Staff of summoning

[Nekoatl]

Recently removed largely for not having an evocation on-hit effect, but it would be much more interesting to add an effect instead. I'm thinking summon a copy of the victim, similar to a Phantom Mirror effect, but instead of setting its HD to 2/3, set it to Summoning/27, of course with chance of activation tied to Evocations and requiring a successful hit. This would present players with the choice between the safety of hanging back or the risk of diving into the fray for the chance to bolster their team of summons independent of MP and spell limits. Copying the victim, or otherwise tying the strength of the summon to that of the victim, is important so as to not reward players for dragging around a weak enemy. There are plenty of levers here to tweak the effectiveness for balance, e.g. proc chance, HD scaling, duration, and a wide variety of possible summoning limits, including:

* One per monster at a time.
* One per monster, period.
* Soft limit... proc chance impacted based on number of copies that exist.
* Hard limit on total simultaneous copies, optionally scalable with skill level(s).

[sanka]

Sounds a funny idea, but the problem is that with most of these limits after you succesfully summoned a copy (or a few) you are encouraged to switch weapons. I think it would not result in a good gameplay: weapons like this should very heavily discourage switching to avoid constant switching being optimal.

While personally I am not keen on having staff of summoning back, if you would like some brainstorming ideas (perhaps for a more bloated version of crawl), here is mine:

A successful hit with a staff of summoning may give all of your allies a small % chance to attack the same creature (if they can, that is, if they are standing next to it or if they can shoot at it, etc). It can be balanced by tweaking the %, which should depend on Summoning and Evocation skills.

[Sprucery]

after you succesfully summoned a copy (or a few) you are encouraged to switch weapons

This issue could be addressed by just making the summons vanish if you unwield the staff.
Of course, a staff is a bad weapon so would this make it useless then... you would need some form of non-melee damage.

[petercordia]

Having a couple of 'free' summons and hanging back might well be worth it. Especially with the recent removal of staves of energy ( )

The summons should definitely unsummon when you switch weapon.

[Inarius]

yeah I agree, cast a random summon depending on Summoning level.
And if you unweild the staff, you could have summoning turning hostile, or vanishing.

[Siegurt]

If I was inclined to make a staff of summoning, I would make it either duplicate an existing creature you'd already summoned, or increase the duration of one of your summons, since those are the closest thing to "do some extra damage with the summons school" however since the point of enhancer staves is to enhance your spells, and having a spell-skill-related attack augmentation is really there to avoid some of the tedium that would otherwise be required (swaping to a different weapon when you want to conserve MP while whacking nonthreatening monsters), neither of those options would be helpful.

Probably you'd want something like "summon a spellpower+evocations dependent critter that attacks once and disappears" however that's pretty complicated and annoying for what basically amounts to a little extra damage.

Overall though summons don't need an enhancer (it's more important what you can summon than it's duration, and very few summoned monsters improve significantly with more spellpower), and it's better to attack with a *good* weapon along side them (since the player is more robust than summons are) so Summoners don't actually *want* to have a staff, except as a tedious swapping tool, which is counter to the whole design of having staves have an on-hit evocation. So staff of summoning removal is a good remove, wield a real weapon instead.

[Nekoatl]

Spell power is very important for most summoning spells, whether for getting higher quality summons, or greater quantity, or reduced likelihood of betrayal, or even just duration. As long as you're not just using summons as a distraction and are actually trying to kill things with them, you should want as much spell power as you can get. Admittedly, using summons to kill things is penalized rather harshly by reduced XP gain, so many players will avoid it... but that's a separate problem that will probably be remedied eventually.

As for the player being more robust than the summons, that's not always the case, particularly when taking advantage of the special properties of summons (e.g. ice beasts or iron imps tend to make better tanks against groups of venomous monsters than a player who has yet to find a source of poison resistance does), and furthermore, even when it is the case, it's often more efficient (time-wise) to strategically maneuver enemies so that they're chasing you while being killed, and therefore not attacking anyone.

Futhermore, DCSS has a fundamental problem regarding spellcasters attacking physically, whereby they have to divide their available attributes between strength and intelligence. You can be good at fighting, good at spellcasting, or okay at both. Therefore, players who want to be good at spellcasting are ill-advised to fall back on melee damage except against unthreatening enemies or in the most desperate of situations. As I understand it, enhancer staves offer a kind of workaround to this limitation, allowing magic skills to provide melee damage (at the cost of significant skill investment), even for characters with low strength. But, that only applies to those investing in a school of magic for which there is a magical staff.