Does staff of fire boost a maxed spell

[danr]

Suppose I have flame tongue or throw flame at max #######'s. Does a staff of fire do anything for them?

My situation is that I found a randart flail with rF++ rC- rElec rN+ and a randart buckler with rPois MR - is it worth forgoing the staff of fire for all those resists esp when my main spells right now are at full power?

[Tiber]

Enhancer staves don't let you go over the spell cap, but just because you have max bars doesn't mean you're at the spell cap. So the answer to your first question is, "maybe, but not much."

To answer your second question, I'd go with the buckler either way, but it really depends what you're going to do with your main hand. You can switch to the flail for the resists, but the weapon itself won't do much damage. Staff of fire might do more in melee if you have good evocations skill. And really, it sounds like you're character is a mostly pure caster, so it doesn't matter too much either way. I might just hold the staff of fire and buckler, but switch to the flail as needed.

[evilmike]

Suppose I have flame tongue or throw flame at max #######'s. Does a staff of fire do anything for them?

Tiber is correct. When the power bar has maxed #'s, it just means you are somewhat near the cap, not at the cap.

But, because of the way things work, you shouldn't worry about trying to hit max spellpower. It's very hard to actually hit 200 power, and you don't gain a whole lot from hitting it. So a "full bar" really means that you have enough power, and about as much as you can realistically get.

[danr]

Thanks. So the power bars are not an absolute measure I guess, it's really a scale of 0-200?

Unfortunately as a Spriggan I can't wield a staff with a buckler. I've also now got fireball castable without any hunger, and the enhancer is still boosting that.

[evilmike]

Thanks. So the power bars are not an absolute measure I guess, it's really a scale of 0-200?

Unfortunately as a Spriggan I can't wield a staff with a buckler. I've also now got fireball castable without any hunger, and the enhancer is still boosting that.

200 is the highest any spell will go, some spells have a lower cap (and a shorter power bar).

A "full bar" means you have somewhere between 150 and 200 power. That last 50 is still a lot, the problem is that there's a huge stepdown after you hit 150. This means that while you can still gain power beyond a "full bar" (and quite a lot of power, in fact), it requires a larger investment.

[danr]

Man, this game is so obtuse. The player is shown a power rating in ######. But that is just an approximation of a scale of 1-200. But even that is not a linear scale, it has gradations at unknown points. And add to that yet that each spell has a different base calculation like 1d8 vs. 2d28.

[evilmike]

The spell power bar could be better, but it does its job. The main failings are that it doesn't always make it clear when a spell is maxed (160 and 200 look the same), and the last # covers a huge range of values. But I wouldn't call it obtuse, since it basically gives you all the information you should want.

It's only obtuse when you try looking at how things really work. You don't need to know that power ranges on a scale from 0-200, you need to know that "more bars means more power", and "full bar means you are about as high as you can realistically get". I can promise you, that I have *no idea* how to calculate spell power, or how much better a 150 power fire storm is from a 100 power one, in terms of damage numbers. I just know "more is better". Actually, I don't give a shit how it really works, because this stuff means nothing to me. Of course, I could easily look this stuff up (it's probably in the learndb, and I know where it is in the source code as well), but it would be a waste of time.

The actual (internal) spell power number is something players shouldn't concern themselves with, but for some reason do. It's sort of like some other things Tavern posters have a bizarre preoccupation with, such GDR and skill points. These are internal game mechanics that work, do what they were designed for, and so on. But understanding how these things really function is completely unimportant if you're just interested in playing the game. A simple analogy is that you can be good at driving a car without knowing how it's built.

People who disagree with me on this are either (a) so good at this game that understanding these minutiae makes a difference, or (b) they are bad players who mistakenly think they can get better at Crawl by studying its internals.

I'd (very roughly) estimate that there are fewer than 10 people in the world who fit into group (a), and I'm certainly not one of them.

Sorry for the rant, I just want to get this point across: stuff like this is only obtuse if you make it obtuse. Stop worrying about all the internal numbers and formulas: they matter less than you think they do.

[Tiber]

I actually sort of dislike how it scales. When I was starting out (and victory dancing/integer skill values were still in) I would obsessively watch my skills go up and my spell power. You think you're doing great because those first few bars come quickly, but then it seems like you're just not getting any more bars. It also doesn't help much once you get to the higher level spells, because most of the bars will be filled just by the time you can actually cast it.

