The Tavern

I'm not sure I follow the design on these unrands, they have a good amount of work put on them but they are items so weak they just about never see any use when they do happen to show up.

The Singing Sword has an atrocious weapon type that is just a bad scimitar. One solution could be changing it into a better weapon type, such as a dblade or a scimitar, but unrand long blades already have scimitars and dblades covered rather well, so what I would suggest would be to give it the speed ego and maybe make it +9. Without becoming hugely better it'd be quite good and it'd have more of a chance to be actually used by someone out of zigsprint than it does now.

The Mace of Brilliance I believe could be changed into a morningstar without further tweaks to become a very good weapon and it wouldn't mean much of a flavor loss. However I must say a dire flail with brilliance's effects would be a very interesting and powerful weapon.

Mace of Brilliance is sorta okay already imo, it just needs a bit of a push to be good.

As for making the Singing Sword a decent weapon, lol good luck with that dream. Here's what the devs think of it as of the last time it was changed:

http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... 2f96e63214

Does that "in general" mean against geckos or what.

He has also been quoted as saying Cheibriados is "one of strongest [sic] gods currently."

A lot of unrandarts aren't sexy.

A +7 long sword that also does good damage to everything in LOS for free is pretty good. I got a hydra to half health just by walking away from it. It's a great weapon for the first half of the game when used as a swap for harder fights.

But it could be a weapon to actually use to fight instead of something to get free damage off then swap from whenever you actually want to start hitting things that matter.

A +7 long sword is very likely to be something I'd use to hit things that matter. I meant used as a swap because of noisy.

I suppose just about any enchanted, branded scimitar or any great sword being better is perfectly fine and not worth being brought up for discussion then. Nevermind it being one of the three unrand weapons left that don't even attempt to compete past orc.

an unbranded +7 long sword that you can't rebrand that also makes a ton of noise is not a great weapon imo

What if the Singing Sword dealt sonic damage against anyone you hit it with, in addition to the AoE sonic damage during high tension?

I agree with the complaints about the Singing Sword. Mace of Brilliance is fine as is: it's simply not meant to be used to hit things. If it was upgraded to a morning star, that would be nice gravy, but upgrading it to a dire flail would remove its best purpose: to be wielded with a buckler of protection or shield of resistance to stack large defensive bonuses on conjurer-types.

I think weve talked about this somewhere in the forum and I think singing sword would be useful if it gave random buffs since some charms are called war chants

I think it would be better if some monsters reacted to its songs differently such as being charmed, confused, frightened(when it's a screaming sword), neutralized, frenzied and maybe other things. I would rather this effect, even if it meant the acc/dam rating would decrease to balance, since it a plays on the singing part of singing sword.

Really Singing Sword should just not be noisy since noisy on weapons is bad (you can swap away to walk around). Make the sonic screaming be loud if you want (since then you can't just swap away and keep the effect), keep the flavour text if you want, just make it not loud while you're walking around with no enemies in sight.

I probably would have used Singing Sword in a few games where I found it early ... except it has Noisy and I don't want to deal with that.

I think noisy weapons should make extra noise on hitting things instead of being a passive effect. Applies to the singing sword and other artifacts with that property.

Although I'd also prefer if the screaming triggered during melee instead of just when carrying it, I don't like it when weapons have sporadic passive effects like that.

When it comes to weapon effects, on hit is good, on (un)equip is good, and constant passive effects (like resists) are good. But if it's something that triggers randomly, it shouldn't be on a weapon that can be swapped easily.

Trigger screaming mode randomly after a successful hit; turn off screaming mode after some time or chance to renew on subsequent hits.