Revamp Scarves

[Siegurt]

So I very rarely feel like a scarf is an attractive option. Some of the enchantments are interesting/useful, but presently all the scarves provide either limited-use abilities (cloud immunity is only very rarely impactful) or abilities that are duplicated (Resistances are all over the place, spirit shield is on an amulet, a hat, and is a racial ability for two races, repel missiles is available in a more powerful form by getting an (expensive) spell, or by just getting more EV)

I think limited-utility items are particularly annoying if they're long-swap equipment choices, it just encourages you to carry one around and then break from the action to spend time swapping it in/out in the small number of cases where it applies, at least rings and amulets can be swapped in-situ as needed, so it's not *as* tedious to carry one around for swapping.

The missing AC (compared to using a cloak) is actually impactful for a significant portion of the game, and in the portion of the game where the AC is no longer quite so important, you've already got plenty of other options that supersede or obviate the abilities that Scarves provide.

So I would, personally, like it if either you sacrificed less AC or the abilites were more distinct and also generally useful, or both.

Some possible suggestions:
1. Make scarves enchantable, like hats.
2. Remove the amulet of spirit shield so that was more unique of a scarf ability, I guess unrands are rare enough that the bear hat can stay, it's probably fine if a couple races don't have any use for one type of scarf.
3. Combine cloud immunity with the resistance cloak limit it to being immune to cold/fire clouds, the rF/rC are generally useful, but not interesting, and the cloud immunity is interesting, but not generally useful, maybe the combination is both (or is it neither?) If Qaz didn't exist (or even maybe while he does) I would say that you could make it passively *spawn* random clouds along with the immunity.
4. Remove the rMsl scarf, or make it interestinger to not overlap so much with dMsl/just more EV (repelled things are reflected? There's too much reflection already though, that would really only work if we got rid of the other sources)
5. Come up with some new scarf egos (or recycle old discarded egos, clarity and stasis were always problematic as an amulet, in part because of swapping, if they were scarves, would that make them reasonable?)
6. Make some subset of races able to wear scarves, but not cloaks (this makes hats somewhat more distinct from helmets), Possibly make some mutation(s) prohibit cloaks, but not scarves (Spiny comes to mind, but that's a demonspawn-only one)

Note that as an aside I do feel like hats have this problem with helms (the non-uniqueness of egos) to a lesser extent, but there's at least a significant minority of cases where I'll wear a hat, for scarves that minority is vanishingly small.

Some (possibly stupid) alternate scarf egos I just came up with off the top of my head, and some existing effects that might be nice to move to a scarf:

Scarf of the Hypnotic Eye: All creatures within range 3 must move towards you before attacking, they can use their normal abilities outside this range, or when adjacent.
Scarf of the Deep: Your scarf gives you a slappy aux attack, that can constrict, like an octopus tentacle, it can't wear a ring though.
Scarf of Blood: (remove amulet of harm and move harm to this amulet)
Scarf of Glitter: Randomly causes distraction on monsters in LOS (like gozag's gold effect)
Scarf of the Spider: Makes you immune to spider webs, & nets, can sometimes randomly web things that hit you.

These are all pretty powerful (possibly overly so), and probably would need more fleshing out, I more provided them as examples of things to think about stuff, then as things to put forward as advocated proposals. Possibly some of these would be better suited to scarf unrands, rather than scarf egos.

[Sorcerous]

1. Make scarves enchantable, like hats.
2. Remove the amulet of spirit shield so that was more unique of a scarf ability, I guess unrands are rare enough that the bear hat can stay, it's probably fine if a couple races don't have any use for one type of scarf.
3. Combine cloud immunity with the resistance cloak limit it to being immune to cold/fire clouds, the rF/rC are generally useful, but not interesting, and the cloud immunity is interesting, but not generally useful, maybe the combination is both (or is it neither?) If Qaz didn't exist (or even maybe while he does) I would say that you could make it passively *spawn* random clouds along with the immunity.
4. Remove the rMsl scarf, or make it interestinger to not overlap so much with dMsl/just more EV (repelled things are reflected? There's too much reflection already though, that would really only work if we got rid of the other sources)
5. Come up with some new scarf egos (or recycle old discarded egos, clarity and stasis were always problematic as an amulet, in part because of swapping, if they were scarves, would that make them reasonable?)
6. Make some subset of races able to wear scarves, but not cloaks (this makes hats somewhat more distinct from helmets), Possibly make some mutation(s) prohibit cloaks, but not scarves (Spiny comes to mind, but that's a demonspawn-only one)