[danr]

I'd really like just a percentage, e.g. my fireball is 70% of the maximum potential damage that fireball can ever do.

[ebarrett]

I'd really like just a percentage, e.g. my fireball is 70% of the maximum potential damage that fireball can ever do.

That would probably lead to some people thinking that their 85% power firestorm is weak, and bitching about it to vent their obsession with big round numbers over understanding the game.

[Tiber]

I'd really like just a percentage, e.g. my fireball is 70% of the maximum potential damage that fireball can ever do.

That would probably lead to some people thinking that their 85% power firestorm is weak, and bitching about it to vent their obsession with big round numbers over understanding the game.

A. Who would do this?
B. Why should we care about them?

Sorry, but that just strikes me as an incredibly weak argument

[danr]

The same argument applies to the current system anyway - someone could just as easily complain that their #####... fire storm is weak.

The fact that I have no idea how many #s would be 85% max power illustrates my point.

[ebarrett]

A. Who would do this?
B. Why should we care about them?

1. POWERGAMERS
2. Because people already bitch about lack of numbers a lot, people bitching about numbers not bending to their will is just a natural next step if Crawl ever goes that route (it won't)

Sorry, but that just strikes me as an incredibly weak argument

You could try reading evilmike's post (I'm sure you already did) and understanding it (I'm sure you didn't). Max bars is "enough power", max power shares bars with enough power but is ridiculously hard to get and people shouldn't bother. If players are given a number instead - or new thresholds for bars, so that full bars are only attained at max power - people will bitch about not having a POWER GAUGE filled to as much as it can visually fill.

[danr]

You shouldn't be so sure about what I do and don't understand.

One think evilmike said is that "The spell power bar could be better"... so let's talk about that instead of who's a moron and who's bitching about things they can't or shouldn't understand or care about.

I don't really need a number, I just think it might be easier.

Basic "scale theory" (which is a field I just invented, so I'm the world expert) would suggest:
- Each increment on a scale should be symmetrical, e.g. each increment represents the same amount of increase. Note that this can be geometrical progression too e.g. each step represents 1.5x the power
- The scale clearly indicates when it is "full". Some rounding is okay but there shouldn't be a large range of values represented within the final step.

There could be a tension between these two. With a geometric progression / log scale, which I believe DCSS uses for these kinds of things, the last step will always be a very large one. Then you either have the last increment reflecting a large range and not telling you if you are "full" (violating principle #2), or you add a final increment which does not have any range but simply represents the max value. Then you are showing "full" but you violate the principle of each increment reflecting an equal range, because the last marker actually covers 0 range.

In DCSS though the latter option is also a problem because it is very hard to get to completely full (I hear), so people will always see that one missing increment and it will drive them crazy.

These are just musings. Perhaps the current system is the best possible compromise given the situation.

[KoboldLord]

Basic "scale theory" (which is a field I just invented, so I'm the world expert) would suggest:
- Each increment on a scale should be symmetrical, e.g. each increment represents the same amount of increase. Note that this can be geometrical progression too e.g. each step represents 1.5x the power
- The scale clearly indicates when it is "full". Some rounding is okay but there shouldn't be a large range of values represented within the final step.

A little fun bit of trivia:

Your gas gauge on your car doesn't follow your 'scale theory'. The needle actually stays buried on Full for about the first quarter-tank expenditure after you've filled it up, and it points to Empty a good ten to fifteen miles before your car no longer has enough gas to continue functioning.

The reason for that second one is pretty intuitive. If the gas tank was actually empty when the needle hit Empty, there would be loads and loads of idiots who ignore the gas gauge until they're actually stranded. Giving the idiot user an extra ten miles worth of distance without telling them saves a lot of nuisance litigation when they sue your company for their own stupidity.

The first one is a little bit less intuitive. It seems that when people drop a wad of change on filling their tank, they expect that needle to say that the tank is Full. In the real world, that tank stops being Full-full after the car goes absolutely anywhere, and on a 'scale theory' gauge it should be expected to go at least one notch on the scale towards empty by the time the driver gets home, no matter how far away that is. But in the real world, consumers won't tolerate losing their pristine Full-pointing needle after only driving a few dozen miles. This is thoroughly backed up by consumer research, such that there isn't a single manufacturer of automobiles on the market that doesn't set the needle to point to Full way longer than it logically should.

