Glaciate


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Crypt Cleanser

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Post Saturday, 31st March 2018, 22:20

Glaciate

Glaciate is pretty widely regarded as the worst level 9 spell, being dual-school like firestorm but without the ability to hit things offscreen and also doing less damage at max range. Dumping a ton of exp to get a level 9 spell is rarely a good idea to begin with, but it seems pointless to have an extra shitty one just for the sake of having it. I suggest either:
1) buffing glaciate by making it do full damage at all ranges (and possibly increasing the damage further), or:
2) removing glaciate and, if a high end ice conjuration is necessary, significantly buffing ozocubu's refrigeration and making it level 7 or 8

I'm not going to post about glaciate's weird cone targeting but I will thank minmay's post about it.

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Sunday, 1st April 2018, 00:44

Re: Glaciate

The original version I put together didn't resemble the released version very much, the original one spit out 3-6 fireball-sized (This was back with circle LOS as well) ice projectiles that would hit up to 3 targets, each target getting damage applied once for each area of effect it was in.

The result was a spell that could either hit a larger area of effect for less damage than firestorm, or hit a smaller area of effect for more damage. The leftover frozen statues were taken mostly intact from my version.

The complaints at the time were that it used the dazzling spray targetter, so you could finagle the targeting to get the exact one, two, or three targets you wanted some of the time, but not all of it, which made it tactically useful, but pretty annoying if you wanted to get picky about which critters you hit.

Also it did the full firing/explosion animation for each projectile, and there was a complaint at the time that it felt pretty drawn out on slow when there were lots of updates to be done over a slow web connection.

I suspect it'd take some serious work to get the old version working in current-era code, but fwiw it's here:
https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=7760
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Sunday, 1st April 2018, 00:59

Re: Glaciate

Personally, I use glaciate to hit the adjacent squares, since it can be dangerous with firestorm. It ignores EV and hits hard, while creating clouds, so it isn't bad. Of course, this means that I would use it even if it had 50% the area, if the cone still started near you, in which case it could be lower level.

I like Siegurt's original idea, but I wonder how it could be handled to avoid targeting being too keypressy. Maybe binding the modes (single or multi-target) as if it were two different spells.

A projectile animation wouldn't be needed, just the explosions would suffice IMO.
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Snake Sneak

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Post Sunday, 1st April 2018, 05:27

Re: Glaciate

The problem with damage scaling down based on proximity isn't the concept; it's that the spell's damage isn't balanced with it in mind. It has the base damage of firestorm; cool! But you only get that in melee range, then it steadily falls off. That's bad balancing; it should be firestorm grade closer towards the middle, and therefore notably stronger on the closest tiles.

The current form would be OK if it dealt significantly more damage. Making it uniform damage throughout would be a simple balancing fix, but also turn it into "alternate AoE fire storm". That being said, remaking the spell could likely create something more interesting, if there was a good suggestion.

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Post Sunday, 1st April 2018, 10:43

Re: Glaciate

Siegurt wrote:The result was a spell that could either hit a larger area of effect for less damage than firestorm, or hit a smaller area of effect for more damage.


Another way to do this could be some sort of ice beam that would be targeted like the lightning rod, with more damage the less tiles it hits
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Slime Squisher

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Post Monday, 2nd April 2018, 11:07

Re: Glaciate

Hellmonk wrote:Dumping a ton of exp to get a level 9 spell is rarely a good idea to begin with

I can't stop being amused how tavern denizens talk about "spending tons of XP" and other stuff being worthless, and later on I go check scores overview and see that: winning casters have lvl 9 spells, speedrunner casers have lvl 9 spells, streaker casters have lvl 9 spells, my casers have lvl 9 spells. An I find it excellent idea to get lvl 9 spell on a caster as soon as possible (with minor investments into defences).
So, everybody who think that lvl 9 spells is just an expensive shit, you are all wrong!

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Shoals Surfer

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Post Monday, 2nd April 2018, 11:20

Re: Glaciate

I could see level 9 spells being a tradeoff if you're playing a variant crawl where experience is extremely difficult to obtain rather than forced down your gullet until you're buried in it, and the lategame is difficult enough to justify taking shortcuts and skipping optional areas rather than "hey I can abyssgrind for three years with no chance of death".

