Would bolt of magma be more interesting with a fireball-like attack pattern?" No, but is fireball interesting as a spell with a fireball-like attack pattern? Also a no, in my opinion. It is about the most cliched possible spell that could be in crawl.

Similarly, good paragraph:

Trying to differentiate spell schools based on attack type is going to lead you to the conclusion that there's only so many different ways you can cause damage, but trying to consolidate down spell attacks to only a few fundamentally different spells results in throwing out most of the spell schools and with it all the secondary advantages that differentiate them.

Indeed, consolidating spell attacks has a lot of potential!

In a game where you generally don't have all possible spells available anyway, it is neither necessary nor useful to have ten different magic skills, much the way it is not necessary or useful to have ten kinds of weapon skills. You have all these weapon skills that are all about doing damage either in melee or at range and then you have six kinds of magic that are mostly about doing damage in melee or at range! "The conclusion that there's only so many different ways you can cause damage" is where you have to start, not a realization you try to avoid through six kinds of bolt spells.

[Siegurt]

I think you're onto something in your second paragraph there. "Would bolt of magma be more interesting with a fireball-like attack pattern?" No, but is fireball interesting as a spell with a fireball-like attack pattern? Also a no, in my opinion. It is about the most cliched possible spell that could be in crawl.

Similarly, good paragraph:

Trying to differentiate spell schools based on attack type is going to lead you to the conclusion that there's only so many different ways you can cause damage, but trying to consolidate down spell attacks to only a few fundamentally different spells results in throwing out most of the spell schools and with it all the secondary advantages that differentiate them.

Indeed, consolidating spell attacks has a lot of potential!

In a game where you generally don't have all possible spells available anyway, it is neither necessary nor useful to have ten different magic skills, much the way it is not necessary or useful to have ten kinds of weapon skills. You have all these weapon skills that are all about doing damage either in melee or at range and then you have six kinds of magic that are mostly about doing damage in melee or at range! "The conclusion that there's only so many different ways you can cause damage" is where you have to start, not a realization you try to avoid through six kinds of bolt spells.

It *is* useful to have the different types of magic, in order to provide *different types of gameplay* while it's true that "doing damage" is largely the same, the rest of the game is not, that's the point of my post and what you decided to conveniently ignore.

1. No one is trying to avoid anything by having six different kinds of bolt spells, we have six different kinds of bolt spells, because there's six different types of play experience that benefit from having a bolt spell, and having six different bolt spells is the simplest way to keep those play experiences from bleeding too heavily into one another.
2. Consolidating spell attacks has no potential, that's exactly what I said, trying to "agree" with me by restating the exact opposite of my point is the worst and lowest form of trolling, it makes you look pathetic and weak. If you have a point to make, make it.
3. Is anything about "a square" inherently cliche? The fact that there have been other games with a spell called 'fireball' doesn't make it any more or less valuable to crawl, a spell that hits a 3x3 grid (regardless of what you call it or what you flavor the damage output) requires a different sort of planning and a different sort of attention to how you move and when you attack then one which only hits one target or one that hits targets in a line.

Now if you want to argue that the play experiences aren't different enough to retain individually (for example if you feel like venom mage plays too similarly to fire elementalists for example) you could argue for the removal of the entire school, I would disagree, but everyone has opinions.

If you want to argue that long swords and maces play too similarly to one another, I think that might be closer to the mark, but is also way off topic.

[watertreatmentRL]

Excuse me if I'm a little indirect. I've been wondering lately whether I have the right to state the One True Path to Roguelike Enlightenment. Still, I think I stated my point pretty clearly.

[bel]

Spells are generally learnt based on availability and what you've already trained. For instance, if you have invested a fair bit into ice magic, it makes sense to pick up bolt of cold.

Ice magic as a whole is sufficiently different from fire magic as a whole. I don't see why every spell in the ice magic school should be completely different from every spell in the fire magic school.

[watertreatmentRL]

The crawl magic system is shot through with redundancy and unnecessary complexity. If the argument is that it's the secondary advantages that make the schools play differently, seems to me the course of action would be to make those things the primary advantages and develop totally different spell sets around those, not to say that the core of every magic school is a set of damage dealing effects with strikingly similar features. If it is determined that there is a mismatch between the number of available effects and the number of available schools, as I'm sure there is, then the corresponding cuts will be necessary and valuable.

People underrate the downside of having a lot of stuff. A character creation screen with a help menu consisting of several hundred numbers between -5 and 4 in a paged, multipart grid is just the beginning. How uniform do your mechanics have to be to allow a normal human being to cope with 140 spells? How about 25? How much redundancy in 140 versus 25 spells for the same usability? The difference between fire and ice magic is not enough to justify the difference between 140 and 25 spells.

[stickyfingers]

I'd rather remove bolt of fire.

[bcadren]

If you want to talk about useless bolt spells, what about bolt of venom? On VM starts it's just not worth the extra investment after OTR. OTR is great crowd control, especially if you find Ignite Poison. Can clear out non-poison resistant things quickly Orcs, Elves, Spiders, Humans (Vaults Guards), Non-Green Draconians, usable all game.

Venom Bolt uhh it kinda works against poison resistant (but not immune) things without training something else...but you're already training something else for poison immune things. I know it can work as an anti-hydra I can remember using it for that, but it's been a long while since I've bothered with it.

Maybe in the end poison is a good example for what other spell-schools should be, it's useful for it's niche and then useless against a lot of other enemies, leading to training other schools. Seems like most other schools try to do everything.