Poisoning monsters

[njvack]

Rather in parallel to the "poison effect" thread, I've been thinking about poisoned monsters. Right now, so many of the monsters are basically the same speed as you, so poison lets you deal a ton of damage while walking away at very very low risk. It's super strong, but quite tedious.

So: what if poisoned monsters were buffed in some way for the duration of the poison? The effect that comes to my mind first is swiftness, so walking away isn't quite so trivial. But something like making poisoned monsters be loud might work as well...

Thoughts?

[siprus]

Well that would make poison pretty much useless, i think. Toxic radiance would give swiftness to every monster in your loss, making it extreamly dangerous except if you are already in corridor. Anyway I don't think i would use poison anymore if it made monsters faster, it already kills monsters slowly enough (except maybe for poison arrow or toxi radiance + ignite poison or gargoyle)

[njvack]

What if the poison effect for monsters was significantly sped up? So you'd do the same amount of damage in fewer turns, in exchange for a monster buff for the duration of the poison.

[dck]

I think this is more of a problem with a lot of melee only monsters being average speed than it is a problem with poison.
And I don't think it's a big problem either.

[crate]

Why is damage-over-time poison a good thing to allow players to have in the first place? What does it add to the game (that is beneficial) over just having immediate damage only? Personally I would just remove it entirely.

Being different in a bad way just to be different isn't a good thing.

[njvack]

Well... in an optimal setting, poison lets you damage a monster while also doing other things. Maybe it fundamentally works better in something more like Final Fantasy-style combat where "combat" is a well-defined thing and if you can hit monsters, they can hit you back... but I'm not convinced it's impossible to make it good in Crawl, either.

The decisions I'd seek would be things like "If I poison that ogre he'll catch up to me and get in some swings. Do I poison him more and hope he dies first? Do I run and minimize the number of swings he gets before he dies? Do I poison him and close for combat so the combined damage of poison and melee will kill him where melee alone wouldn't have?"

But I do wonder if you're right, and that maybe it just shouldn't be a thing.

[siprus]

Only time i really tickle down enemies slowely with poison is poison darts and sting spell, other poison sources either do enough initial damage or stack quickly enough and at worst you usally only have to take few steps back.

Generally I always thought that poison needles being very situational, and i mostly didn't use them for anything else than ogres, hill giants or other relativly slowly moving monsters i can't kill in melee. It was a way for bit more sneaky characters dealing with some dangerous monsters without risking going close or as a way to enhance effect of curare tipped needles without wasting curare needles.

Other case where running around for long time is relevant is sting spell, which in my opinion is ok for low level spell, though i think venom mages are stuck with it for bit longer than I would hope. (though I've decided to not play any other venom mages than gargoyles so it isn't particular problem for me. )

Generally considering how poison works you usually want to stack enough poison to kill the target straight away. With poison magic missing few last spells isn't just quite as problematic as poison will tickle them down even if you can't quite get the finishing poison spell to hit.

So in short, if you want to rework poison it's probably enough to just rework sting and poison needles, but in my honest opinion you are just overthinking this.

[Siegurt]

The other thing that's a mechanic about poison which is different (and perhaps in a good way IMHO) is that poison is more effective the more times you hit the same creature with it. That means tactically it's better to hit one creature twice with sting and melee the second than it is to hit each one once. That mechanic isn't duplicated by other types of attacks.

I suspect it'd be possible to implement in a different way (I suggested one such way, but it hasn't gotten any traction) but I'd be sad to make combat even more homogeneous than it already is, simply because kiting can be tedious (It's in fact more tedious with non-poison methods than it is with poison)

[duvessa]

The other thing that's a mechanic about poison which is different (and perhaps in a good way IMHO) is that poison is more effective the more times you hit the same creature with it.

I don't understand what you mean by this. Poisoning an enemy twice does twice as much damage, but so does hitting it in melee twice or hitting it with iron shot twice.

[njvack]

Distilled, I think siegurt is saying:

magic dart, melee == melee, magic dart
poison, melee > melee, poison

[Siegurt]

Actually no that's not what I mean at all. When you hit someone with more poison, you increase not only the duration of the poison damage, but the amount of damage taken per tick, so it more than doubles the damage done for each successive cast

Here's a non-real-number of what I'm talking about for example's sake:

Poison 1: (1 damage/round for about 3-4 rounds) = 3-4 damage ~ 3.5
Poison 2: (2 damage/round for about 3-4 rounds + poison:1) = 6-8 + 3-4 damage = 9-12 damage ~ 10.5 (triple damage, not double)
Poison 3: (3 damage/round for about 3-4 rounds + poison:2 + poison 1) = 9-12 + 9-12 = 18-24 ~42 (roughly x12 damage, not triple)

Now poison is not *quite* so excellent as all that, each time you hit something with a poison attack you don't automatically add more poison to them (there's a roll), and each poison level doesn't increase the damage done by exactly 1 per tick (there's actually a really funky table) and the poison damage is also rolled for each tick, but for simplifcation of numbers the example shows what I'm talking about.

[XuaXua]

Poison kiting with Spider Form is pretty slick.