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Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Wednesday, 24th February 2016, 23:41
by sage1234
I have been enjoying playing Mummies but have noticed that clarity seems to be removed in .18. Is there any protection from confusion in .18? I bring this up because confusion is real bad as a mummy. Even wands of heal wounds don't work. I love dcss but dislike gameplay where surviving a single encounter is a roll of the dice. As a mummy if your confused it is unlikely you will survive, as far as I can tell the best chance is to summon monsters.

Thanks in advance.

BTW lesson learned from me, I need to be aware of every single monster that has confusion. probably a good idea anyway.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Wednesday, 24th February 2016, 23:46
by ydeve
Clarity has been removed as an amulet and as a randart property (was it even a randart property to begin with?). Currently, the only sources of Clarity are the Autumn Katana, OCPA, the Amulet of Four Winds, and Ash. Yes, it sucks for mummies.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Wednesday, 24th February 2016, 23:52
by sage1234
ydeve wrote:Clarity has been removed as an amulet and as a randart property (was it even a randart property to begin with?). Currently, the only sources of Clarity are the Autumn Katana, OCPA, the Amulet of Four Winds, and Ash. Yes, it sucks for mummies.


Thank you, for my first 15 ruin game I would be proud of a mummy of Ash, was trying Pazellas but I might switch. Actually I will leave it to XOM, which ever god I see first I will worship.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Thursday, 25th February 2016, 04:50
by Airwolf
The mutation still exists, too.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Thursday, 25th February 2016, 08:26
by Jeremiah
Airwolf wrote:The mutation still exists, too.


Doesn't help mummies

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Thursday, 25th February 2016, 08:42
by duvessa
nothing helps mummies

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Thursday, 25th February 2016, 13:21
by seren
ydeve wrote:Clarity has been removed as an amulet and as a randart property (was it even a randart property to begin with?). Currently, the only sources of Clarity are the Autumn Katana, OCPA, the Amulet of Four Winds, and Ash. Yes, it sucks for mummies.


I am not challenging it but what was the rationale? So basically if you don't want to get confused you need either :
* high MR
* loads of potion of curing
* use the god that gives Clarity (which I don't remember at the moment)
* get a good urandart

is that all ?

Edit : found the rational

9d68cf9 | Corin Buchanan-Howland | 2015-12-13 17:46:16 -0500

Replace the amulet of clarity with the amulet of pain
The problems with the amulet of clarity are similar to the ones with the
amulet of stasis: complete immunity to a range of threats and no influence
when those threats are absent. Unlike stasis, the amulet also had no real
downside to make it interesting, encouraging you to carry it around and swap
it in whenever the set of effects it handles are around and you have
insufficient MR. Also unlike stasis, this amulet had weird corner cases
such that it allowed voluntary berserk but not involuntary berserk, but
never allowed ambrosia.

The one place where amulet of clarity really felt useful was on mummies,
since confusion is everywhere and long-lasting, and has a common cure not
available to mummies. In general, finding MR will resolve this; the exception
is mummies worshipping Xom, since Xomfusion can't be resisted normally. I'd
rather address that situation directly than keep this amulet just to handle
this situation.

Meanwhile, the new amulet of pain is an evil amulet that increases damage
dealt to and by the wearer by 25%. If both the attacker and defender have
the amulet, the damage is only increased by 25% total. I expect this
amulet to be strong to characters with great defenses or ranged attacks,
and perhaps speedrunners. Letting this amulet swap freely would encourage
people to use it against monsters that can't fire back and then swap it
when the monster gets into range, so I gave it draining as a swapping
penalty.

This is one of the more experimental designs in the new set of amulets, and
as such I expect it'll get tweaked a few times and it may eventually get
removed or replaced.


And for corrosion :

Replace ring of invisibility with ring of resist corrosion
This is the first part of a set of commits that will remove the amulet of
resist corrosion, thereby effectively moving resist corrosion from an amulet
to a ring.

The motivation here is to keep all the similar resists (rF+, rC+, rN+, rPois)
together in the ring slot rather than spreading them out. It also means that
we can move another amulet away from being a situational resist swap.


For Resist Mut :

ac99359 | Corin Buchanan-Howland | 2015-11-29 21:02:43 -0500

Amulet reform: remove amulet of mutation, replace with amulet of nothing
This is the first step in a series of amulet changes. The first aspect of
this specific piece is to remove the amulet of mutation. This amulet had two
problems: first, it almost completely protected from a rare threat, meaning
that it shut down that class of threat almost entirely. Second, because the
threat it protected against was rare, it was almost never useful to wear
this amulet, encouraging players to haul it around until it was useful to
swap in. Hopefully, removing it will force players to use tactics against
mutators more often, encouraging more interesting play overall.

The second piece of this is creating an amulet of nothing. This is important
for the rest of the reform project, as it will allow unique amulets to have
a base type that doesn't carry any special properties; without this, any time
a change was made to our least-interesting amulet (currently warding), all
the unique amulets that use that type would get a big functionality
change. The amulet of nothing will not spawn normally.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Thursday, 25th February 2016, 17:28
by sage1234
High MR is not always attainable this is an element of luck. Potions of curing are not usable by a mummy. Ash is a great god but choosing Ash only to survive one element of the game doesn't make sense. I did not find a urandart that would help.