1. Yes. 0 base, up to +2. Maybe even +3.
2. Maybe?
3. Cloud immunity is fine as it is, I think. It is limited in use, but it's surprisingly good against resistance-impaired clouds that would otherwise be a problem: mephitic without rPois, miasma (I really hate slows), mutagenic and chaos (good in Abyss)
4. Didn't there use to be a RMsl spell for air mages? Remnant ego.
5. Yes on clarity, and double the yes on swapping as scum prevention.
6. Octopodes and felids need more loot anyway.

Some (possibly stupid) alternate scarf egos I just came up with off the top of my head, and some existing effects that might be nice to move to a scarf:

Scarf of the Hypnotic Eye: All creatures within range 3 must move towards you before attacking, they can use their normal abilities outside this range, or when adjacent.
Scarf of the Deep: Your scarf gives you a slappy aux attack, that can constrict, like an octopus tentacle, it can't wear a ring though.
Scarf of Blood: (remove amulet of harm and move harm to this amulet)
Scarf of Glitter: Randomly causes distraction on monsters in LOS (like gozag's gold effect)
Scarf of the Spider: Makes you immune to spider webs, & nets, can sometimes randomly web things that hit you.

Hypnotic could be evokable Mesm instead.
Scarf of Blood could also give some kind of bonus around gib-tiles? OoD for extra funny moments.
Glitter would be interesting, but I think it's stepping too much into divine territories (Ru also distracts).
Spider could be fun.

[TheMeInTeam]

Spirit shield is incredible and keeping an amulet slot while having access to it is a major attraction for scarves. You'd need to be a caster relying on mana to survive or to find a seriously crazy artifact cloak to outperform GS.

Cloud immunity is more niche, but still useful if you want to go throwing AoE clouds all over the place. It's also nice to carry around for ice caverns, volcanoes, or certain otherwise annoying vaults.

I would appreciate clarity, rmut, and stasis scarves because these things contribute counterplay in areas of the game that noticeably lack it. Though just reworking the mutation system is a better solution for this.

[duvessa]

For the rMsl scarf ego, the first thing to do is remove the damn deflect missiles spell already. It was changed with the expectation that a working permabuff system has been implemented, there hasn't even been any progress towards such a system and it's been like 5 years since the change, it's not going to happen, get rid of the broken spell!
After that rMsl scarves will be much too strong compared to cloaks of course, but you can just nerf the rMsl effect.

Cloud immunity is not actually good against cloud breaths; it doesn't protect against the initial impact. You can get the same benefits as cloud immunity by putting a harmless cloud under yourself or just not standing in miasma clouds. And as you can see from Sorcerous's post, cloud immunity misleads players a lot. I have seen players expect it to do something against Tornado too. I think that the cloud immunity effect should just be removed altogether unless someone can figure out a good solution for the clarity issues with it (I can't).

Spirit shield, like rMsl, is way stronger than anything a cloak can give you (except cloak of the Thief) and the only reason it's often bad is that you can get it from an amulet instead. I agree with getting rid of one of these two sources, but I think you also have to nerf Spirit to prevent it from being a no-brainer.

Stasis was a horrible worse-than-nothing item even when it was swappable, unswappable stasis would be even worse. Unswappable harm also sucks (new robe of misfortune would be bad even if it didn't have the negative properties attached). Clarity is only notably useful for mummies.
One old ego that I think you could recycle for scarves, though, is wizardry. Robes of wizardry were removed while rings/staves of wizardry were kept, even though wizardry works much better on an unswappable item.