So your spell power gauge is like a life a real-life gas gauge. Full pips is good enough. You might be able to cram more gas in your Fire Storm 2012, but constantly driving it back and forth from your house and the gas station is a stupid waste of your time and energy.

[Tiber]

A. Who would do this?
B. Why should we care about them?

1. POWERGAMERS
2. Because people already bitch about lack of numbers a lot, people bitching about numbers not bending to their will is just a natural next step if Crawl ever goes that route (it won't)

Sorry, but that just strikes me as an incredibly weak argument

You could try reading evilmike's post (I'm sure you already did) and understanding it (I'm sure you didn't). Max bars is "enough power", max power shares bars with enough power but is ridiculously hard to get and people shouldn't bother. If players are given a number instead - or new thresholds for bars, so that full bars are only attained at max power - people will bitch about not having a POWER GAUGE filled to as much as it can visually fill.

There's a difference between listening to user input, and making changes as a kneejerk reaction to critics; one is based on the quality of complaints, the other is based solely on the quantity. You're making a slippery slope argument, and I see no reason why we really need to care when people complain, especially when you yourself admit that they'll just find something else to complain about. Based on the whole Mountain Dwarf thing, I'd say the devs have no problem saying no to those people. I don't want the exact numbers, I just want it made more clear what raising a skill will and won't do for me, and I'll decide when I have "enough power". As I explained earlier, my problem is that it isn't really explained that spell power and the bars work logarithmically, so it looks like spell power isn't increasing at all, even when it is. And as the topic itself demonstrated, it isn't clear how much spell power enhancers are helping you, which is kind of important when you consider that pretty much all enhancers come with a drawback or opportunity cost.

So your spell power gauge is like a life a real-life gas gauge. Full pips is good enough. You might be able to cram more gas in your Fire Storm 2012, but constantly driving it back and forth from your house and the gas station is a stupid waste of your time and energy.

That's not really a good analogy, because raising skills is a permanent benefit. Once I figured out that a gas tank wasn't really empty when the bar pointed to empty, I just changed my expectations on when I needed to get gas based on that, just like I did when I learned that max bars doesn't mean full power. People will work to get 0 spell hunger, and the game will tell you exactly when you get that. So why not extend it to work the other way around?

[danr]

Showing a number has been suggested, but no one's insisting on that.

Tiber's analogy to spell hunger is a good one. It is very useful to know when further investment in a skill will do _nothing_ for you.

I realize it may be virtually impossible to get max power on firestorm. However, most spells in the game are not firestorm. What if I just want to get Magic Dart at full power, or Throw Frost? If ##### is not necessarily full power, then the player never knows the point at which further investment goes from gaining very little, to gaining nothing at all. That's a very important distinction.

There are two sub-issues here:
1. Showing when a spell is definitively maxed
2. Showing more fine-grained or intuitive detail of current spell power

I think both would help players make better decisions:
1. "Okay, I guess I won't get any more juice out of that spell, may as well turn off the skill."
2. "Holy crap, raising Earth Magic from 16 to 17 was a ton of work and only netted me X points of spell power / damage / whatever. That's not worth it anymore, I'll leave it at XY power at least until I have nothing else that really needs training".

That's not power gaming, it's just giving the player useful feedback.

[danr]

Re: the point that spell power does something different for every spell: this points to another issues with the current system.

Magic Dart gets 5 "pips" that can be filled. Fireball gets 10 or something like that. This makes it look like fireball's greater power stems from the fact that it has more pips at maximum. It also suggests then that fireball at #####..... would be of about the same power as magic dart at #####.

That's clearly wrong, fireball at five pips is way more powerful than magic dart. So we have a system that tries to indicate relative power somehow, unless the number of pips is meant to show something else that is not obvious to me, and yet that indication of relative power is misleading. So the number of pips is in fact an arbitrary and misleading representation.

Even just this would be an improvement: Every spell's power displays with 10 pips. The last pip could work as it does now, representing spell power from 160 to 200 or whatever. But, when the spell is truly at max power, the row of pips becomes bolded or underlined or something.

[KoboldLord]

Spell power does not need to be more like minimum weapon delay.

