Remove bat, crimson imp, and jackal as possible summons

[Volteccer_Jack]

They are essentially miscasts of their respective spells. Jackals in particular are weaker than imps, despite being a higher spell level.

[Hirsch I]

these spells hardly need a buff, IMHO.

[Volteccer_Jack]

These creatures, combined with the summon cap, make all three spells an awful, tedious chore to use. Summoning a jackal is essentially the same as doing nothing. Do you really think hounds and wolves are better than mephitic cloud or spectral weapon or spider form?

If balance is such a huge concern, lower the caps of these spells to 1. That is effectively how CCF works anyway: summon a dozen jackals and accomplish nothing, summon one warg and win the fight.

PS--If balance is really concern, maybe actually fix summoning instead of these half-measure caps that cause nothing but annoyance and tedious kiting.

[crate]

I don't care about bats (they actually do kind of ok damage, though they're more annoying to have as allies than anything else the spell gives), I don't really have a good opinion on crimson imps.

Jackals from ccf are awful. They're not just worse than anything that call imp gives you, they're worse than a sizable number of things summon small mammal gives you. You basically have an increased chance to miscast the spell entirely (that's what a jackal is, a miscast) except it's not listed that way. Oh, and it counts against the summon cap, so in some cases it is actually worse than just miscasting the spell entirely. That's not a good thing. (Of course I don't like how the summon cap functions at all, but that's another topic.)

n1000 and I discussed ccf a while ago in IRC and decided that a summon cap of 1 on ccf plus removing jackals from it would be a cool spell and likely not overpowered. At any rate I think it would be dramatically more fun and useful than the current ccf and it would be a big step toward making post-summon-cap summoners not completely awful tedious to start.

[dpeg]

crate: That's valuable information. I will bring this up in ##crawl-dev, but no promises. (Note that ##crawl discussion generally goes unnoticed, no matter how good it is.) Thanks for the detailed explanation.

[neil]

Crate's suggestion is in:

http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... 0516ea31f9

There is still some tedium in that, even at high power, you get hounds over half the time and are therefore encouraged to recast to get a wolf or warg. Probably power should play a bigger role in the weighting than it currently does.

For reference, the old distribution:
10/power chance of getting a jackal
5/power chance of getting a hound
otherwise, 1/7 warg, 2/7 wolf, 2/7 hound, 2/7 jackal
power cap 200

And the new (I really did just give jackals' weight to hounds):
15/power chance of getting a hound
otherwise, 1/7 warg, 2/7 wolf, 4/7 hound
power cap 200

[epsilon]

What about removing chances completely and make spell choose the summon by spellpower only? Or chances could stay, but be reworked to something like this:

power cap 200
while power is between 0 and 66
chance to get a hound = 1 - 1.5*power
chance to get a wolf = 1.5*power

while power is between 66 and 132
chance to get a hound = 0
chance to get a wolf = 1 - 1.5*(power - 66)
chance to get a warg = 1.5*(power - 66)

while power is between 132 and 198
chance to get a wolf = 0
chance to get a warg = 1 - 1.5*(power - 132)
chance to get a hell hound = 1.5*(power - 132)

if power is greater than 198 - every cast will give you a hell hound.

I don't mean it should be balanced this exact way, just giving overall idea. It's not like spell will be too strong, right?

[tompliss]

By the way, how about adding the Raiju, for a little more diversity, especially at high power (and to get soemthing effective against rF ennemies) ?

[evilmike]

It's bothered me for a while how the summon cap interacts with spells like this, which have a number of different monsters that can appear (some will always be better than others). Personally I think it's just bad design for a summon spell to randomly give you something much weaker or much more powerful. It's not the same as how damage values are randomized for conj spells. It's more like if casting haste could randomly give you 1.5x speed or 2.0x speed, and you had to recast/wait out the buff to get the speed you want. Bit of a crude comparison but I think it gets the point across.

Removing jackals from canines is a good move, but I think it could go even further. One option is to make it so spells like this can only summon one enemy type (so we'd have "summon hound" or "summon wolf" but not a spell that can do both). In that case, spellpower could play a role by affecting the summon's HD... this would mean your "hound" differs a bit from the natural monster, but I think this is fine. The other (worse, IMO) option is to make it so you could summon a hound or a wolf, and what you get depends on the spellpower bar. A certain number of pips just means you get the powerful summon every time. This sucks though because it creates a weird breakpoint.

[Lasty]

You could combine the two: as spellpower increases, your hound gets incrementally stronger, until you hit the breakpoint and start getting a wolf (or even a scaled-down wolf), and then the wolf also scales up with spellpower.

[dpeg]

The idea with a single, deterministic ally could be done like this: the spell is called
Create Canine Familiar: Hound
and it does not create problems if each familiar is strictly better than the previous one. Otherwise we encourage players to reduce their power, which we never want.

[Galefury]

It would still be a breakpoint, with all the advantages and disadvantages of a breakpoint. The advantages include visible and noticeable improvement with spellpower, the disadvantages include that the improvement comes at discrete points so you can get more out of your exp by stopping training right after reaching a breakpoint.

[dpeg]

Galefury: sure. I still assume that power also affects the minion's HD, as in evilmike's posting. That way, additional xp is not wasted (it may be spent better elsewhere but that's another matter).

[Galefury]

That also has problems, because giving the thing a paintjob at certain power levels gives the impression of breakpoints when there really aren't any. All variants of this (smooth scaling, breakpoints, and smooth scaling with paintjobs) have some problems, I guess just using any is fine.

[jejorda2]

What if summons spells (or some of them) gave you a status that worked like divine guardian? So you have the Familiar buff activated, and tension rises, canine allies appear. Higher spell power means higher quality allies, but no amount of casting is going to guarantee you'll have the warg when you want it.

Would that just lead to fleeing and trying again, which is a more annoying case of the same problem?

[WalkerBoh]

Never use tension for any mechanic that needs to work reliably and/or consistently. It's good for random things like Xom and not much else.

[crate]

Well my first impression of the ccf change is that summoner is dramatically improved now. During my game the cap was apparently not actually at 1, but since I only summoned one at a time anyway this is not important. Having a reliable summon spell (as opposed to the unreliability of call imp) that can actually kill things (so not summon small mammal) means that you're no longer in a weird position between call imp and your level 4 summon of choice where you don't really want to use any of your spells.

It certainly feels powerful but then so does call imp (compare hounds to iron imps in particular; the iron imps are actually stronger. White imps are reasonably comparable to hounds also) so I'm not sure that's a problem ... or alternatively it is a problem with both spells.