Deep Dwarf vampiricism should heal MP not HP

[mrob]

I've been playing DDNes lately, and HP being a consumable encourages tedious play. Every natural enemy is a HP source and you don't want to waste them. If it's slow and has fast regen like a worm, you definitely don't want to kill it, because you can stash it somewhere for future draining. You can easily kite worms and cast Vampiric Draining on them repeatedly to get as much HP as you need.

I thought about ways to fix this, but I can't think of any easy option. Let's say vampiric attacks drain from a separate non-regenerating HP pool, and you get some message like "The worm's life force is too weak to drain" if it's empty. You'd still want to stash natural monsters if you were at full HP so as not to waste that HP pool. Stashing monsters breaks autoexplore so it's very annoying.

I considered making vampiric healing increase an uncapped "vampiric energy" pool instead of healing, which can be converted to HP by resting. This would remove the problem of stashing monsters when at full HP, but it doesn't prevent the problem of wasting monster HP if you kill them with a non-vampiric attack. Meet some popcorn monsters at low MP? You can't just tab them because you're wasting HP. You have to rest up and drain that HP every time.

I don't see any way to make vampiric HP healing non-tedious for DDs. The obvious solution is to make it heal MP instead. This is thematically appropriate, and it encourages DD casters to get up close to their enemies, which is fun. If this is too much of a difficulty increase (and DDs already lost healing wands) then healing from potions could be increased to compensate.

[tasonir]

Example character that abused the hell out of this: http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/tasonir/mor ... 080634.txt

While it does open up the ability to play a DD without a healing god (I used chei), I also cast vamp draining 2618 times that game, and agree it's tedious as hell and is basically exploiting a loophole in the normal DD limitations. This was version .17, so I still had a healing wand, but it should apply about the same way to the non-wand DD (I have not personally tested new DD).

Being able to use non healing gods is a nice feature, but I'd agree it's not worth the price of doing it this way. I don't think it would be much of a difficulty increase as most DD don't get any form of vampiric effects - good vampiric weapons are very rare, and most melee DD's don't use vamp draining (although in theory, every DD should use the spell, as it's brokenly good for them). It would be a nerf to lucky DD's who happened to find a very good base weapon with vampiric, but that's probably a good thing to nerf in any case. It would limit DD's back to healing gods, but that's probably an acceptable limitation.

[Rast]

I don't want to be the guy who says this in every DD thread, but their main gimmick is bad and we should all feel bad.

[Shtopit]

No regen in DD would (sorta) work if there were no regen in the game. Right now, it's way too easy to exploit other creatures' regeneration.

[Hellmonk]

I don't want to be the guy who says this in every DD thread, but their main gimmick is bad and we should all feel bad.

It's worth saying in every DD thread. Their main gimmick is bad, it is bad irrespective of their power level, and it is not fixable without massively overhauling core game mechanics or making DD a patchwork of absurd special cases (even more than they already are). Removing DD is the best option.

[bel]

I guess I can plug my old "solution" to DD here.

It needs a few tweaks; in particular I would like DD to not be able to quaff heal wounds when hostile monsters are in LoS. But the rest should be workable, while keeping the idea of "no healing while resting" intact.

[Siegurt]

I guess I can plug my old "solution" to DD here.

It needs a few tweaks; in particular I would like DD to not be able to quaff heal wounds when hostile monsters are in LoS. But the rest should be workable, while keeping the idea of "no healing while resting" intact.

I also thought when i suggested that, that DDs should brew ambrosia, rather than !hw specifically because of the in combat healing thing

[bel]

That was one option discussed in the thread. But in that case, clarity or Ash would be an issue.

[CanOfWorms]

ambrosia hasn't been blocked by clarity for a while

[mrob]

I won a 3-rune DDNe^Gozag (recent trunk), with 3754 uses of Vampiric Draining. I farmed enemies for HP in the early game, and while clearing Crypt. Everywhere else I was powerful enough to make it not worth the effort. I've also won a 15-rune SpEn^Gozag (trunk, post wand reform), and I think extended would be un-fun because of the shortage of drainable enemies.

https://pastebin.com/EP3KcDa2

I think a DD^Gozag would be very difficult to win without vampiric healing, but maybe it would be possible with heavy use of Potion Petition. With vampiric healing available, DD^Gozag is a powerful combo for 3-rune. Bribe Branch trivializes V:5. Food was never a problem.

[BobIsDead]

I don't want to be the guy who says this in every DD thread, but their main gimmick is bad and we should all feel bad.

I should probably post this in another thread but, seeing as though we're all hating on Deep Dwarves anyway, I thought I might as well propose my DD-fix.

My view is that we already have a mechanic for limiting health regen, rotting, so we should use that. Cut out a Deep Dwarf's slow healing and self healing, and add in the following attributes.

Festering Wounds: A deep dwarf gains rot damage whilst not at full HP.
Resilient Rot: A deep dwarf's rot can not be cured by ordinary means.
Self Restoration: A deep dwarf may spend 1 point of their maximum MP to heal a portion of their rot damage.

How this would work is simple. Let's say they take rot damage at the same rate that you naturally regenerate health. This means, without outside healing, for every bit of damage you take, you take half that damage as rot damage. Of course, with healing (vampirism, regeneration, Makhelb, etc.) you'll get back to full health quicker, thus take less rot damage. However, you'll have to heal quickly after taking damage; can't just leave a bunch of HP bags scattered all over the dungeon for you to farm whenever you feel like it.