But as things are now, you can train slings to 20 in every game if you wanted and suffer very little for it, so you have no reason not to pick up high-level spells for convenience.
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Barkeep

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Post Monday, 2nd April 2018, 16:40

Re: Glaciate

Hellmonk wrote:Glaciate is pretty widely regarded as the worst level 9 spell, being dual-school like firestorm but without the ability to hit things offscreen and also doing less damage at max range.

Huh. Having learned glaciate and used it, I never realized its damage depended on range, I just thought it was kind of a crappy spell.

On one hand, I am a terrible player; on the other hand, this mechanic is not particularly intuitive considering how most of Crawl's spells work.
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Swamp Slogger

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Post Monday, 2nd April 2018, 20:26

Re: Glaciate

pretty much the problem with the spell is that its weak at range. Easy solution would be make the dmg same as fire storm at at far ranges and noticably stronger at point blank. Even still it would be inferior to firestorm since it cant hit outside LOS

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Halls Hopper

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Post Tuesday, 3rd April 2018, 03:48

Re: Glaciate

njvack wrote:Huh. Having learned glaciate and used it, I never realized its damage depended on range, I just thought it was kind of a crappy spell.

This was my experience as well. My gut reaction was to want the simple solution of making damage the same at any range... but I think that mostly came from the easy comparison to Firestorm.

Making Glaciate basically just Firestorm #2 doesn't intrigue me. The current "shotgun blast" concept has strong fantasy, so I'd rather lean into it. I propose reducing Glaciate's range, perhaps by 2, increasing damage and making it uniform throughout.

The reduced range doesn't solve weird targeting concerns completely but it might help, and at least the output is unique so I hesitate to take it away when in practice even the current version has been only slightly more fiddly and troublesome than Fireball.

As far as Ozo's Ref. goes, there's a glut of cold spells at level 6 (Ozo's, Bolt of Cold, Freezing Cloud) and it's usually the least compelling of those, so I welcome a change, probably to level 7.

I'm not too keen on simply increasing Ozo's damage though, since I think that just creates another version of Ignition/Shatter. My pitch for Ozo's Ref. is to add an rC- debuff to the effect (maybe rC--) to evoke the "freeze-and-shatter" combo fantasy while encouraging gameplay that isn't just spamming a screen-wide AoE over and over.
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Zot Zealot

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Post Tuesday, 3rd April 2018, 04:15

Re: Glaciate

Is it a good or bad thing that glaciate generates ice blocks? Those are a relatively unique part of the spell and maybe it would be interesting to generate more.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Tuesday, 3rd April 2018, 04:42

Re: Glaciate

The ice blocks don't do much of anything either way.

DCSS has four level 9 damage spells and they're all loud AoE spells. Perhaps Glaciate should be taken in a different direction.

One possibility is that Glaciate could take a single target and simply kill it outright. Flavour it as completely encasing them in a block of ice, or chilling them to nearly absolute zero, or as dropping an actual glacier on them, whatever. And no, Hell/Pan lords shouldn't be immune to this.
This might be too similar to LCS and Chain Lightning, which are also single-target spells with very high damage.

Alternatively, you could keep the AoE nature of it and make it quiet or silent. This fits with the other ice magic spells (the loudest one is bolt of cold). You would still want to change the cone targeting and damage falloff since frankly neither of those are good mechanics.

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Majang, stormdragon

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Post Tuesday, 3rd April 2018, 04:57

Re: Glaciate

duvessa wrote:Alternatively, you could keep the AoE nature of it and make it quiet or silent.

"Flashfreeze"

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Tuesday, 3rd April 2018, 05:31

Re: Glaciate

chequers wrote:Is it a good or bad thing that glaciate generates ice blocks? Those are a relatively unique part of the spell and maybe it would be interesting to generate more.

The ice blocks were originally intended to give glaciate something of similar utility as the fire vortexes do for fire storm (they do block LOS). Of course the shape that glaciate's AOE has now, and the lower damage at long range, makes the ice blocks significantly less useful than they were in the original (being able to concentrate fire down a corridor and block it up with ice blocks to slow down creatures approach and avoid LOS attacks was pretty good, having to sacrifice most of your area of effect and do less damage makes that tactic much less appealing with the current incarnation.)
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Mines Malingerer

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Post Tuesday, 3rd April 2018, 14:58

Re: Glaciate

What If we spiced up the current glaciate by giving it a searing ray style approach, you start with glaciate as it is currently, then if you wait a turn it recasts it for say 6 mana each time up to a 4th time each being more powerful than the last one. The downside is you can't change what direction you are blasting with ice, and the range thing still exists.