Making scarves enchantable just makes them even more like cloaks, that's not good.

[Siegurt]

Making scarves enchantable just makes them even more like cloaks, that's not good.

Hm, would hats be better if they were unenchantable too? Should there be more types of unenchantable equipment (Animal skins come to mind)?

[Hellmonk]

Remove scarves imo. Guardian spirit already existed as an amulet and I'm not convinced that making the ego more common was a good move, though the scarf is often useful if you're playing a character that wants to wear faith. Resistances appear on a lot of other slots. Cloud immunity is a dumb swap item in the cases where you use it to "cheese" (more commonly: use lazy positioning in) a vault and bad to worthless in most other situations. The only good scarf ego is Rmsl, but that can just become a rare cloak ego if you want the player to have access to it. I guess moving some ring egos to scarves might be ok though.

[Sorcerous]

I have seen players expect it to do something against Tornado too.

Link it or I'm calling BS. I can't imagine a player that stupid.

[duvessa]

I have seen players expect it to do something against Tornado too.

Link it or I'm calling BS. I can't imagine a player that stupid.

##crawl-dev-20181209.lg:

  Code:

22:37:11 <gammafunk> anyhow I think a good route for the card is to do something with making clouds
22:37:48 <ebering> give it cbls at high power :P
22:37:48 <gammafunk> since qaz gives you cloud immunity, you could summon a twister at high power

I don't think it's stupid for players to think that Tornado's clouds might have something to do with Tornado's damage. It even gives you the red "Cloud" status light which changes to grey if you have cloud immunity, despite the clouds doing absolutely nothing either way.

[Sorcerous]

This is impressive on multiple levels.

[sdynet]

One old ego that I think you could recycle for scarves, though, is wizardry. Robes of wizardry were removed while rings/staves of wizardry were kept, even though wizardry works much better on an unswappable item.

I like it.

[petercordia]

1. Make scarves enchantable, like hats.
2. Remove the amulet of spirit shield so that was more unique of a scarf ability, I guess unrands are rare enough that the bear hat can stay, it's probably fine if a couple races don't have any use for one type of scarf.
3. Combine cloud immunity with the resistance cloak limit it to being immune to cold/fire clouds, the rF/rC are generally useful, but not interesting, and the cloud immunity is interesting, but not generally useful, maybe the combination is both (or is it neither?) If Qaz didn't exist (or even maybe while he does) I would say that you could make it passively *spawn* random clouds along with the immunity.
4. Remove the rMsl scarf, or make it interestinger to not overlap so much with dMsl/just more EV (repelled things are reflected? There's too much reflection already though, that would really only work if we got rid of the other sources)
5. Come up with some new scarf egos (or recycle old discarded egos, clarity and stasis were always problematic as an amulet, in part because of swapping, if they were scarves, would that make them reasonable?)
6. Make some subset of races able to wear scarves, but not cloaks (this makes hats somewhat more distinct from helmets), Possibly make some mutation(s) prohibit cloaks, but not scarves (Spiny comes to mind, but that's a demonspawn-only one)

1. Please don't make scarfs enchantable. This would reduce variety. If necessary buff some scarf effects.
2. I think that it adds flavour that there is a scarf that has the same effect as an amulet.
3. I also perceive cloud immunity as really weak. Resistance is usually weak. Merging them could be fun.
4. Often I can't/don't get dMsl. I like having the option of rMsl scarfs. Even if I don't use it often, I think it can be something like +6EV verses missiles, which is ok.
5. Stasis (from bcrawl) works well. It's only really be useful in Zot&Tomb, but I think it should be in the game for those characters that need it. I'd also really like there to be some artefact scarfs.
6. agreed. give podes & felids scarfs

[bel]

I never really understood why scarves exist at all.

