Buff tier-4 stabbing

[phloomp]

General idea is increase the power and success probability of stabs against mobs that are distracted or haven't noticed you, particularly in the early game. Proposed formulas:

Spoiler: show

Assuming the wiki is correct,
* increase the damage output of tier-4 stabs so that it is equal to tier-3 stabs.
* Increase the chance of success to (Dexterity + (Stealth + Weapons Skill)/1.5 + |5 - enemy HD|) %
I sort of picked these numbers out of a hat; the point is to make success grow faster with skill than it currently does, and to give a little bonus against weak enemies.

Motivation: I would like spell-less stabbing to be a viable build. Enchanter is a fun background, but once you get your defences and hexes strong enough it becomes a lot of "cast EH over and over at point blank range" which doesn't feel so different from a conjurations or melee background.

But spell-less stabbing is not viable, see viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20867#p281563. The problem is that once you've blown a stab attempt (i.e. woken up your target) there is no way to set them up for effective stabbing again, so you need to either avoid all awake enemies or focus recources on a non-stabbing way to kill them.

Key word in the last paragraph is "effective" - you can set monsters up for tier 4 stabbing, just by breaking contact. But, particularly in early game, tier 4 stabbing is shit. So, let's make tier 4 stabbing less shit.

[le_nerd]

How about removing the [loud noise aspects of] alarm traps, howler monkeys, and bringing back rings of invisibility?

[phloomp]

I don't think those are too significant here: in my experience the main problem with pure stabbing is just monsters in LOS waking up (and howler monkeys + alarm traps are fun). If there isn't enough evokable invisability I'd prefer increasing the spawn rate of cloaks of invisability, but that still wouldn't make stabbing a viable starting build.

[duvessa]

"Haven't noticed you" stabs are rare, and distraction stabs don't happen without allies. This doesn't seem like it would make spell-less stabbing good. It would make summon stabbing better.

[phloomp]

Fair point, probably don't want to buff summon-stabbing. Maybe "haven't noticed you" stabbing should just be moved into tier 2 or tier 3, and leave formulas the same.

EDIT: Actually, it's just weird that you get bigger stab bonuses for being invisible than for a monster just not knowing that you are there. If stabbing unaware monsters were successful with the same probability as invisistabbing and did the same damage (tier 3) it could be more predictable for an unspoiled player as well.

[duvessa]

Actually I'd like to merge all stabs into two "tiers" instead of four. Petrify+nets doesn't need its own category, and distraction doesn't need its own category. I just don't think you can reasonably make spell-less stabbing good without making it easier to spell-lessly get monsters into stabbable states.