The Tavern

I never see EV increasing now (I put it on with full HP and MP, tried standing still and moving). Is it broken?

For me, the +15 EV only shows when there's a forcemore prompt interrupting an action. Then my EV goes back to normal.

I'd assume it works, but the display is just bugged for it not show the value.

Also, IMO, this amulet is really fucking bad in general.

Wow, +15 EV when not attacking? But, it's disabled for Searing ray/Wu Jian attacks? So, you can only use it when running away, and you can't quickswap to it either to get the effect? And the display for it is also buggy?

It just needs to be erased, who thought this was a good idea?

Vajrapani wrote:Also, IMO, this amulet is really fucking bad in general.

Wow, +15 EV when not attacking? But, it's disabled for Searing ray/Wu Jian attacks? So, you can only use it when running away, and you can't quickswap to it either to get the effect? And the display for it is also buggy?

It just needs to be erased, who thought this was a good idea?

It has a lot of uses, you just need to think around the box.

1) When you're running away is when you want +15 EV the most. If it keeps you from dying, great. Running away is very powerful in Crawl and this makes it more powerful.
2) If you're ninjaing a rune, you're spending almost all your time moving around rather than fighting, +15 EV again great for this.
3) If an enemy is standing in a Conjure Flame, Acrobat gives you +15 EV while you stand next to it and let the fire kill it.

And many more uses I don't have memorized.

I generally don't play Trunk much so I haven't used it, but...

It sounds like it could also help a whole lot with early centaurs and cyclops, and on to yaktaur packs in Vaults. You get the extra EV while approaching or against their first attacks on you, as long as you're not yet attacking them?

(Depending partly on how "running away" is defined and operationalized exactly, to turn it off...)

There was a bug in webtiles / trunk here, that I fixed. (It was displaying as intended in console.)

It's worth noting though that it's not entirely obvious when it makes sense to display the EV boost. The intended (and now current) behavior is that you see it on the beginning of the turn after it applied, but this doesn't mean it will apply for just anything you do in that turn -- normally a status light being on when you have control does imply that the status will be unconditionally active on your turn, and acrobat is pretty weird in this respect. This is also why it goes away if you open your inventory, etc. So arguably, never showing the boost would be correct as well, just less satisfying.

advil wrote:There was a bug in webtiles / trunk here, that I fixed. (It was displaying as intended in console.)

It's worth noting though that it's not entirely obvious when it makes sense to display the EV boost. The intended (and now current) behavior is that you see it on the beginning of the turn after it applied, but this doesn't mean it will apply for just anything you do in that turn -- normally a status light being on when you have control does imply that the status will be unconditionally active on your turn, and acrobat is pretty weird in this respect. This is also why it goes away if you open your inventory, etc. So arguably, never showing the boost would be correct as well, just less satisfying.

Problem is most people opt for the “St. Mathew” approach: seeing is believing. If you don’t see the +15 EV, you think it is not working.
I agree with Patashu, it has lots of uses. An early Ce, Sp or Fe, ninjaing a rune, approaching a Ce or yakataur if you don’t have ranged, etc.

How stupid would it be to edit it so that it gives you +EV when running and for one turn after? So rather than the bonus being available only sometimes, you can leverage moving often in order to refresh your evasion buff, it doesn't last long enough to be considered a spell-tier "Lasting Buff", and it encourages dancing around the battlefield while still letting you get value out of your amulet beyond "only when running away". This would help wizards stuck in melee kite better, would solve the problem of the EV boost never being visible onscreen, would allow some use of the AotA with Wu Jian, and would make the amulet less arbitrary to the common player.

Generally speaking kiting isn't something they want to encourage players do to more of, and it's generally a bad idea to add mechanics that are better than tab for melee fighting. If you got +1 turn after moving, the ideal strategy for any melee monster (and many things that aren't) is to take a step back, attack, take a step back, attack, take a step back, attack. It's more time consuming and more presses, and +15 EV is a huge boost that would make not taking advantage of it a terrible choice for winning. Using tab would be actively hurting yourself, rather than just saving time.

DCSS could use amulet reform 2.0. This one has weird design space ("Running away is very powerful in Crawl and this makes it more powerful." is not something to encourage imo) and apparently a weird interface problem, Harm's design allows a really annoying version of amulet swapping, gourmand and inacc still exist for some reason, Rage is still no drawback berserk, and the balance between amulet base types is way off imo. Just a thought.

I think a better solution would be "it shows you the bonus EV until you take an action that actually adds time to the monster clock, that would cause the monsters to possibly take action"

Hellmonk wrote:DCSS could use amulet reform 2.0. This one has weird design space ("Running away is very powerful in Crawl and this makes it more powerful." is not something to encourage imo) and apparently a weird interface problem, Harm's design allows a really annoying version of amulet swapping, gourmand and inacc still exist for some reason, Rage is still no drawback berserk, and the balance between amulet base types is way off imo. Just a thought.

