petercordia wrote:Svendre, why do you hate pure mages so much?
Because it's so much harder and tedious to play in a glass cannon manner where you perfectly, amazingly survive every encounter without eventually going splat in a game where they've designed so many different ways for you to be forced to eat damage. Yes, it is possible.
It just annoys me to no ends though because it comes across to me as a severe imbalance between methods of play. The crux of the matter is how obtaining AC more drastically affects spell casting than anything else. Even a stealth stabber has shadow dragon armour, which actually enhances stealth. Why isn't there a heavier armour better than steam dragon which doesn't impede spell casting? Poor elven armour which wasn't even that great and was limited to elves was ripped out long ago.
But even more beyond that point are a hundred other points. I once wrote a doc entitled "If Melee were like Spell Casting" which made fun of the extreme imbalances. Maybe I'll dig it up sometime. A few samples: you would have melee miscast effects where you stab yourself, you would have fatigue where you run out of energy to attack with your weapon, you would need INT in order to wear heavier armour and still hit things (but wouldn't use it for anything else). You would need to train five different weapon skills to overcome monster resistances... your weapon could be disarmed like silence....you could be instantly drained of all melee strength by invisible moths....confusion would allow spell casting attempts but completely block all melee, swinging bigger weapons would make you ravenously hungry, and on and on and on.
The classic comeback is, but why should every method of play in crawl be of equal difficulty? Because there shouldn't be any no-brainers when deciding which way to play will often yield the best results. If it's just about picking some insanely difficult race with major handicaps, that is fine. If it's about the core design between melee/ranged/spells for all races and throughout the core of the game, then it just seems like sloppy game balance to me. For all the core strategies in crawl, I think they should be roughly equivalent in effectiveness though approaching problems from different angles, modified by racial and starting profession difficulties for variety.
If not that, then it's someone claiming they are balanced. Go look at some tournament results and see how many fighters there are doing well versus pure spell casters. Maybe that's simply because people enjoy playing that kind of combo so much more? Yeah? Right? No way it could also be related to the fact that people like to win more than lose on the whole right? Tell me another good one.
Spells need a lot of help, so does dex and stealth. AC, axes, melee in general need a good nerfing. Ranged needs an overhaul first, and probably a nerfing to a lesser extent.
I'm barely glossing over this topic.