Hydra form?

[Sprucery]

I would just like to say that poison is already useful even in Zot (venom bolt, poisonous cloud, poison arrow).

[daggaz]

Well, then you won't be able to heal from monsters who died of your poison.

I mentiond larger monsters because hopefully popcorn would get auto-consumed, but there's no reason why you shouldn't get to eat the corpse of a monster you poisoned to death.

I would just like to say that poison is already useful even in Zot (venom bolt, poisonous cloud, poison arrow).

I should have said 'melee-based poison', tho I figured by mentioning p-arrow as a design goal, this was self-evident. Note that giving hydraform this level of power gives transmuters short and limited, but powerful access to the poison school without having to actually divest the skill points. Thats pretty much inline with the whole idea of 'i'll cast a spell to let me emulate aspects of another class/species/monster whatever.

[Jeremiah]

What if hydra form just transformed your head into multiple, hydra-like necks/heads, melding headgear (& maybe amulets?) but leaving other armour and EV intact?

Damage might have to be nerfed a bit (and the +50% HP bonus reduced or removed) to make it not strictly better than blade hands vs single targets, but if it kept the cleaving and healing it could still be better vs large numbers of monsters, while leaving blade hands as the preferred option vs one powerful enemy.

[Insular Community]

I don't get why forms (aside from statue) have to a-bomb your AC...

[jejorda2]

What if Hydra form damaged everything adjacent to you and added to your health and nutrition (as appropriate) on the turn you cast it? It would work a little like static discharge, in that it doesn't need to be targeted. If damage were adjusted, I don't know if the spell would need to allow the form to continue past the turn that it is cast or not. I guess you lose the opportunity for enemies to cut your heads off. Just cast it to get a single UC/Fighting/Transmutation based AOE Vampiric attack that is subject to AC/EV.

[damiac]

Rename it to hydra strike, and then it's an option to spend mana rapidly and do good damage and heal, while avoiding the whole thing with utterly wrecking your defenses. Then you might cast a few hydra strikes, then cast blade hands. Both spells are useful, and it's not a waste of XP anymore.

I think that's a really good idea.

[jejorda2]

Another issue with Hydra Strike would be if you cast it in, say, spider form, do you end the turn in spider form? Or back in standard form? Or is it simply unavailable while in a form?

I'd vote for returning to shifted form. That way it's useful to the people who train transmutation skill enough to cast it. And you get to ask, "Should I cast blade hands while those enemies are a step away, and let the penalty lower the power of my Hydra strikes, or just use HS while in standard form, then let them hit me while I switch to blade hands?"

A little ASCII animation of "d" glyphs representing the hydra heads lashing out could be fun. Or not.

[tasonir]

As far as I know, blade hands does not lower your spell power at all, it simply reduces spell success (anti-wizardry). Hydra form is a short duration, although it's been upped a few days ago to where you should now get about 7 turns as the minimum unstead of 3 (not counting the 1 turn already spent before your next action). Higher spellpower will directly increase its duration a bit better now as well, although it's hard to really increase transmutations spellpower as I believe only archimagi + wild magic can do that.

I believe the current 7-10+ turn version is better than an instant strike version, although I do agree that it would be nice to have more transmutations that don't lower your AC. But hydra form isn't geared to be that form.

[damiac]

The problem is, hydra form isn't geared for anything except wasting XP (admittedly in a fun way).

[crate]

I'm playing a tm right now and hydra form seems pretty good, I don't know what all these complaints are about. It feels like ice form's big brother more than anything.

[nago]

Its duration has recently been increased, maybe that changes things a bit? (at least the incredible tedium to use it)

  Code:

Change hydra form duration

Extend it to the same duration as blade hands, and make heads
reset when the spell is recast (to extend duration).

The ultra-short duration was a little vestigial after the high
hunger cost went away; better to save it for whenever that idea
comes back.

[tasonir]

awww...I'll have to play with it more, but I kind of liked the second duration (when it went from min 4 turns to around min 7-9 turns), we'll see how an actual long duration plays.

What high hunger cost did they mean? Did it have additional hunger costs besides just being a level 6 spell? Even if so, being able to auto-eat enemies for food seems like it would override any hunger costs...

[Lasty]

In testing hydra form when it first was created, I found than on a typical-ish post-Lair human Tm, hydra form was capable of taking out any number of surrounding yaks/death yaks without danger. More surprisingly, you could kill up to 3-4 draconian zealots consistently even if they weren't clustered around you, but once you upped the number to 5-6 you got massacred. I also found that any number of klowns just destroy you. Basically, if you can deal enough damage to eat monsters it'll sustain you indefinitely, and if you can't, it's pretty bad for armoured species.

That was before the duration fix, of course. I still would hesitate to use it frequently just because it seems like it turns so heavily on managing to eat things before your health drops too far.

[crate]

My hutm had 8/22 defenses or something in hydra form, with the +50% hp that was not a lot different from my 11/30 in blade hands (better vs single enemies, worse vs multiples, except of course you heal against multiple enemies and have cleave so it ends up better there too). It does lots of damage as far as I can see (a bit more than ice form/blade hands according to fsim for a typical tm probably, which matches with my experience in the game where I used it). It's very good.

Think of it as a grown-up ice form (or slightly smaller dragon form). If you compare it to blade hands on a built-for-blade-hands tm then yes you're going to be disappointed, but gosh for my hutm that I just won blade hands was really bad compared to hydra form/dragon form (or even ice form!) and you don't see people complaining that blade hands is weak.

edit: hasted hydra form kills infinitely many dracs, btw (ok I guess if you fill the screen with drac zealots you might get smited to death, but I don't see how I could have realistically died to them in zot)