remove dart gifts

[headcrab0803]

When oka or trog starts to gift items, these darts are pretty much useless. Why should players who go for trog or oka suffer from training throwing? I guess this would buff needlestabbers quite a bit but getting darts is just too frustrating

[pratamawirya]

I guess this would buff needlestabbers

Well, there are tomahawks and javelins.

[dck]

So what exactly is the deal with net gifting/net acquirement not being a thing? Nets make a horrible mess out of your inventory when they start getting ripped but they're very useful and powerful tools.
Right now every game you roll a 1/4 chance to see if you get free nets forever and if you don't and don't get some ossuary full of traps or some similar vault you are likely never to see more than one or two until you hit zot: $, where amusingly they happen very often.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Think of darts as the equivalent to getting chain mail or a short sword from Oka. Yeah, it's not going to be useful. But if he only gifted Javelins and needles for throwing, that'd roughly equivalent to him only gifting Demon Tridents and Bardiches for polearms.


Personally, I'd rather the majority of crappy gifts get removed, including darts, and the gift timer get extended to compensate. But that's mostly unrelated.

[dck]

Except everyone else gets actual ammo that is useful instead of just hoping to get some needles instead of thirteen more silver darts.

[skyspire]

I agree, most darts are useless, except maybe at D1-D7. Except darts of dispersal, those are extremely useful. Saved my life from a 27-headed adjacent hydra when I was low in health.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Except everyone else gets actual ammo that is useful instead of just hoping to get some needles instead of thirteen more silver darts.

True, but an ordinary javelin is much stronger than an ordinary arrow.

Throwing is in a weird spot since it uses base-weapon types like melee but has ammo like launchers. Giving them only good stuff would be like taking out the crap weapons from the melee schools. The current status quo is like giving them -5 arrows when most darts pop up, however.

[jejorda2]

What if darts are just removed? Once you find a stack of tomahawks, will you ever use darts? Isn't monster damage based on hd more than base damage anyway, such that tomahawks and darts do similar damage from kobolds?

[1010011010]

... most darts are useless ... Except darts of dispersal, those are extremely useful...

I think darts should have more utility to them like darts of dispersal.

Melee weapons scale up in damage and down in accuracy, attack speed and requires more skill investment, ranged weapons don't have multiple launchers for each ammo except bows which follows the melee trend (Dam, Acc, speed and skill change). Thrown weapons are mostly differentiated by who can use them: large rocks for large beings, javelins for most, tomahawks for the few smaller species. Of course there's nothing stopping a HuGl picking using tomahawks but ultimately javelins would be more ideal.

If darts had more interesting effects then they could compete with the other thrown weapons, and people won't be so upset when they're gifted a set of darts.

[crate]

If darts had more interesting effects then they could compete with the other thrown weapons, and people won't be so upset when they're gifted a set of darts.

Like if they could poison+slow, or paralyse, or confuse, or put things to sleep, or frenzy them...?

wait a second....

Darts basically deal zero damage; needles deal zero damage (except they never come unbranded and poison needles are better than poison darts); there is really no point to having both needles and darts exist, except that one needs a blowgun and the other doesn't. In practice the blowgun thing matters for few characters (usually just ash worshippers), and if anything it often actually makes needles better for the other characters since artefact blowguns can exist and very often have speed brand. Needles use throwing skill too so....

Really tomahawks are fine as the low-end throwing item. They actually do damage, but they're still clearly worse than javelins.

[1010011010]

@Crate

I was thinking more along the lines of, needles effect the targets system where as darts produce enchantment like effects.
Just from looking at the list of player spells I came up with darts of:
Abjuration
dispersal
dazzling spray
levitation
inner flame
mephitic cloud
butterflies
and done without stepping on any of needles toes.

Throwing skill would need to be split into throwing and blowgun (which makes sense since using a blowgun is nothing like throwing and actually more like using a crossbow) to make people choose between needles or darts. Which coincidentally solves the gift problem since needle users wouldn't get darts and throwers would actually use the new darts.

Darts as they are, are bad but before they're scraped I'd give them a chance based on the strongest dart.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Blowguns actually used to be their own skill before being merged into Throwing. I was new to Crawl when it happened, so my memory might be off, but I think it was because it was decided that it wasn't good to have a weapon school with only a single weapon type.

One idea might be to merge darts and needles, aka darts get needle effects and needles and blowguns are removed. This would remove the snazzy randart and fixedart blowguns, which would be a shame, but it'd condense the two "terrible direct damage" missiles into one and players would be able to fling Curare and the like without a blowgun. Of course, this would no doubt cause screams of rage for various reasons, but what doesn't anymore?

[and into]

Blowguns actually used to be their own skill before being merged into Throwing. I was new to Crawl when it happened, so my memory might be off, but I think it was because it was decided that it wasn't good to have a weapon school with only a single weapon type.

One idea might be to merge darts and needles, aka darts get needle effects and needles and blowguns are removed. This would remove the snazzy randart and fixedart blowguns, which would be a shame, but it'd condense the two "terrible direct damage" missiles into one and players would be able to fling Curare and the like without a blowgun. Of course, this would no doubt cause screams of rage for various reasons, but what doesn't anymore?

