VeryAngryFelid wrote:It was a fun game indeed, though I am worried that even Cj plays as a hybrid now. It does not have any good spells, it's either small damage (Magic dart), noisy (prism) or melee range (IMB and dazzling spell). It was weird to use Searing Ray as main spell on Lair 6.
Died in Abyss because I forgot to check brand of dancing weapon, LOL. It reminded me why I stopped playing crawl.
FWIW searing ray is even better than it used to be (it now tracks and also does more damage than it used to, and pierces on every turn) so it's not really *that* weird for it to be your "staple" on L:6 (it was already a pretty good spell that would take you well into the lair before it was improved).
IMO Cj is more powerful than FE or IE now (at least early on), both of which got a non-trivial nerf (although I think FE might be more fun to play, despite being less powerful) VM is also much more powerful than it used to be, it's on par with Cj now, at least for the first part of the game where you're really leaning on your background.
New dazzling spray *is* hot garbage. Having to wait until something's adjacent to try to apply a debuff is awful, and it's chances for application suck and the debuff applied isn't very good, comparatively speaking, the old one worked at longer range and did decent damage to a fair number of creatures for it's level, I also never personally had any problems with the targeter, although I know some other people hated it.
On the other hand new IMB is better for it's use case than force lance was. Being able to create a gap to escape is pretty damn powerful, if that's what you use the spell for, and new IMB has better/more knockback than old force lance did. If you think of new IMB as "replacement force lance" it's definitely better, it's just doesn't do what old IMB did at all. It's just not a mid-tier damage spell. I would rename it, personally to something like "force blast" just so it's clear it's not anything like the old IMB spell, plus that just sounds cool,
Force Blast you can say it like you're in a commercial for deodorant or something. However searing ray *is* a middle-range damage spell despite it's level 2 status, it's probably as good overall as a typical level 3-4 attack spell, so Cj don't *really* need both (being able to choose between more efficient, and slightly faster damage was nice, but not required by any means) Particularly since the awkward cases where using searing ray as your primary damage spell was just not effective or convenient have been removed.
F. prism didn't change, and while noisy, is pretty decent for killing groups, if you're willing to lure them back so the noise isn't as much of an issue, plus it doesn't miss, which is nice. f.Prism isn't any noisier than fireball, and it does slightly less damage to a larger area (for 1 less MP, and more complexity) so I would rate the two spells similarly in terms of overall utility in their respective starting books.
In short new Cj's starting book comes with two single-target damage spells, one of which is good enough to last through the lair/orc, a good (but noisy) group-damage spell, and one decent utility spell and one bad one. Comparatively speaking it's probably about the same overall as old Cj power level wise (better in some cases and worse in others) I don't know that it's significantly more fun, but it's slightly less annoying in at least one aspect, but it does lack some of the flexibility it had.
The starting book that took the biggest hit was definitely wizard, probably the most powerful thing in the wizard starting book used to be conjure flame, and that was nerfed pretty harshly, and unfortunately they got nothing to make up for it.
Personally I would vote for FE as most interesting of the new starting kits, although it might be too much to pay attention to every empty surrounding square on each and every turn to decide what's optimal to do (Foxfire is very taxing in terms of number of things you have to consider from turn to turn to use it optimally)
Monday, 23rd December 2019, 14:19 