Agree on everything although I'd say that rage's downside is that you can pass out after berserk, which Trog's berserk doesn't risk. Being paralyzed is a huge downside in the case that you were wrong about being able to kill everything during the berserk. It isn't terribly bad when you've cleared everything as you expected, but especially for newer players, amulets of rage can be very dangerous and possibly even a newbie trap. They get stronger as your ability to predict combat increases, of course.

tasonir wrote:Agree on everything although I'd say that rage's downside is that you can pass out after berserk, which Trog's berserk doesn't risk.

You can still pass out after a Trog berserk if your piety is less than ******.

learndb: When non-xom-effect berserk ends, there is a 1 in 10 + (rage_mutation_level * 25) chance of passing out (1d4 paralysis). Trog gives an extra piety/160 chance of avoiding passing out (so guaranteed protection at ******).

Interesting. While I don't know the exact piety level a "typical" berserker stays around (if there even is a typical berserker), I'd estimate most players are usually around 130-150 most of the time due to piety being spent on gift timeouts. So you'd have about 1/8 chance of not being protected from a 1 in 10 effect? Roughly 1 in 80 berserks should cause you to pass out (with the estimated 140 piety)? I don't seem to remember ever noticing this, although it's possible I've just been lucky. Most of my bersekers only berserked around 20-35 times all game, so it's also possible I just criminally underuse berserk.

Regardless, my point stands that non-Trog berserk can be more dangerous, although apparently Trog berserk also has some risk. Risk of both is of course a lot lower when you first kill everything during berserk

Yup trog berserks are pretty safe unless you only just picked Trog up, just making it clear it's not 100% safe.

I still remember how shocked I was to pass out while having 5 stars of Trog's piety.
How about displaying "Currently you have N% chance to pass out after berserk ends" in berserk ability description?

tasonir wrote:Generally speaking kiting isn't something they want to encourage players do to more of, and it's generally a bad idea to add mechanics that are better than tab for melee fighting. If you got +1 turn after moving, the ideal strategy for any melee monster (and many things that aren't) is to take a step back, attack, take a step back, attack, take a step back, attack. It's more time consuming and more presses, and +15 EV is a huge boost that would make not taking advantage of it a terrible choice for winning. Using tab would be actively hurting yourself, rather than just saving time.

Why is this necessarily such a bad thing? I do understand the idea behind keeping tab viable, but I think there's a large difference between "acceptably viable" and "optimized". Even as it stands already, when your HP gets low your game log tells you that you're "too injured to fight recklessly!"

fight recklessly

"Recklessly", to me, translates to "beating on some dudes until something interesting enough happens for you to actually care about it". Which seems to fit nicely with the current tab system of beat on some dudes until something interesting happens - either they all die, or you get low enough on HP to have to take note. While it's true that adding this amulet buff will cause tab to not be optimized while you're wearing it, I don't see that as such a huge problem. Tabfighting doesn't autocast berserk or Finesse for you either, does it?

PseudoLoneWolf wrote:
tasonir wrote:Generally speaking kiting isn't something they want to encourage players do to more of, and it's generally a bad idea to add mechanics that are better than tab for melee fighting. If you got +1 turn after moving, the ideal strategy for any melee monster (and many things that aren't) is to take a step back, attack, take a step back, attack, take a step back, attack. It's more time consuming and more presses, and +15 EV is a huge boost that would make not taking advantage of it a terrible choice for winning. Using tab would be actively hurting yourself, rather than just saving time.

Why is this necessarily such a bad thing? I do understand the idea behind keeping tab viable, but I think there's a large difference between "acceptably viable" and "optimized". Even as it stands already, when your HP gets low your game log tells you that you're "too injured to fight recklessly!"

fight recklessly

"Recklessly", to me, translates to "beating on some dudes until something interesting enough happens for you to actually care about it". Which seems to fit nicely with the current tab system of beat on some dudes until something interesting happens - either they all die, or you get low enough on HP to have to take note. While it's true that adding this amulet buff will cause tab to not be optimized while you're wearing it, I don't see that as such a huge problem. Tabfighting doesn't autocast berserk or Finesse for you either, does it?

The problem with the scenario suggested isn't with the (not) pressing tab part (you can still, in fact use tab to attack in the situation mentioned) the problem is with the "step back" portion mentioned, rather than attacking (with tab or not) until the thing standing next to you is dead, you have to alternate attacking with stepping backwards to get a massive boost to your defenses, this makes a large portion of the game much much easier at the expense of increasing the amount of tedium by a large degree. Since there's no cost for movement (like there is for berserk or finesse) there's no 'choice' about when it's good to use the 'walk one step away' ability, it's always the best thing to do, and increases the amount of player work to kill things by a lot more than double.

One of the objectives of the game designers is to not add things that give you any noticable advantage, with no disadvantage other than player boredom, the mentioned suggestion would fall squarely into that category.

