The Tavern

Is there any semi-reliable reference guide that estimates your ability to pacify a monster, based on its classification (animal, humanoid, demon or undead), your Skill level in invocations, and some measuring stick of the monster's "threat level", like its HD? I can't see my odds within any game screens or by x,v on a monster. The game does a nice job providing % chance of success for other pass/fail checks, like hex wands and Lugonu's banishment ability. Elyvilon could use a boost here. :-)

You can't really know because monster HP is randomized within a fairly wide margin, and pacifying is based upon enemy monster's HP. Any estimate would also be within a very wide margin depending on how much HP an individual monster randomly had.

Yep, though there have been pushes (or at least suggestions) at times for pacification to work off of HD (altered by "type" — beast, undead, demon, etc.) so that a % can be displayed.

Just display the success-% already. Who cares if it gives you some information about enemy HP.

Well, presumably HP info is hidden for a reason!

Stealing from something I wrote earlier:

Heal other has a whole lot of issues. To start, it has strange flavor/use discrepancies: it is flavored as healing, and does indeed heal, but the actual use of this power is not for healing(allies or otherwise), but pacification, which does not care about whether the monster is actually capable of being "healed", and can thus be used on monsters which are at full HP. This is confusing, to say the least. More importantly, unlike basically all other targeted "affect monster" spells, it does not check either HD or MR-instead, it checks maximum HP. This has several problems, starting with how different monsters of the same species can have wildly varying max HP. This not only means that chances to affect the same species of monster can be hugely different, but also as a result, this ability does not show the player a percentage chance to affect the targeted monster like most other things that do now. If it did, the player could use this information to figure out which monsters of the same species have what amount of HP relative to each other, which is information that is purposefully hidden. People have proposed letting it instead show the player a chance based off that monster type's "average" HP, but that means the number shown could be hugely inaccurate in either direction, which would be confusing and misleading... so neither have happened, which means players are stuck with awkward, ambiguous failure messages, and the unspoiled player won't have a good idea what their chances to pacify are.

tl;dr: make it named "Pacify", make it not heal, make it work off either HD or MR, and then show % chance of success.

I'd like to know the reason. I mean, I get that the devs don't want to show numbers everywhere (like enemy HP). But why would it be bad if the player would see that the success-% was 35 against some monster but 40 against another monster of the same type?

Sprucery wrote:I'd like to know the reason. I mean, I get that the devs don't want to show numbers everywhere (like enemy HP). But why would it be bad if the player would see that the success-% was 35 against some monster but 40 against another monster of the same type?

Info leak for players who look out for that kind of stuff, just plain confusing to everyone else. ("What? Why did my % go down from one orc to another just now? My skills are the same... Huh, is this a bug?")

Better just to make it work off of a factor like HD, altered by enemy type if you want to keep that element.

and into wrote:Info leak for players who look out for that kind of stuff

OK, I don't think we want players to xv which ogre has the least HP so they can attack it first... I guess that's a good enough reason to not show enemy HP.

Better just to make it work off of a factor like HD, altered by enemy type if you want to keep that element.

Sure, I wonder why it was tied to HP in the first place.

Sprucery wrote:Sure, I wonder why it was tied to HP in the first place.

Because it's healing, and healing heals HP and not HD.

But since the average HP of a monster is now shown, why not make pacification show % chance based on that average? It already can be looked up.

Sprucery wrote:
and into wrote:Info leak for players who look out for that kind of stuff
OK, I don't think we want players to xv which ogre has the least HP so they can attack it first... I guess that's a good enough reason to not show enemy HP.

That's easy to fix, randomize monster damage too so Ogre with higher max HP deals proportionally more damage too. Though I am not sure what is so great about randomized max HP since player damage is randomized much more than that and we don't see current monster HP anyway. Almost dead Ogre with 50 max HP actually can have higher current HP than almost dead Ogre with 60 max HP.

stickyfingers wrote:
Sprucery wrote:Sure, I wonder why it was tied to HP in the first place.

Because it's healing, and healing heals HP and not HD.

But since the average HP of a monster is now shown, why not make pacification show % chance based on that average? It already can be looked up.

This would be fine if pacification success were changed to a constant for each enemy based on their average HP, but (aside from a bit of rounding or w/e) there should not be a difference between displayed % of success and actual % of success. Displaying numbers that are wrong is worse than not displaying numbers imo.

and into wrote:Displaying numbers that are wrong is worse than not displaying numbers imo.

We players are already convinced that spell failure and hex chance are lying to us. Making pacification chance actually lie to use would not be a good idea.

and into wrote:
stickyfingers wrote:
Sprucery wrote:Sure, I wonder why it was tied to HP in the first place.

Because it's healing, and healing heals HP and not HD.

But since the average HP of a monster is now shown, why not make pacification show % chance based on that average? It already can be looked up.

This would be fine if pacification success were changed to a constant for each enemy based on their average HP, but (aside from a bit of rounding or w/e) there should not be a difference between displayed % of success and actual % of success. Displaying numbers that are wrong is worse than not displaying numbers imo.

What about "about" then? And it's not like you need the value to be exact.

hex chance actually does lie

How? Even for a plain monster or only in some cases like when they equip a mr+ item?

Trunk already displays average max HP, you might display pacification chance vs that max HP. To make it clear you might display "about 76%" or "76% vs average max HP" in targetter

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% Chance of Elyvilon pacify success?

% Chance of Elyvilon pacify success?

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