Silence!

[Malevolent]

So how/when does the spell Silence work anyway? My Felid is currently trying to use it to good effect, but it seems it doesn't work as often as it should. The spell does say that "certain monsters' abilities" or something like that cannot be silenced - apparently, tormentors calling upon the powers of darkness counts as such an ability. However, I am quite certain I witnessed a silenced pandemonium lord casting Lehudib's Crystal Spear at me, which I'm fairly sure is a spell, just like the one I could cast. Why didn't it work? Brimstone fiends didn't seem to do anything while silenced, and greater mummies tormented and smited me but didn't seem to summon their scorpions and other junk. (And, of course, these observations may be subject to error due to small sample sizes.) So... when exactly does this damn spell work? If anyone could provide some guidance, it would be much welcome. Honestly, there are some really murky and spoilery mechanics involved with the spell Silence - I should be able to clearly tell if the spell will work on a monster, either with the enemies' ability descriptions saying "can be used while silenced" or the description of Silence itself being more clear on its possible use cases.

[crate]

All demons are unaffected by silence.

[ZoFy]

Mummies and other undead can't cast anything while silenced though.

[chequers]

The same spell can be cast in different ways by different monsters. There are normal spells (affected by silence and antimagic), demonic spells (affected by antimagic), divine invocations (affected by silence), and innate abilities (unaffected by both).

This is explained somewhere in the manual, and the spells are listed in different sections of the x-v screen.

Fwiw, I think this is unnecessary complexity. Remove silence spell and make silence and antimagic affect everything. Any potential play depth added by the existing designed is far outweighed by its complexity.

[Malevolent]

Nah, I like the idea of being able to cast Silence - nuking my own magic in exchange for nuking everyone else's magic too around me. But there is definitely a lot of complexity involved that needs to be cleared up - Crate said demons are unaffected by Silence, so why isn't that in the spell's description? Something oughta be done... thanks for the replies, I guess that in the extended endgame Silence will mainly be useful against undead spellcasters then.

[chequers]

Like I said, the spell can be used differently by different monsters. What's important is the x-v screen:

Normal spells: "It has mastered one of the following spellbooks"
Demonic spells: "It possesses the following magical abilities"
Divine abilities: "It possesses the following divine abilities"
Innate abilities: "It possesses the following special abilities"

For monsters with random spells (pandemonium lords) you cannot see this information, but all their spells are demonic.

[pumpyscump]

I find Silence to be a pretty fun hybrid spell. If x-v already displays the necessary info in an obtuse manner, why not have it just be more explicit?

[Shard1697]

Because it's very complicated to have 4 different ways that abilities are affected by 2 different things.

I would be good with "Silence affects everything except for natural abilities like poison spit/other breath weapons". If silence is removed as a spell and becomes just a scroll, I would see no reason for demons to be immune to silence(honestly, even if it isn't I think that's kind of out there).

[genericpseudonym]

Mummies and other undead can't cast anything while silenced though.

Curse skulls can, though.

[svendre]

All demons are unaffected by silence.

Silence is very effective on Geryon in the vestibule, it prevents him from summoning.

[chequers]

Is Geryon a demon?

This is just getting bogged in irrelevant minutae. I created a pull request to make it more obvious which spells are affected by silence:

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/pull/269

[Sprucery]

Geryon is not affected by silence but his horn is :)

[Sar]

Demons gesture to cast spells. It's written as such in the message log.

[dowan]

Couldn't it just say in the monster ability description outright whether it's affected by silence? I didn't realize about Geryon's horn, and although it makes a certain kind of sense, this is a video game we're talking about, so something making sense does not make it an obvious game mechanic.

[ZipZipskins]

"Its spells can be silenced" would be a free and easy five words to just slot in by a monster.

This makes total sense to me and removes some spoilery nonsense.

fr: remove Geryon, remove Geryon's horn, remove anything that asks for his horn, just let people go into hells, you can make vestibule as dangerous as you want to compensate, it doesn't matter

[chequers]

Some monsters have spells that can be silenced AND spells that cannot.

[pumpyscump]

Some monsters have spells that can be silenced AND spells that cannot.

That seems simulationistic and annoying.

[ZipZipskins]

Some monsters have spells that can be silenced AND spells that cannot.

This seems like a good time to fix that

[ZoFy]

Whatever you do, please don't remove the Silence spell. Even before Mass Confusion got cut out, Hexes school had been considered unviable late game.

[seren]

Is Geryon a demon?

This is just getting bogged in irrelevant minutae. I created a pull request to make it more obvious which spells are affected by silence:

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/pull/269

I thought that anti magic also worked on priests, but it seems it is not.

[duvessa]

silence is a very bad spell, I don't think removing it would affect the viability of hexes significantly.

[infinitevox]

silence is a very bad spell, I don't think removing it would affect the viability of hexes significantly.

That's my entire strategy for doing Tomb...

[ZoFy]

The upside of Silence is huge and since cancellation (as well as other potions and rare wands) exists, the downside doesn't kill you with proper play.

[TonberryJam]

Silence is awesome. Makes it so much easier to clean up heavy casting branches or some heavy smiting.

You can also combo the skill with darkness to help thwart those mummies not quite close enough.

[ajon]

Why are demons immune? If they were affected, it would make hexes a more viable late game skill.

[duvessa]

demons were made immune to silence in an attempt to make the overpowered version of silence less overpowered

now that silence has the shrinking radius and is bad, demons could probably regain silencability, maybe it would make the spell actually good again (not sure that would actually be good for the game though)

[TonberryJam]

flavor wise spell-like has no verbal components.