Fair point. That was the explanation I was looking for, thank you.

it's really over powered. I wonder how it even got into the game. Was seeing great benefits on it for full strength melee. Now imagine if I were to use a fast moving, high evade combo.

The amulet of Acrobat seems to deactivate when using stairs and escape hatches.
(I haven't found a shaft to see if it has the same effect.)

Or maybe it is part of a larger issue described in: https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=11436 :?:

Although this is consistent with how Ozocubu's Armour now works in Trunk (deactivates when using stairs and hatches), it is inconsistent with the description that it is active when moving:
"An amulet that allows the user to tumble and roll to evade the blows of their enemies, but only while moving and waiting. ..."

...vs...

"You climb upwards."
"You slide downwards. The hatch slams shut behind you."

The quickest fix to me seems to be: add the Up and Down level caveat to the Amulet's description.
( Btw, I think it would be interesting to deactivate the +15 EV bonus when going Up a level (but not when going down) since it would be difficult to "tumble and roll" while climbing upwards! )

Somewhat tangential:

Should amulets be balanced against each other? It's not clear to me. What's the problem if they're unbalanced?

Faith is very strong, but it's strong for almost all characters. Gourmand is useless, I agree. Inacc is just the waste of a remove curse scroll. Rage should have a drawback.

bel wrote:Faith is very strong, but it's strong for almost all characters.

Well, it depends on the god. Faith is very strong with some gods (e.g. Qazlal) useful with others (e.g. Trog) and kind of meh with others who don't use piety for anything worthwhile.

bel wrote:Somewhat tangential:

Should amulets be balanced against each other? It's not clear to me. What's the problem if they're unbalanced?

The player is allowed to choose between all amulets they have, so that choice shouldn't be a no-brainer.

duvessa wrote:
bel wrote:Somewhat tangential:

Should amulets be balanced against each other? It's not clear to me. What's the problem if they're unbalanced?
The player is allowed to choose between all amulets they have, so that choice shouldn't be a no-brainer.

While I can understand the rationale, if I want to use maces and find a club, a mace and a flail, choosing between these is a no-brainer. Do all choices need be agonizing?

Zhorgal wrote:While I can understand the rationale, if I want to use maces and find a club, a mace and a flail, choosing between these is a no-brainer. Do all choices need be agonizing?

Yes. Would DCSS be as great as it is if you always used the same weapon/spell/amulet/god in all games played for win?

But faith is not that much of a nobrainer. In all my winning chars, only one was wearing faith: the Qazlal worshipper. With Qaz I agree, it is a nobrainer. With others the most common amulets were spirit, regeneration, magic regeneration or reflection.
That doesn’t mean much because I’m not much of a player.
But it would be interesting to see if this holds. For winning chars, what kind of amulet did they use?

Some uses I've found for Acrobat:

1: If you find one earlygame; it's great for Cj; as pressing . during Searing Ray gives you the +15 EV.

2: Got summons? You can literally pass turns and let the summons wail on things. Bonus points if you also train long blades and Riposte as you do this.

There's probobly some sort of insane Summoner-Dith-Longblades-Acrobat Merfolk build out there that can win by pressing .

Notably; it dosen't work going up stairs. As my poor Tengu just found out. Went down stairs... which led right next to an 8-headed Hydra which literally killed me before I could do something. An actual unavoidable death [Other than 'don't use those stairs then' but by that logic you'd never leave D:1]

As long as I can wear faith and berserk I don't think it really matters how the other amulets work to me.

Arrhythmia wrote:As long as I can wear faith and berserk I don't think it really matters how the other amulets work to me.

Surely you also wear guardian spirit on some characters?

IMHO acrobat is the best amulet for some characters, primarily those who rely on MP or are fast (DECj of Vehumet and CeHu of Okawaru). Both faith and berserk are not a big deal for them and guardian spirit is only marginally useful as well.

Sprucery wrote:
Arrhythmia wrote:As long as I can wear faith and berserk I don't think it really matters how the other amulets work to me.

Surely you also wear guardian spirit on some characters?

Damn, knew I forgot one. That's the one I like the most too.

I actually end up using reflection a lot of times, being able to freely swap it with berserk basically gives me two combat effects in that one amulet slot (Not much point in wearing "rage when I'm not going to berserk, so might as well strap on something I can freely swap in combat with no cost that provides a benefit)

Of course I suppose having all 3 (rage,reflection, and acrobat) and swapping them for berserking, normal combat, and running away, would probably be optimal, but I'm usually pretty bad about preemptively deciding to run away (unless I'm really paying attention, I play a lot of lazycrawl) so when I want to use acrobat, I'm frequently best-off just keeping it on all the time so I don't forget to give myself the needed swapping time before fleeing.

The Tavern

How does the amulet of the acrobat work in trunk?

How does the amulet of the acrobat work in trunk?

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