The Tavern

I'm pretty sure that my character just yesterday learned Controlled Blink, but now I can't find it in my spell list. I do seem to have 8 new spell levels I didn't have before. Has the spell been axed by the devs?

you guessed it

I really hope they can come up with another high-level utility spell, if CB was too 'boring' and 'predictable'

I don't mind as long as we'll have access to enough scrolls of blinking. They still seem to be around in all their splendid and predictable boredom.

Not gonna lie, I kind of disagree with cblink removal. While it's certainly true that it duplicated a consumable and had a very powerful effect, I think the 'predictability' of the spell was mostly upside, in that it was immediately obvious what the spell did and how it worked, something that cannot be said for most of the tloc spells remaining. It was also the only reason to train high levels of translocations; disjunction is not really worth training for a level 8 spell and most characters that get gateway will be doing so out of summoning skill first. Likewise I don't think the zot tele restrictions are super relevant here; the 'overpowered' zot ninja strats addressed by extending the orbrun restrictions relied on random teleport, pog, blink scrolls, and apport, not the cblink spell. Not to say that this change ruins crawl or anything, but it does leave the translocations school in a weird spot.

I'm starting to feel like it's time to just remove the translocations school.

like semi-controled blink ?

I'd have rather kept it, as well. But it bothers me less than removing other utility spells like regeneration, because those you could actually rely on finding (hell, you could start with regeneration). Losing CBlink isn't impactful in about 2/3's of games, because those games never generated the spell to start with. Still, RIP controlled blink...