Monster abjuration

[Sar]

I just finished playing a DsSu character, started with the goal to try out new Summoning spells (and by "finished" I mean "died horribly in Pan"), and I had some thoughts about monster abjuration. Currently, any (most?) monsters who know spell-flavoured summoning spells have a 50% chance to remove all your summons in their LoS instead of casting those spells. Unlike player's abjuration, that doesn't seem to shorten summon duration, it just removes them, with two exceptions: both TSO and Trog will protect their summons sometimes. This rarely came into play during regular game, in my experience - not a lot of monsters there summon. However, in postend areas, that seemed to be more of a problem. I had to retreat, when I could, when something normally harmless, like ynoxinul, would come in and poof half of my army.

Recently there's been a push in Crawl to make Summoning more balanced as a school. With all the changes to it, is that mechanic still necessary? Because I feel like Summoning is still a very powerful school, at least in normal game, and Dragon Call feels worthy of being a level 9 spell, being essentially a Tornado made of dragons. However, losing a lot of high-level summons makes it feel weaker than it is. I could add some half-baked proposal like making a monster HD/spellpower check, or making it work like player abjuration, by reducing your summons' duration, but the truth is that I don't know shit about how Crawl actually works and whether that change is even necessary. I would like to hear what people think about that, though.

[reaver]

Another way to only partially remove abjuration: Add a check that monster has the actual spells flag before letting it cast it. A few monsters have had special casing removing their abjuration because it was unflavorful (Example, elemental wellsprings before their removal because they talked about making water elementals from water rather than summoning them.)

[SublimeSnake]

I always thought it would be cool to have a spell that would allow you to "durably summon" (unabjurable) though that might be kind of unbalanced. You could have it be a high level spell, and the next summoning spell you cast within the next 5 turns or so are unabjurable summons.

[Baldu3]

durable summon = permanent allies = mercenaries/deathgod allies/orcgod allies
SAR proposal = worthless sissies can't erase 30MP worth of summons per turn

I completely agree btw. Summoning is significantly less powerful then it was 1-2 years ago, and all the new summons are pretty cool (i even saw a spell to summon a copy of me that can cast spells in my last game). With the summons not attacking enemies outside of player vision and the limit on summons the changes I think would be nice for summoning is to double all summon durations, give all enemy summoners single target abjuration, and have specific enemies have aura of abjuration.

edit: in a recent game my lightning spire summon seemed to shoot offscreen enemies once in a while

[and into]

Fully support. My stab at a proposal would be to make the player's summoning spellpower be used as a check for how much the given summoned stuff's time is reduced. Player's Shadow Creatures, which doesn't use spell power, can be guaranteed to poof out of existence at any sign of abjuration, regardless of strength of said enemy who casts abjuration. Shadow Creatures could use a nerf and this seems thematic; the description text of shadow creatures can mention something like, "Although just as fearsome as the creatures they imitate, the summons created by this spell do not last long and are extremely vulnerable to hostile abjuration."

[crate]

Unless it changed I had always felt like monster abjuration worked like player abjuration ... using Summon Dragon (the old spell, with the enormous duration) in tomb didn't lead to them getting abjured immediately. Using shorter duration summons did. I would still support a change to the monster abjuration mechanic but I'm not sure that your initial description of how it works right now is correct.

[dck]

I do think it works by just removing time from the summon, I recall reading something like that when reading about trog's summon protection at least. I think it's just the chunk of summon duration it removes is so arbitrarily huge it just sends away most stuff instantly.

[MiraclePrism]

Unless it changed I had always felt like monster abjuration worked like player abjuration ... using Summon Dragon (the old spell, with the enormous duration) in tomb didn't lead to them getting abjured immediately. Using shorter duration summons did. I would still support a change to the monster abjuration mechanic but I'm not sure that your initial description of how it works right now is correct.

Part of the problem here is that changes to summoning spells have gone in the direction of shorter durations in general, ala Summon Hydra.