Abyss Ambulator

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Post Tuesday, 3rd April 2018, 16:35

Re: Glaciate

My preference: keep the wedge shape, make full LOS, make equal damage at all ranges.

Snake Sneak

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Post Thursday, 5th April 2018, 03:41

Re: Glaciate

I always thought the "theme" of ice was having worse direct damage than fire (like Bolt of Cold having less range) but more utility. Maybe what ice needs is a good level 8 spell to match Ignition.

Spider Stomper

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Post Friday, 6th April 2018, 21:09

Re: Glaciate

Perhaps glaciate should be like ignition and simply hit every enemy in your LoS.

Snake Sneak

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Post Friday, 6th April 2018, 23:30

Re: Glaciate

"Maybe X spell should just be Y spell with a different element" is a lame design philosophy. This is also why I'm not keen on fixing glaciate via just making the damage the same at all ranges, because it becomes firestorm with a cone instead of a targetted blast.

Also, that's already Ozo's Refridgeration, which multiple people have suggested should maybe get buffed to 7 or 8 due to a glut of lv6 Ice Spells that it's usually the least compelling of. Then -it- would be the Ignition, in a way.

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Zot Zealot

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Post Thursday, 28th February 2019, 17:57

Re: Glaciate

A lot of cool ideas in here!
I most like the suggestions of making it quiet, and of increasing the damage to adjacent monsters beyond the damage firestorm does.
If you make glaciate like Searing Ray, you could make the range dependent on how long you keep it up for.

Blades Runner

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Post Thursday, 28th February 2019, 18:58

Re: Glaciate

How about if it worked like a blizzard style spell, doing a ton of damage but over a longer period of time. It could be differentiated from Tornado in that it wasn't constrained by smaller spaces, perhaps the center smite targeted, and significantly slows enemies until they become frozen blocks if they don't get out soon enough. Maybe it could keep on going out of LOS for some amount of time, and it certainly would damage the caster if they stood in it. Furthermore, perhaps clouds delivering it spread out in random directions from the time of initial placement, so it presented some danger to the caster. Probably a million holes with the concept, but just tossing it out there.

Abyss Ambulator

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Post Friday, 1st March 2019, 18:16

Re: Glaciate

duvessa wrote:The ice blocks don't do much of anything either way.

DCSS has four level 9 damage spells and they're all loud AoE spells. Perhaps Glaciate should be taken in a different direction.

One possibility is that Glaciate could take a single target and simply kill it outright. Flavour it as completely encasing them in a block of ice, or chilling them to nearly absolute zero, or as dropping an actual glacier on them, whatever. And no, Hell/Pan lords shouldn't be immune to this.
This might be too similar to LCS and Chain Lightning, which are also single-target spells with very high damage.

Alternatively, you could keep the AoE nature of it and make it quiet or silent. This fits with the other ice magic spells (the loudest one is bolt of cold). You would still want to change the cone targeting and damage falloff since frankly neither of those are good mechanics.



The suggestion of killing a single target outright sounds like an idea for the mythical high-level poison magic spell - maybe it could haste and buff the target but it dies after 3 turns.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 1st March 2019, 20:29

Re: Glaciate

What immediately sprang to my mind after looking at this thread again for a high-level cold spell was a single-target spell that you can channel, and *keep channeling* until you run out of mana, and which keeps increasing in damage the longer you channel until the critter dies or you stop channeling, also fun would be if it had an increasing chance of slowing the target. I also like the idea of needing LOS to hit with it, but not requiring it to continue channeling on the same target.

For flavor and added nifty factor, exploding into ice chunks on death would be cool (I don't know that they need to do damage or anything, but that wouldn't be out of order for a level 9 spell either)
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Temple Termagant

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Post Saturday, 2nd March 2019, 23:15

Re: Glaciate

"A roaring avalanche erupts from your hands before an inexhaustible glacier plows over what remains"

So my idea from reading these comments would be for glaciate to become a chanelling spell like Searing ray.

On initially being cast it behaves just the same as it does now, but on subsequent turns it attempts to force monsters backwards and spawn ice blocks in front of the caster, getting progressively further and further way. Anything which is pushed back takes moderate damage while anything which resists the pushback takes extreme irresistable damage but halts the march of ice along that angle of the cone.

This gives it more utility than it has at the moment in that you can now open up space between yourself and monsters and block that space with iceblocks to slow their advance. Or you could just recast the spell to get the ranged damage repeatedly.

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