Tarantellas And Mummies

[Tiktacy]

So, I just had my first run in with a tarantella as a Mummy without clarity.

Spoiler: show

For the most part, I have never felt like mummies inability to cure confusion has been THAT bad. Its been bad, I've died plenty from it as a result, but its at least felt like a challenge to try to avoid it if at all possible and its often lead me into unusual situations that I have to get myself out of(essentially resulting in interesting gameplay, even if it has felt unfair at times).

But Tarantella's are going way too far with this. How are mummies w/o clarity expected to deal with these outside of blasting the shit out of them from a distance? I mean, I'm not saying my death was unavoidable, I should have been paying closer attention to what the elf had summoned and if I did then I could have avoided the death all together, but even so this doesn't feel like a fair death.

It doesn't feel fair because it feels like I was just instantly killed the moment I got confused, from full HP to 0 by a single generic elf mage. Its okay to have dangerous enemies in the game, I love juggernauts and I think death cobs are really cool, but that's not really what this is. At least with those enemies you have the opportunity to realize something is going wrong(huge loss in HP, starving, etc.) but with mummies and Tarantulla's you just get hit once and suddenly your playing "press and pray" with your keyboard hoping you might manage to swing in the correct direction enough times to kill it.

If I had it my way, mummies would just get clarity period(I can't for the life of me think of a single reason they don't). But I know the devs like to do things in steps rather than sweeping changes, so I suggestion giving confusion the paralysis treatment to get rid of chain confusion. Chain confusion is a pretty annoying mechanic period and nobody likes having to deal with it, this change would not only positively effect mummies but also other players as well.

TL;DR: The way Tarantella's interact with mummies is unfun and unintuitive, and is even more noticeable with the removal of amulet of clarity. I suggest adding a delay that at least allows you to spend a turn before being confused again(similar to paralysis). At the very least, add this to terantella's form of confusion.

Mod edit: removed apostrophe's from title

[duvessa]

You aren't allowed to melee tarantellas, just think of them as like octopode crushers or iron giants, or death cobs on non-undead.

[Tiktacy]

You aren't allowed to melee tarantellas, just think of them as like octopode crushers or iron giants, or death cobs on non-undead.

This doesn't seem like what they had in mind when they created tarantella's. At least with other species you can quaff, mummies legitimately can't do anything, which is what I think makes this interaction worth changing.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

the problem isn't that mummies can't quaff curing; it's that non-mummies can quaff curing.

[KoboldLord]

For mummies, confusion is worse than paralysis. In the case of paralysis, at least you get to fast-forward past the non-interactive part of the game where you wait out the status effect. For confusion, you have to manually advance the clock one tick at a time while completely helpless to do anything constructive the entire time. That's without even going into the fact that you get one action worth of paralysis immunity to use on teleporting out of your situation if you want to avoid chain-paralysis, while confusion just keeps lengthening the timer even though it is every bit as bad.

Confusion is designed as if intended to be paired with easy access to confusion-healing, for instance potions of curing. From a game design perspective it is not an okay status effect to apply to a species that cannot cure it. The simplest solution would be to grant mummies clarity, but letting them self-damage stats, rot hp or mp, or drain xp for guaranteed confusion curing would also bring them in line with all the other species in the game. If giving mummies a buff is completely unacceptable for some manner of ideological reason, then give them a confusion vulnerability instead that automatically turns all confusion into paralysis, following all the normal paralysis rules, because at least then I don't have to manually advance the turns to find out whether I'm going to die while helpless or not.

[Sprucery]

I still think the best course of action would be to change confusion, for example like this:

You can attack normally, but there is a 50%* chance of attacking a square next to the target. You can read, but there is a 50%* chance of failure (or, reading takes more time). You can zap a wand, but there is a 50%* chance of misfiring. You can cast spells, but miscast chance is greatly increased. Etc. The idea is that you could try to do the stuff you normally do, but confusion would make it (more difficult / sometimes fail).

* or some other value

[tabstorm]

Lure more so you don't randomly die when you get chain confused.

[Tiktacy]

Lure more so you don't randomly die when you get chain confused.

I lured the elf mage to the staircase and that was the only monster in LOS besides the summons.

[tabstorm]

Oh, I forgot they got spawned on like D:9 now by Deep Elf mages. That probably wasn't a good idea.

[njvack]

For player characters, right now confuse is not really an interesting status effect. As KL and duvessa have pointed out, it's very nearly identical to paralysis unless you have one of a few "actually I would rather not be confused" tricks. At this point, it'd be decent to merge the two player effects into one, or differentiate them. Fortunately, there's now Vertigo so maybe player confusion could be that or something.

[Lacuenta]

If giving mummies a buff is completely unacceptable for some manner of ideological reason, then give them a confusion vulnerability instead that automatically turns all confusion into paralysis, following all the normal paralysis rules, because at least then I don't have to manually advance the turns to find out whether I'm going to die while helpless or not.

That would be terrible, my mummies generally tend to survive confuse.
Axereasons

[Lasty]

I haven't done it yet, but I do think that at the very least confusion shouldn't be chainable. I support the idea of revising how confusion works for players, and monster confusion could probably take a nerf to stay in parallel. I haven't considered yet what the ideal form of the confusion status effect would be.

[Rast]

IIRC, a bunch of evokables work well under confusion:

Fan
Stone
Decks of summoning
Sack
Box
Rod of shadows
Rod of Clouds
etc

Would have saved OP if he'd had them.

Also taking stairs while confused works well to escape summons. Doesn't help in Spider, of course.

EDIT: removed OP's morgue.