The other defense is vial of floods and fan of gales, sadly on this game in particular I did not have a fan of gales and my vial of floods was inert. This won't happen again. The big problem I have with the mummy and confusion is there isn't a valid defense obtainable to most characters by mid game and once confused you have very little options. A character that is going well is removed from full health to dead in 4 turns with all actions being random. In this situation I had a rod of teleport and cure wounds which are random and risky.

[/quote]

I am not challenging it but what was the rationale? So basically if you don't want to get confused you need either :
* high MR
* loads of potion of curing
* use the god that gives Clarity (which I don't remember at the moment)
* get a good urandart

is that all ?

Edit : found the rational


[/quote]

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Thursday, 25th February 2016, 18:06
by sage1234
I wanted to point out that I love this game and this is a small part of the game I don't like.

Thank you developers for all that you do and have done.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Thursday, 25th February 2016, 18:40
by crate
The problem is really that confusion is a badly-designed status effect most of the time. "Destroy a potion of curing with an attached 1.0 turn paralysis" is not a particularly interesting monster attack (this is what confusion is to anyone who has curing), and "paralyse the player" is already done by, well, paralysis (this is what confusion is to mummies or anyone without curing).

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Thursday, 25th February 2016, 19:13
by Siegurt
crate wrote:The problem is really that confusion is a badly-designed status effect most of the time. "Destroy a potion of curing with an attached 1.0 turn paralysis" is not a particularly interesting monster attack (this is what confusion is to anyone who has curing), and "paralyse the player" is already done by, well, paralysis (this is what confusion is to mummies or anyone without curing).

To be fair, it isn't *identical* to paralysis, you have a chance of acting in a way that is in your favor, it is more like 25-75% chance of paralysis on each turn (depending on how many movement actions available might be beneficial), which is less harsh than paralysis. I have always thought of confusion as Paralysis-lite, with a chance of curing.

Later in the game it does turn into a one turn stun for non mummies, which is all right, there should exist some lower level monster abilities that higher level characters can shrug off (I mean at xl 20 are you concerned about the throw frost an orc Wizard tosses at you? )

I think the real problem is that too many high level critters have confusion, when they should have a more level appropriate ability instead.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Thursday, 25th February 2016, 19:31
by Sprucery
Sprucery wrote:I still think the best course of action would be to change confusion, for example like this:
You can attack normally, but there is a 50%* chance of attacking a square next to the target. You can read, but there is a 50%* chance of failure (or, reading takes more time). You can zap a wand, but there is a 50%* chance of misfiring. You can cast spells, but miscast chance is greatly increased. Etc. The idea is that you could try to do the stuff you normally do, but confusion would make it (more difficult / sometimes fail).

* or some other value

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Friday, 26th February 2016, 06:07
by Rast
Most non-wand evokables work just fine under confusion.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Saturday, 27th February 2016, 14:11
by Hurkyl
seren wrote:I am not challenging it but what was the rationale? So basically if you don't want to get confused you need either :
* high MR
* loads of potion of curing
* use the god that gives Clarity (which I don't remember at the moment)
* get a good urandart

is that all ?

Also:

* Plenty of Hex uses or massive ranged damage (or maybe massive EV/SH), because of Tarantellas
* Only doing 11 rune runs or less, because of Hell effects

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Monday, 29th February 2016, 17:30
by infinitevox
Seeing that Clarity is gone in .18, and Mummies are pretty terrible...

What about just giving Mummies Clarity as an inherent weirdness? I highly doubt that would break anything, and might go a bit towards making Mummies not so bad

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Monday, 29th February 2016, 18:06
by MainiacJoe
I get the impression that mummies are intentionally a challenge species...

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Monday, 29th February 2016, 18:25
by infinitevox
A challenge should come from weighing your options vs your current situation, and making strategic choices, not a death-sentence to a single ability that proliferates the mid to late game.

(I'm not counting the option to just not play a mummy.)

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Monday, 29th February 2016, 19:05
by Blade
Confusion is annoying on mummies, but it's rarely an unavoidable death sentence. It just means the character needs to be a good deal more cautious around sources of confusion.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Monday, 29th February 2016, 19:10
by Lasty
People discuss this like amulets of clarity were guaranteed on all mummies before. The situation now is that all mummies have to play like the majority of mummies used to. Several changes have already happened to Confusion, and I'm sure more are still to come.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Monday, 29th February 2016, 23:25
by TehDruid
The only problem with Mummy confusion is Xomfusion, which I hope to see fixed at some point, because it even has a chance to bypass clarity, iirc. MuCK is hard enough without confusion.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Monday, 29th February 2016, 23:47
by crate
Xom confusion stopped bypassing clarity some time ago afaik. Of course, you are very unlikely to get clarity under Xom as a mummy any more, so it's not like that really matters.

Re: Is clarity removed in .18

PostPosted: Tuesday, 1st March 2016, 07:38
by duvessa
It wasn't a chance to bypass clarity, it always bypassed clarity. Xom could make you drink a potion of confusion, or give you a miscast that causes confusion, and you could resist that with clarity, but direct Xom confusion bypassed clarity every time (until it was changed to never bypass clarity). Same thing goes for Xom mutation and rMut.