Saturday, 1st July 2017, 09:47 by duvessa
I really have to question the existence of damage over time effects at all.
When a monster is suffering from a damage-over-time effect, the player is encouraged to kite and wait for the damage-over-time effect to kill it, instead of engaging it. This is immediately apparent on any character that uses poisoned needles, sting, poisonous vapours, a venom weapon, sticky flame, and so on. Given that "luring" is reviled, kiting a monster waiting for poison to sloooooooowly kill it is surely even worse!
When a player is suffering from a damage-over-time effect, it's not likely to change their actions in combat, with the exception of spending a turn to cure it (which is no more interesting than any other "lose a turn" effect). You can say "well, it encourages them to end the fight with enough HP to survive the DoT" but you're already quite obviously encouraged to end every fight with as much HP as possible, DoT or no DoT; the DoT just makes it harder to count how much "real" HP you have. If you just did the DoT damage up front then it'd be both strictly more dangerous and much less annoying.
Similarly all these regeneration-stopping/reducing things like sickness and that one mutation are effectively DoTs, since taking away your healing over time is the same as doing damage over time; there's no difference between disabling your 1 HP/turn regeneration and dealing 1 damage per turn.
And while DCSS may be overly invested in the flavour of poison, there are very few monsters that rely on the Pois effect to work. Worker ants, snakes, killer bees, wolf spiders, spiny frogs, etc. would work perfectly fine with no poison and slightly higher base damage. Naga poison spit, gold dragon poison breath, etc. do so little that removing them from monsters would probably be a buff to those monsters. Redbacks and swamp dragons are specifically invested in poison, but they're also pathetic jokes of monsters because you can just quaff curing or not stand in the poison clouds.
As for player-available poison, there's a magic school that nobody likes, miasma clouds which could just do higher immediate damage, a weapon brand that people only use because it's OP in the early game, poisoned needles that most players don't even bother carrying anymore, naga poison spit which could easily be replaced by another breath weapon if nagas must have a breath weapon, and stingers, which don't need to have poison.