Slime Squisher
Posts: 368
Joined: Thursday, 11th April 2013, 21:07
Casting UI Concerns (was: No More Haste Spell)
tabstorm wrote:Semi-trolling but semi-serious question: How is casting haste before engaging in melee substantially different from casting a bolt spell in induced tedium? There are a few instances where you'll cast haste without enemies in view, but these are mostly fixed vaults where you know what's coming, like going downstairs to Tomb:2 or Tomb:3. Both replicate a consumable (bolt wands vs. haste wands). Both are pretty much no brainers, you're going to cast Haste or Bolt when enemies come into view. All that's left is that bolt spells directly damage the enemy and haste dosen't. Are all spells that aren't direct damage spells tedious? What about bolt spells? Aiming bolt spells can get pretty annoying.
Real Talk: Crawl's spellcasting and ranged attack interfaces are terrible. They are okay by roguelike standards, but genre UI is horrible-bordering-completely-unusable to begin with.
It's my belief that a large part of the reason you see new players recommending and playing pure melee characters is simply that bump attacks (and tab) are much less fiddly than going through the (z)ap, (f)ire, and e(v)oke interfaces for their character's primary offense. Press a button, do a thing. Not press 2 (f,f) to 4 (z,?,b,enter) buttons to do a thing, or worse, *maybe* do a thing that the game will proceed to ask for confirmation about. (spell failure chance, blocked line of fire, improper tile picked for autotargeting, etc.)
Sequell stats:
[23:13] <Implojin> !lg !goodplayers s=class cv>=0.18 !boring
[23:14] <Sequell> 505219 games for goodplayers (cv>=0.18 !boring): 109433x Fighter, 42662x Berserker, 37291x Gladiator, 35697x Monk, 32907x Transmuter, 22576x Abyssal Knight, 22542x Conjurer, 21617x Fire Elementalist, 21060x Enchanter, 18265x Skald, 17770x Wizard, 16162x Hunter, 16054x Assassin, 12162x Necromancer, 11504x Chaos Knight, 10717x Earth Elementalist, 10039x Wanderer, 8823x Ice Elementalist, 8598x Venom
[23:14] <Sequell> Mage, 8059x Summoner, 7310x Air Elementalist, 6202x Warper, 4407x Artificer, 3362x Arcane Marksman, Death Knight
The predominant classes here have one thing in common: You can press tab to fight.
You can't argue in good faith that players are picking these classes because they're mechanically strong: Yes, Berserker fits the bill, but things like Fi and Mo begin the game with some of the fewest survival tools of all the classes.
Sure, the player can setup macros to skip through spell selection and targeting, but why should s/he have to? Why is this functionality hidden behind a command that requires knowing it exists and manually setting it up? One-press autotargeted ranged attacks should be set by default to something like (non-numpad) 1,2,3,4,5, with those binds defaulting to known spells in order of memorization at each new game, and a one-press rebind available from i/I/Z/V/a to set each bind to use/fire the chosen item/spell/evocable/ability. Put a string at the bottom of each of those screens saying something like "Press 1/2/3/4/5, then press an item letter to bind an item for use." Set the autofire targeters to sane defaults: Nearest monster for direct damage spells and hexes, selfcast for buffs, tile-targeted adjacent to the nearest monster on a line between itself and the caster for cloud spells (aborting with a manual targeting message only if it would hit the caster or can't find an empty tile).
We could put the manual targeters for those item/spell/ranged weapon binds on shift+number and move the existing binds for !@#$% elsewhere, or we could put them on alt+number, or we could use F1 through F5 instead.
We could default bind 1 to the starting ranged weapon for backgrounds with no book, or set the binds to the starting wands in order of initial inventory slot for artificer.
We could find some space underneath or beside the existing wielded weapon and quivered item display in the main gameplay viewport to display the currently active slot binds, to the effect of something like:
1) wand of flame 2) wand of random effects
3) summon butterflies 4) 13 steel javelins
5) nothing bound
I'm rambling a bit now so I'll stop typing, but what I'm trying to get at is that there's a lot of room for improvement in Crawl's offensive ability interface.