In the current system, weapon delay has a clear cutoff when it is definitively improved as much as is possible to improve. Consequently, players engage in the degenerate practice of rushing hellbent for leather toward that minimum delay, and then dropping weapon skill development entirely until there's virtually nothing else to do with their skill points.

A clear cutoff is clearly detrimental, and we don't need to add one to spellcasting too. Hypothetically players might sometimes decide to stop short of max power, but player psychology says they usually won't. Especially if they're unspoiled newbies. Staking a clear goal in front of the player pushes them to achieve that goal. If it's a bad goal to attempt to achieve, it's a newbie trap. Crawl doesn't need newbie traps.

[njvack]

Your gas gauge on your car doesn't follow your 'scale theory'. The needle actually stays buried on Full for about the first quarter-tank expenditure after you've filled it up...

But in the real world, consumers won't tolerate losing their pristine Full-pointing needle after only driving a few dozen miles. This is thoroughly backed up by consumer research, such that there isn't a single manufacturer of automobiles on the market that doesn't set the needle to point to Full way longer than it logically should.

My old car did exactly this; my "new" car follows an extremely linear progression from full to empty. My experience has been that cars' gas gauges are just kinda funny, and you should learn how your particular car's gauge is funny.

Back on-topic, I've never found the spell power bar to mean much of anything. Having the bar all the way full is nice for stroking my epenis, but failure rate and, to a lesser extent, food cost are almost infinitely more important. That, and whether my spells seem to be killing the current set of threats.

While I'm generally in favor of MOAR NUMBERS, this is a case where an adjective might be better -- with the manual's text saying something along the lines of "stop worrying about this ok?" Or just hiding it altogether...?

[BlackSheep]

If all you want to do is know when you've reached the maximum spell power for a spell, request that the color of the hashes change once the spell is maxed out.

[danr]

If all you want to do is know when you've reached the maximum spell power for a spell, request that the color of the hashes change once the spell is maxed out.

This would be a good change and would totally satisfy my #1 above.

It's not that I really care that much to have my throw flame at max power, I just care when I absolutely should stop wasting XP on fire magic if e.g. that is my only fire spell.

[BlackSheep]

It's a pretty simple change to communicate a pretty small piece of information. Put it in the dev wiki as a feature request to increase the likelihood of it happening.

*whistles*

[JeffQyzt]

RE: Mantis - I believe that the "approved" mechanism for Feature Requests is to add them to the dev wiki, and then get an interested dev to add it as a FR to Mantis.

[ebarrett]

While I'm generally in favor of MOAR NUMBERS, this is a case where an adjective might be better -- with the manual's text saying something along the lines of "stop worrying about this ok?" Or just hiding it altogether...?

Wasn't spell power displayed in adjectives until a while ago? Also, spell power is relevant, even if getting max power isn't.

Also, reflecting on non-quoted text (speed editing at work, woo - there's barely any proofreading in this by the way) I'd say that your declared fondness of numbers has tricked you into evaluating one thing for which there are no immediately available numbers (effectiveness of some spells, which is completely subjective and based on spell power on the appropriate cases - which is objective but also very well buried under formulae and stepdowns and what is proving to be a highly questionable display system) based on other things for which there are numbers (spell failure chance, which is given in-game, and spell hunger, which pretends to be hidden under an extremely clunky display but has an extremely simple formula so anyone who is minimally spoiled can come up with the actual number in a second).

You should stop worrying about spell power when it is good enough, but it's still in your best interests to push it past "I can cast this safely at zero food cost" - at that point it's still most likely "not really that good", and if a player really beelines for zero hunger/failure with extreme focus on Spellcasting skill plus wizardry bonuses, your spell power dependant spell of choice might end up being rather underwhelming the moment you get it.

[njvack]

You should stop worrying about spell power when it is good enough, but it's still in your best interests to push it past "I can cast this safely at zero food cost" - at that point it's still most likely "not really that good", and if a player really beelines for zero hunger/failure with extreme focus on Spellcasting skill plus wizardry bonuses, your spell power dependant spell of choice might end up being rather underwhelming the moment you get it.

Ah -- I've never gotten spells online through wizardry and Spellcasting -- it's generally been through leveling the spell schools unless the hunger cost is really egregious or I need MP or spell levels. Wizardry is a temporary crutch to get something significantly useful (usually a L6 conj) working earlier. Going that route, power seems pretty OK at about the time spells are otherwise useful.

Your point is good, though.