Fingolfin wrote:spell noise
Spell noise is not nearly as opaque as melee noise, and it's no more important than melee noise is.
Fingolfin wrote:not overtraining spellcasting
Overtraining spellcasting on casters is a pretty direct parallel to overtraining fighting on non-casters.
Fingolfin wrote:training Fighting a lot (super unintuitive).
You don't need to train Fighting at all to win, a ton of people get their first win with no Fighting skill. Also the idea that you should train Fighting "a lot" if you're not using melee/missiles is just wrong.
Agreed on spell success and spell levels being confusing, and spell hunger being a newbie trap.
As far as spell power, spell selection, and the overall complexity of magic in DCSS, I'm not convinced. Correct weapon selection is infamously difficult to do without fsim, and if you watch unspoiled players they're usually running around with some randart war axe or spear and passing on 100 better weapons, and they really have no realistic spoiler-less path to improvement because of the extremely high variance of melee/missile damage coupled with the number of variables involved. Damage spells, on the other hand? Above spell level 1, practically all of them have multiple dice. The damage of Bolt of Fire is very stable, you can immediately discover that it does more damage than Fireball, if the level difference didn't clue you in already. Speaking of which, there are no +6 Throw Flames with {protect, rF+, Dex+3}, so one of the biggest newbie traps in melee/missiles just doesn't exist in spells.
All that said, what's really relevant here isn't whether magic is harder to learn than melee, it's whether faerie dragon would make magic significantly easier to learn. Perhaps it's just me, but even when I was very new to DCSS and very, very bad at DCSS, when I was playing pure conjurers I never saw MP economy as a difficult or even particularly relevant mechanic. This number goes down as I cast spells, if it gets too low I have to run away until it regenerates. I'm already familiar with that because it's exactly what HP does, right down to running away from the hobgoblin while it regenerates. I do not think MP cost reduction would have helped me learn the game. Things that really
would have helped me:
- Removing spell hunger. Yes, even I was initially fooled into thinking it would matter.
- Simpler spells. For Unspoiled Me, the worst offenders were transmutations, anything that made allies, and anything that made a cloud (hard to figure out how much damage it's doing, I had no idea why my Mephitic Clouds weren't working well on death yaks etc. because how am I supposed to know what HD is?). I'm glad to see Evaporate and Bone Shards and Twisted Resurrection gone, but on the other hand, the new wave of conjurations is frankly awful in this regard: Searing Ray has multiple damage levels to keep track of, a weird interface, and only the third beam penetrates or something??? I'm a code diver and I'm still not sure what Dazzling Spray's targeting is doing. IMB has this explosion tacked on with a bizarre shape, and the chance of exploding depends on its range for some reason, and the explosion basically never hits anything anyway. Force Lance requires knocking the target into an obstacle to do decent damage, and the description makes no mention of this. Fulminant Prism is a weird pseudo-monster and again has several damage levels to keep track of. Battlesphere too. Orb of Destruction is a monstrosity of all the previously mentioned problems combined and more.
- Better communication of what spell power is and does, and how much I have. I mentioned that spell damage is generally quite stable, and it is, but not so stable that the effects of increasing power are immediately visible. Even the effect of an enhancer is not always apparent. I wonder how many players are running around thinking that Int (or skills for that matter) only affect spell success, not spell damage? It's worse for non-damaging spells too, even experienced players often have no clue what power does for certain summoning and transmutations spells. Oh yeah, and to complain about cloud spells again, cloud damage is independent of spell power. And the spell power display is this weird nonlinear breakpoint bar with little indication of how to interpret it.
- Warning me about how much damage monsters are able to do. This part has improved a lot since I started playing, since you're now shown monsters' spells and their melee damage, but even rough estimates of their missile damage or the damage of those spells (and often their other effects) were things that I usually had to learn by dying to them.
- Showing % spell failure instead of "Good, Great, Excellent", and so on. This one has already been fixed.
- Better communication of how massively expensive high skill levels are compared to low ones. Also mostly fixed.
- Free reign over my spell list, and no miscast effects that kill/cripple me, so that I could try out new spells with no penalty. There was Selective Amnesia, but I wouldn't always find it, or would even think I couldn't spare the spell levels to keep it in my spell list (again, stupid new player things), and I didn't want to burn my Sif piety because that would mean less books!!!
I generally got much further playing fast species (spriggan and centaur) than I did playing other species, but that's because speed is really powerful and makes those species really powerful. All I learned from playing centaur was that being fast was really good, and that a lich could do like 90 damage with Bolt of Iron. I do not think that making my characters really powerful inherently helped me learn magic, or much else. Even if it did, again: if you want that just buff DE instead of adding a new species.
This isn't to say that this faerie dragon species couldn't have a place in DCSS. Alternative MP mechanics have the potential to be interesting and unique. Heck, I even liked the shared HP/MP mechanic on Dj before it got buried in special cases. But I'm not thrilled at the idea of adding a new species just to have a more powerful magic-oriented species.
This
is to say that making magic approachable demands a lot more than a new species.
But as long as we're talking about species: that list I presented was mostly not things that would make sense as species features, but the last one could work. A species could have unlimited spell amnesia with no penalty, and still be balanced and maybe even interesting. Feel free to combine that with MP cost reduction or just unlimited MP, with some way of preventing summon spamming from being strictly better than resting. I don't buy that MP is tactically interesting as it currently stands anyway, you get too much of it. Again, such a species would
not be a substitute for fixing the complexity and opacity problems I outlined above.
And with all that said, all my first wins were still with pure conjurers. Even in 0.4 and 0.5, I thought they were a lot easier than melee.