Are they supposed to be a gateway for charms being turned into items in the future? If so, how are they supposed to be balanced? Spell level is a mechanism to balance charms, but you don't need any training to wear scarves.

[severen]

I never understood why they added scarves to begin with, but I've played like 90% Op since they added them so I never bothered to come up with a plausible reason. Cursorily it seemed mostly pointless outside occasionally finding an early rMsl one and wishing I could wear it against Xtaurs but generally I always had some other method for dealing with such things in mind anyway and didn't care.

I always assumed it was some Devs cute fluff project that they felt some kind of special love for since they seem obviously pointless and in fact are actually slightly harmful since they add unneeded complication to an existing item slot and generate no interesting choices that just minor changes to ego wouldn't have done too and would have been more elegant. They seem to be an inelegant solution to a non-existant problem merely put in place for imaginary fluff that probably only two devs think is cute and therefore worthwhile. I mean its essentially the same as the barely coherent run on sentences I just wrote.

But meh they probably aren't hurting anyone so who cares.

[petercordia]

C'mon, scarfs are fun. In concept at least. You get some kind of situationally useful effect which is more powerful than the usual cloak egos, and in exchange sacrifice AC. The account of AC you sacrifice is about 1 in the early game, and about 4 in the late game, so scarfs have to have effects that get better in the lategame.
Much more interesting than hats, where you lose 1-2 AC (compared with a helmet) and the only compensation is that you're allowed to have a funily shaped head and there's 1 ego that's exclusive to hats.

[Aean]

1. Disagree here. The whole thing behind scarves is basically "more powerful egos than cloaks, but no AC benefits." I'd even be in favor of expanding that concept to the hat/helmet realm, since right now hats are mostly just "helmets with less base AC that more characters can wear."

2. Spirit shield can probably stay a scarf. A lot of egos can appear in more than one place, so it probably wouldn't hurt too much to allow it to be an amulet and a scarf.

3. I don't know about spawning random clouds - that seems to tread a little too much on Qaz - but cloud immunity could definitely either be rolled into something else (say, resistance scarf) or expanded somehow.

4. I'd have to side with others and say that it'd be better to remove dMsl, and keep the scarf, though certainly it could be make more interesting than just repelling them (e.g. scarf that makes enemy missiles fire in random directions rather than at you)

5. New egos would be interesting. I don't know that clarity and stasis would necessarily be the best options, though - clarity being very situational and stasis still being mostly a swap item.

6. Definitely agree here. Just as hats work on some species/mutations that prevent wearing helmets, scarves should work on some that prevent wearing cloaks (e.g. felids, octopodes)

[duvessa]

I always assumed it was some Devs cute fluff project that they felt some kind of special love for since they seem obviously pointless and in fact are actually slightly harmful since they add unneeded complication to an existing item slot and generate no interesting choices that just minor changes to ego wouldn't have done too and would have been more elegant. They seem to be an inelegant solution to a non-existant problem merely put in place for imaginary fluff that probably only two devs think is cute and therefore worthwhile.

Yep that was it

[Shtopit]

Fusing cloud immunity and resistance together sounds like a good idea. Cloud immunity could even be turned into an ability, instead of being always active.

I would move invisibility to scarves. It's an immensely powerful ego, so nerfing the item a little by taking the AC away should be good.

[petercordia]

I agree about moving invis to scarves.

For the weaker scarf ego's, it would be possible to randomly generate scarves with 2 ego's.
adding some minor effects, you could get a scarf with 2 properties out of {rF+ rC+, rCloud, rMsl, wiz, rElec, MR+, stasis}
the advantage is it'd make scarves stronger and more varied and interesting. However it would also make scarves more complicated and potentially too strong.

any thoughts on whether this'd be good/bad?

[TheMeInTeam]

^ I don't see how any of those are stronger than spirit shield on average, so probably not "too strong".

Having experienced one too many games like this lately: https://crawl.kelbi.org/crawl/morgue/Th ... 082545.txt

I would certainly welcome having more consistent access to MR.