The Tavern

starting with 1 id'd RC scroll is better than just +1 generated over the game. You are guaranteed not to waste your first RC to use-IDing, plus you get to try on every single unidentified item until you end up with a bad cursed item, so it fixes the worst of the early game -6ac ring problem (If that is considered to actually be a problem).

Another solution is to have an innate ability with permanent cost. For example you could remove curse from an item for -5 max HP. Of course having an ID-ed scroll of remove curse is still optimal but at least there could be less ragequits.

I am reasonably sure people who ragequit over curses would ragequit over losing 5 maxHP as well.

I have one ragequit where my Tr explored about 5 dungeon floors with cursed Sling looking for a remove curse before I got tired of all those hit-and-run battles. So I know at least one player who would use the ability

well I probably wouldn't wield a sling without any ?remove curse on a Troll ever, but I guess it's just me

Edit: of course, things happen. I remember dying to worms a couple of times because I was too bored of kiting them, that's a dumber thing to do.

Yes, that was my mistake and it taught me to avoid wielding weapons I am not comfortable with unless I have ?RC. At least Sling cannot be distortion.

Starting with 1 rc in inventory is silly because that's essentially saying "cursed item identification is interesting and good, but in the part of the game where it actually matters it's bad so we need to cancel it out by making players start with the solution". A player putting on a cursed item without being able to remove it for a while is the point of curses. Wielding a cursed sling really sucks but that's probably the worst case and yeah I wouldn't wield a sling without rc.

I think curses should be unremovable and disappear with exp. No scrolls. The benefit of not having scrolls is that you can't wait until you find a rc scroll to wear-id stuff. You either use a scroll of id or wear-id and since there aren't enough id scrolls for everything until mid-game players might wear-id with the risk of curses.

^ I like that idea a lot. And it would be easy enough to have Ash make curses permanent, and let it provide an "add curse" ability (no piety) and a "remove curse" (moderate to high piety cost) ability.

This will require really thinking through what is allowed to be cursed and the frequency of curses.

For example, this sounds like it would be suicide for a melee-oriented build to wield-id any low-end weapon at all -- if it turns out to be cursed and -3 and you don't have the ability to kill things with throwing/spells/wands, then it's practically a death sentence.

Or even worse, your example of actually wielding an un-ID'd sling before you've trained up enough sling to be able to still kill things if it turns out to be bad.

A cursed -5 ring of slaying? That would seriously impair range-oriented builds too.

I think this will also strongly encourage people to leave pockets of XP around the dungeon. e.g. saving Orc for when you need to unwield a bad weapon.

And it will encourage some of the other games too, e.g. if you're looking for a ranged weapon, you should walk up to every enemy wielding one to see if they are able to unwield it.

While I think this idea would be fine for some things, I believe it makes the bad parts about the cursed item game much worse.

well draining and elemental invokers and even new god wrath already do this pretty blatantly so i guess it's not considered a problem

But not as severely: a few decimal points of draining isn't nearly as crippling as being stuck with a terrible/unusable weapon when you are relying on wielding a good one to kill things, and the recharging evokers can be mitigated by carrying extra evokers for a while. (I haven't toyed with god wrath to comment)

The alternative is to identify the weapon or the sling before wielding it if you're worried about it being cursed. I think cursed weapons are always glowing now so it's still safe to upgrade to a better non-glowing weapon or wield a non-glowing sling (not sure though).

No, curses don't guarantee glowing. Not-glowing does guarantee +0 or worse.

didn't read the thread but if you remove curse scrolls then how would you play ashenzari?

I've thought that ash should get god abilities to manage curses herself rather than manipulating your scroll supply for a very long time now, and fully support this reform.

I'd prefer adding the drain status on unwield to playing with the item until an XP limit is reached. Other temporary measures can be explored like malmutations which wear off with XP.

But then it's not as challenging a detriment.

Perhaps Ashenzari followers get this "drain on unwield of a cursed item" state, but all others are forced to wear until they pass an undisclosed XP wall (and therefore don't play in an xp-hampered state).

I'd prefer the draining solution to the Earn-XP-until-uncursed solution. For one, earning exp until an invisible value is, well, invisible to the user and they may not be aware it's happening. Secondly it's crippling to certain characters (melee characters who just lost their good weapon for one that is really, really bad) and only lightly affects other characters (spellcasters now have a weaker backup melee weapon). This means it's not going to be possible to balance to a fair amount for both cases. If you drain a character's overall exp levels, this will affect all characters roughly the same amount, and you get a nifty little status light that lets the player know what's going on.

Honestly I really just love the draining effect as a punishment to the player; it is definitely an effective punishment but at the same time it feels fair. Small amounts of it aren't that bad, and getting large amounts can be quite severe, but at all points the player has input into managing it. So if you're screwed over by draining it was likely your fault. Rarely it may be the case you were fighting a shadow dragon with no rN+, but that's generally also your fault most of the time

I quite like the current availability of this scroll. It certainly doesnt feel too rare, even a 3-rune game will often ascend with 10/20+ in the pack.

What makes this one a bit of an odd-ball compared to the other player-valued scrolls is that its usefulness changes dramatically over the course of the game. Remove Curse is rarely used to Remove a Curse that has been applied to your gear, this just doesnt happen much in a 3-rune game outside of the Ossuary. It is of course used as 'poor-man's ID' instead by the majority of players. Now sure it has it's limitations, it wont protect you from distort or Contam, but it's value to the player in the ID-minigame which occurs early during the run is immense.

You could argue that Identifying items later on is just as important, though the availability of competing items means each glowing drop is less attractive, and the power of the character means the odd curse is not a killer. The reason why we love to use it for equip-id early on is that it frees up that other scroll rare on the early run, the true ID, for potion and scroll stacks. The reason it's a consumable many view as so over-archingly critical is the result of the ramifications of being unlucky with a curse in the very early-game. A lot of new characters are effectively doomed by a very early curse they cannot break, I dont mind it much at all, i've ctrl-q a couple that were horribly bad, struggled to turn a couple around, and even saved a few. It's challenging, it's fun, it's not like every other run you've made. This is very important to me at least. I never read or quaff-id unless its absolutely panic-induced. (lethal poison) So I need all my ?IDs for consumable stacks, not items.

Overall as I stated initially, I like where this is balanced. It's a shame the scroll becomes 1/52 by the lategame, I never drop them but rarely use them or care about the stock levels. As someone who has ascended 3 Ashenzarites I would say that the importance of the scroll lasts considerably longer, but still not to the end of 3-rune, it generally becomes moot by Depths. (though an extended run with a lot of jewellery swaps and a reliance on binding in magic will hammer through them happily)

edit: I really dislike the idea of starting with a remove curse. Not for the sake of the scroll itself, but because it ID's the scroll. If you are going to start with a scroll known I would prefer it actually be ?ID, that gives 1 definate identification for the player, a chance to ensure that 1 particular item wont kill them, rather than a chance to load up 8 slots with unknown junk and purge.

Except it's worse than NetHack because in NetHack you get unlimited curse-testing at altars and can also bless ?i and ?rc to have a chance of effecting everything in your main inventory at once.

When I first started playing Crawl, I hated it because I was used to NetHack where even common items can potentially have powerful effects and there are very few items that have no constructive use, like !pois, !degen, !rot and ?curse foo (unless you worship Ash).