Or bring back hand crossbows....

Anyway, darts basically have this going for them, as far as I can tell:
1.) Early on, exploding and poison darts are pretty dangerous when kobolds (e.g.) use them against you
2.) Darts of dispersal have a neat effect
3.) Fire and frost darts destroy your consumables, sometimes before you have even IDed them, and make you angry

On the other hand, early blowgun-using kobolds are probably more dangerous, and more common anyway. So why not just remove darts, and let tomahawks generate with the dispersal, poison, or exploding egos? That seems easiest.

(Probably I would not give frost, fire, or steel to tomahawks, as that would be a lot of egos and clutter up the inventory, and tomahawks were intended in part to minimize that. Also frost/fire darts are almost entirely an annoyance, maybe on tomahawks they'd represent something of a legit threat early on, but still probably not enough to justify the consumable-destruction angle. And poison/exploding tomahawks would be scary ranged threat in early game without item destruction annoyance.)

[galehar]

Or remove tomahawks and buff darts instead

[duvessa]

Probably I would not give frost, fire, or steel to tomahawks, as that would be a lot of egos and clutter up the inventory, and tomahawks were intended in part to minimize that.

Wait, how was adding more item types intended to minimize inventory clutter?

It also seems reasonable to me to remove both darts and tomahawks. Monsters can still throw stones and use launchers.

[Timbermaw]

I am in defense of tomahawks.
They are in-disposable for small species - and can also hold their ground with medium size races, since javelins are much rarer.

Simply removing them at the moment would put us in a situation where javelins are too great to give the player and blowguns aren't useful for direct combat.

(Unless you only mean removing tomahawk - and dart - gifts. In that case i think it's okay, since they are common enough.)

[jejorda2]

I could swear I've been hit by poisoned tomahawks already.

Probably I would not give frost, fire, or steel to tomahawks, as that would be a lot of egos and clutter up the inventory, and tomahawks were intended in part to minimize that.

Wait, how was adding more item types intended to minimize inventory clutter?

A stack of N tomahawks takes fewer inventory slots than N daggers, hand axes, spears, or clubs for throwing.

[and into]

I could swear I've been hit by poisoned tomahawks already.

Probably I would not give frost, fire, or steel to tomahawks, as that would be a lot of egos and clutter up the inventory, and tomahawks were intended in part to minimize that.

Wait, how was adding more item types intended to minimize inventory clutter?

A stack of N tomahawks takes fewer inventory slots than N daggers, hand axes, spears, or clubs for throwing.

I think duvessa was pointing out that making hand axes, daggers, spears, and clubs non-throwable is what actually reduced inventory clutter; adding tomahawks did not reduce clutter, even if it was meant to compensate for the change that did.

[XuaXua]

Tomahawks are excellent alternatives to carrying around a stack of rare javelins, though I do feel like the orcs are confused between using tomahawks and using crossbows.

Blowgun is the only weapon you can enchant, but not vorpalize. They are odd-man out.
Remove blowguns; apply the now-lost, non-duplicated needle effects (curare, sleeping, paralyze, berserk; that's it, right?), to darts. Carry one less thing around and actually train Throwing instead of enchanting a blowgun.

[skyspire]

Remove blowguns; apply the now-lost, non-duplicated needle effects (curare, sleeping, paralyze, berserk; that's it, right?), to darts. Carry one less thing around and actually train Throwing instead of enchanting a blowgun.

Ash loves the idea of no blowguns, that's for sure. And I'm on the side of Ash.. I'd love not having to use half a turn to switch weapons, and to have the extra inventory slot. Let's give starting assassins curare darts Oh and it's frenzy darts, also darts of confusion.

[dck]

Needles are good and fun to use as they are and don't deserve to be nerfed.

[skyspire]

Needles are good and fun to use as they are and don't deserve to be nerfed.

It looks more like a buff than a nerf to me, player-wise.

[dck]

Making me train more throwing to achieve the same result is not a buff.

[duvessa]

If you removed crossbows and let characters throw bolts, would that be a buff?

[tompliss]

Can you enchant your hands ?
Or pick up +2/+3 hands of freezing from a yaktaur ?

[WalkerBoh]

There should be a chance of misfiring your blowgun by accidentally inhaling your needle, lower chance with higher int. This leads instantly to death. Sucks to suck (haha, get it?).

(Sorry, this thread was getting really stupid already).

[Sar]

If you're a mummy, you pierce your bladder and can't use blowguns or talk anymore.

[skyspire]

so basically you guys want that rare unguaranteed find of a randart blowgun and ability to enchant blowguns instead of training throwing, which also allows you to use javelins/tomahawks more effectively. The other benefit to blowguns, is its the only ranged attack option you have if you are trapped in a net.

[partial]

I'm for anything that eliminates gear switching

taking a half turn to equip a blowgun is 90% of the reason I rarely use one

[Brannock]

I could swear I've been hit by poisoned tomahawks already.

I can confirm that tomahawks of poison do exist.