I'm sure this would create its own set of problems, but it would eliminate most of the need for special casing and would make scummy tactics less feasible. Sure, there's a bunch of things you'd need to tweak, like the rot/regeneration ratio, however it'd cut out a lot of the weird and aberrant parts of deep dwarves whilst preserving their core gameplay style.

[Rast]

I think a DD^Gozag would be very difficult to win without vampiric healing

Are you counting vampiric weapons? Most games have at least a crappy weapon with the brand early enough for you to not die, and later on you find a vamp battleaxe in depths or vaults.

[Siegurt]

I think a DD^Gozag would be very difficult to win without vampiric healing

Are you counting vampiric weapons? Most games have at least a crappy weapon with the brand early enough for you to not die, and later on you find a vamp battleaxe in depths or vaults.

That has not been my experience, I've played a sizable number of 3 run DD games where no vamp weapon at all dropped, certainly it's not something I feel like I can count on "most of the time" and finding a mid to high level one is very much in the minority of my games.

[Rast]

I think a DD^Gozag would be very difficult to win without vampiric healing

Are you counting vampiric weapons? Most games have at least a crappy weapon with the brand early enough for you to not die, and later on you find a vamp battleaxe in depths or vaults.

That has not been my experience, I've played a sizable number of 3 run DD games where no vamp weapon at all dropped, certainly it's not something I feel like I can count on "most of the time" and finding a mid to high level one is very much in the minority of my games.

Do you try every blue/artifact weapon better than short sword? And buy weapon shops hard? I find vamp weapons 80% of the time by XL 13, and you can usually stay alive that long by training Evocations for mana.

[tasonir]

If you're really desperate for non-god healing just start as an necromancer, and get guaranteed vamp draining in your starting spellbook. It's easy to get online by XL:6 or so, and you're set for the rest of the game (or as long as there's living targets, at least). I did this with cheibriados, but doing it with Gozag would be basically the same. It's very tedious.

[kuniqs]

Just give DD innate heal-on-kills, like, half the power of Makhleb's.

[ZipZipskins]

I don't think making them even more powerful is the answer to fix their broken design space and that's a LOT more powerful

[duvessa]

I assume it would come with removing their heal wounds ability, so it would be a big nerf instead. Doesn't fix their core problem though.

[watertreatmentRL]

Deep dwarves have been a missed opportunity to try a really different kind of healing mechanic. The main problem with deep dwarves, as I see it, is not the degenerate behaviors of using vampirism, banking monsters, always going Makhleb, and so on. These things are easy to fix: Just stop vampirism and such from working for deep dwarves. Instead, the problem is that the healing mechanic involves active management from the player.

This idea of using exploration as the basis of healing is a pretty good start, but giving the player healing potions is not the way to do it. You give the player a valuable tactical consumable, which has always been a huge part of the power of deep dwarves, and you force them to manually manage hp recovery. Alternatively, you could give the player a store of Nemelex Elixir-like status that charges with exploration and works only when the player is injured and out of combat, which is to say when there are no monsters in LOS and no monsters tracking the player. When this turns out to be a far superior way to handle regeneration, this system could be extended to all species and deep dwarves can be removed.

[Siegurt]

Deep dwarves have been a missed opportunity to try a really different kind of healing mechanic. The main problem with deep dwarves, as I see it, is not the degenerate behaviors of using vampirism, banking monsters, always going Makhleb, and so on. These things are easy to fix: Just stop vampirism and such from working for deep dwarves. Instead, the problem is that the healing mechanic involves active management from the player.

This idea of using exploration as the basis of healing is a pretty good start, but giving the player healing potions is not the way to do it. You give the player a valuable tactical consumable, which has always been a huge part of the power of deep dwarves, and you force them to manually manage hp recovery. Alternatively, you could give the player a store of Nemelex Elixir-like status that charges with exploration and works only when the player is injured and out of combat, which is to say when there are no monsters in LOS and no monsters tracking the player. When this turns out to be a far superior way to handle regeneration, this system could be extended to all species and deep dwarves can be removed.

Previously, I suggested giving them ambrosia, as that is challenging to use tactically (because of the confusion)

Now that i think about it, putting 'brew ambrosia' on a ru-like skill draining timer might be an interesting possibility. The problem with this is the tedium of having to micro manage stockpiling (this happens whatever timer you use unless it happens automatically, which starts to look a whole lot like just resting)

[Shtopit]

Something I have thought:

DD start without any means to recharge their health: no wands, no self-heal, no god power, no spell, no anything. Nothing works but !HW. They need to kill a certain number of enemies (might be XP or HD based in relation to their level) before they are allowed to replenish their health by waiting. Even then, they have slow healing 2 (no HP regen when monsters are visible).
However, this safety is restricted to the floor they are in. On the next floor, they will again have to kill their number of enemies to get regen. They cannot upstairs to a floor with regeneration, unless one of the floors beneath it also has regeneration activated.

This means that DD would always find themselves in situations where their initial lack of regeneration matters, without being swamped by a boring mechanic like active (non passive) healing. !HW would be a strategic resource. Maybe slap in ambrosia, only usable with enemies in sight. All in all, it would be more challenging and less boring. The only problem is how convey the info to the players.