Rings of Stealth

[Nekoatl]

It's tedious but advantageous for many characters to equip 2 rings of stealth while exploring but switch to combat-oriented rings on spotting any sufficiently dangerous monster. Both the stealth bonus and the quick nature of ring swapping make this a very safe strategy. As such, rings of stealth should be removed or reworked, despite the impact on octopode stabbers.

Some options to counterbalance this removal:

1) An amulet that gives 1-2 pips of stealth.
2) A possibility for hats (maybe also gloves) to generate with stealth ego.
3) Adjusting the stealth score contribution from Stealth skill, optionally with a corresponding reduction to species' Stealth aptitudes.

Option 3 has the benefit of making massive dagger stab damage not quite so easy to acquire so extremely early, making the investment more strategically significant.

[Hellmonk]

Support option 2. Option 1 is not competitive with current amulet selection. I see no need to rework stealth apts, tho I think you could plausibly argue that stealth skill modifier should be higher and most backgrounds should lose starting stealth.

Crawl will always have ring swapping as long as rings are a fast swap slot though, you can't really eliminate the general case if you have equipment swappable in combat at all.

[Nekoatl]

Quick ring swapping itself isn't really a problem, in fact it's kinda necessary as long as you have specialized resistances because otherwise you'd be incentivized to run from everything that you have an unequipped resistance to, swap gear once in safety, then reengage, which would be painfully tedious. (This is already kind of a problem with several armour egos.)

Stealth rings in particular are a problem because they always provide a benefit outside of combat and never provide a benefit in combat, whereas you're likely to find other rings that always provide a benefit in combat and never provide one outside of combat. This rewards the behavior of swapping with stealth rings before and after every combat which is both tedious and a no-brainer.

If there were a bunch of other rings that were meaningfully useful outside of combat, this would be less of an issue, but even so, it's best if rings are designed to primarily be beneficial in combat or out of combat, but not both.

I have to disagree about a stealth amulet not being a competitive choice, at least for stabbers. But, if I'm wrong, the number of pips could always be increased to bring it in line with other amulets, unless there's some hidden hard cap on detection rate that I'm not aware of.

[gameguard]

why not remove autoexplore while were at it? It's suboptimal and leads to autoexplore death. We really need to prevent people from playing suboptimally for convenience, am I right?

Let's also disable being able to skill multiple things at once because we need to hold people's hands.

[Nekoatl]

Is that comment meant to be in support of my proposal? If not, then I suspect you've completely misunderstood something.

[Siegurt]

Honestly this proposal just pushes the "problem" down the road, there's always *something* optimal to explore with and if that isn't optimal in all circumstances, then it's optimal to swap. I'm not sure exploring with one thing and having a different thing be good for combat is a problem, but if it is, this doesn't really fix it.

I'm really not sure it actually *is* optimal to explore with rings of stealth on (For example it might arguably be better to explore with Willl+ equipped)

[duvessa]

jewellery should take multiple turns to wear/remove, like armour does

[andrew]

Every ring besides stealth, though, is at least sometimes useful in combat for most characters to whom it's useful at all.

[Nekoatl]

Okay, there are some characters who don't benefit from stealth boosts (Qazlal, heavily armoured). And, I forgot about rings of flight, for obvious reasons. So, I admittedly somewhat overstated my case earlier.

But, if stealth+ buys even a single extra turn before the enemy notices you, that completely outclasses any other ring you could be wearing. Not only does it give you a chance to see the enemy and swap to a particularized combat ring (e.g. willpower), but it also gives you the chance to back off without provoking a pursuit. This ability to quietly retreat is extremely valuable when encountering highly dangerous enemies, letting you avoid them and either clear out the rest of the floor or bail entirely to revisit later. Even in areas themed around a specific damage type (e.g. Snake Pit), you could still encounter a unique monster with a different repertoire, so stealth makes a claim to being more valuable than even a resistance to the themed damage.

[andrew]

Qazlal yes; but don't even heavily armored characters get the one pip from the ring? And ring of flight is indeed a very special case.

[Nekoatl]

There's a hard lower cap of 0 stealth, so if all your stealth bonuses don't total to exceed your armour penalty, then it makes no difference whether you have the bonuses or not.

[andrew]

True, but I thought that minimum was applied before equipment. So negative raw stealth (from skill-armour) becomes 0, and then you get any bonus from rings. Am I wrong about that?

[Nekoatl]

Yes, the 0 minimum cap is the final step in the function, after all other calculations.

[andrew]

And it has been made so! (With option 2.)

[Majang]

...and other good changes, too! I'm very happy about goldified manuals!

[andrew]

Yeah I just won a HaBe that didn't feel obligated to use up its two manuals of Evocations as soon as it got them, just to get them out of inventory!