Conservation impact on item destruction

[Bart]

I would like to address a (recurring) problem, which bothers me: consumables destruction. As it is now:
- Item destruction causes undesirable behavior, including stashing scrolls and potions and running back and forth to prevent random destruction. Also, throwing all of consumables on the ground before fight is effective, yet very tedious. So is throwing consumables away in the middle of fight.
- cons amulet encourages item swapping.
- preservation ego and conservation amulet are considered extremely desirable and often chosen as no-brainers. Sometimes they are overestimated, which comes from the false sense of security of "life saving" consumables. Nevertheless, most of the time +cons is extremely desirable.
- unlucky meetings with ice/fire/sticky flame spamming monsters suddenly makes resources scarce.
- although it is not a major concern, some builds are punished more than others. Characters with low EV/SH are particularly encouraged to get +cons (correct me if I am wrong, but it seemed to me that item destruction from e.g. arrows occurs only when player is hit). DMsl on the other hand seems to be already half as good as conservation.

Do I have a perfect solution? No. Can we do something? I hope so. There are few proposals (and maybe you have more), which I would like to consider.
1. Remove conservation ego. Make item destruction dependent on current rC/rF level instead. Although this increases importance of resistances and makes item choice less interesting, it also allows player to gradually decrease item destruction. Also there are no more causes where player is one-item dependent.
2. Decrease significantly item destruction in backpack, but destroy sometimes items used in combat. From strategic point of view this would be more interesting than current system. With clouds it is easy; I am not sure how it should be handled with breath weapons (player is not affected by breath at the moment of drinking/reading).
3. Make conservation not hot-swappable, yet more common ego. Let is spawn on any armour type. In this way eventually nobody should be left without option to get it and also amulet scumming is prevented.

[archaeo]

Just to get it out of the way, there's always option 4: remove item destruction.

[crate]

really conservation should be removed if item destruction is going to be a thing in crawl imo ... I like it as a player but from a design perspective I don't understand how it is allowed to exist, since it pretty much undoes the entire point of having item destruction in the first place

it should of course also be removed if item destruction isn't going to be a thing, because then it does nothing

I don't even think it actually needs a replacement.

[tasonir]

The only good thing that item destruction does is make Jiyva a better god because when you worship her she completely removes item destruction and the game becomes more fun. Also preventing stashing is nice. I can't get myself to stop stashing otherwise, because I'm dumb.

I'd be ok with removing it and letting Jiyva be slightly worse because Jiyva would still be awesome.

[gammafunk]

I think the last truly useful thing said about item destruction is still:

I do think it serves an important purpose in current crawl: providing a reason other than weight not to carry all of your consumables
without item destruction, you'd end up always trying to carry all your possibly useful consumables (all 15 potions of heal wounds, etc), which means that the weight limit would be exceptionally annoying for most characters
there are probably other changes that we could make to help with this (making potions weigh less, generating fewer items, removing the weight limit, etc), but without such measures I do think that removing item destruction wouldn't turn out well

I don't think that letting players carry all their consumables is an issue really, yes... my concerns about removing item destruction are (1) inventory management becomes always awful because of the weight limitation and (2) should probably decrease the number of consumables generated to compensate

(to be clear, I already hate the weight limit on characters that run up against it... not because it means I can't carry as much, but because it means that every single item I find requires inventory management)
(and removing item destruction would mean I would run up against the weight limit in every game that doesn't have huge strength)

To me item destruction is part of the much bigger and more important issue of item weight and inventory management in crawl; there are too many annoying instances of of the latter, and the former causes a lot of it. Greatly reducing the amount of times I have to juggle inventory around is far, far more important to me than the fixing only the times that item destruction is responsible for said juggling or the instances when loss of a consumable due to item destruction impacted my game. On the 0.15 horizon is the issue of inventory management in general, and if we can do something like "remove item weight," the removal of item destruction will likely be a byproduct of that.

crate pointed out that conservation doesn't make a lot of sense from a design perspective if we accept that item destruction needs to exist for the time being. I think the justification for conservation basically comes down to a "player choice" philosophy crawl uses as a compromise for many game mechanics. A lot of players are quite annoyed by item destruction, and conservation allows them to not think about this game mechanic very much. Gourmand is a similar kind of compromise in this philosophy, but for the spell hunger that frequent spellcasters have to deal with (to pick its most common use-case). It's a better compromise compared to conservation, I think, since spell hunger has a more meaningful effect on gameplay, but crawl tries to offer a lot of such compromises through equipment and species choices. Long story short, conservation will also probably not be a thing at some point in 0.15, but not before item destruction is not a thing.

[Leafsnail]

To be honest I still find that argument totally baffling. I don't see how a feature that encourages you to go trek across the dungeon every time a consumable gets destroyed/used or every time you want to ID something results in less inventory management.

Like... I just don't see how the threat of the weight limit could possibly be worse than the status quo. At worst people will have to drop (fewer) things due to the weight limit instead of item destruction.

[Bloax]

really conservation should be removed if item destruction is going to be a thing in crawl imo ... I like it as a player but from a design perspective I don't understand how it is allowed to exist, since it pretty much undoes the entire point of having item destruction in the first place

it should of course also be removed if item destruction isn't going to be a thing, because then it does nothing

I don't even think it actually needs a replacement.

The worst part is that the game actively punishes you for not wearing pre/conservation, since you would avoid almost all such episodes if you chose to wear the damn things.
Having a limited choice in equipment (because there's no way you're going to be wearing a technically better cloak if you have preservation unless you're wasting an amulet slot) just isn't a Fun Thing.

[Sar]

there's no way you're going to be wearing a technically better cloak if you have preservation

I worn MR over preservation multiple times (including at least one time in Zot). Had no amulet of conservation, either.

[bcadren]

I've never really used conservation, honestly. Get to an area with a lot of item destruction...leave most to all the items behind, use Wand of Tele; Wand of Heal Wounds and ...Actual Spells instead. I just think regardless of how well you might try to protect things, you walk into an area with a lot of freezing or sticky flame, esp. the hells...you should just assume you'll lose all of the and use what you are going to immediately.

[Bart]

I've never really used conservation, honestly. Get to an area with a lot of item destruction...leave most to all the items behind, use Wand of Tele; Wand of Heal Wounds and ...Actual Spells instead. I just think regardless of how well you might try to protect things, you walk into an area with a lot of freezing or sticky flame, esp. the hells...you should just assume you'll lose all of the and use what you are going to immediately.

I've done hell plenty of times and definitely not always had I conservation. I also killed at least one character in cocytus due to zero potions in equipment and had close calls in gehenna because of no teleportation source. Of course I did not have to attempt getting these runes - I just present these examples to give you better understanding of the problem. If wand of teleport (for gehenna) or wand healing (for cocytus) does not appear for you, you might get in trouble. Having no means to teleport/heal yourself is not a funny thing and there's not a lot you can do to prevent it without conservation.

there's no way you're going to be wearing a technically better cloak if you have preservation

I worn MR over preservation multiple times (including at least one time in Zot). Had no amulet of conservation, either.

That's also perfectly normal situation. I also did Zot with MR preferred over +cons, because most of the time your scrolls in Zot do not matter a lot anymore (and your MR does). I wanted to talk about item destruction not because some of characters do not care about it. I started the topic because some are really having hard time dealing with it.

Anyway, thank you, gammafunk, for giving us hope that in 0.15 the issue will be properly addressed.

[Kate]

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