Jewellery should identify when worn

[duvessa]

You can reliably but tediously identify resistance rings by hitting yourself with the appropriate effects, and almost all the others identify themselves anyway (for good reason). None of these will penalize your character except for draining and stat drain, and both of those are still temporary and have very little effect. You can reliably identify see invisible by finding an orc wizard, unless you have an SInv mutation, which is a pretty unimportant edge case, IMO. So I really think these rings should just identify when you put them on. Note that this is the same reasoning that's behind rings of fire/ice auto-IDing (which was changed around 0.8, IIRC), so there is very good precedent.
The only remaining ring is slaying. This means slaying should also identify when worn - if you make every non-slaying ring auto-ID, you know that a ring that doesn't auto-ID is a ring of slaying. No, you wouldn't know the enchantment on the slaying ring, but is that really worth keeping? (it's not)
For amulets, it's the same thing. There is only one amulet that is costly to identify, resist mutation, so the same argument for slaying applies. Okay, I admit that again there are edge cases if you are a demigod or have the clarity mutation, but again, who cares.
So, my proposal is to make all jewellery identify when worn. This should definitely include randarts - currently there is almost no reason to ever put on unidentified randart jewellery, since it won't identify anyway and you are exposing yourself to Contam.

[Sandman25]

Side comment - it would be a buff for Jiyva also, my last character died in Spider Nest wearing unidentified ring of protection from cold and unidentified ring of protection from fire.

[dck]

It would make bad properties like the mentioned contam more relevant also, since nowadays you are never exposed to it because you use an ID scroll on every piece of randart jewellery ever and then carefully decide whether it's a good idea to wear it or not.

[Amnesiac]

Moreover, I'm quite sure most jewellery auto-identifies even if you have the mutation with the same property in the current trunk. I think since it's apparent with the simplification if read-identifying that the development goes by the way of eliminating annoying and pointless stuff, it's time to say goodbye to auto-identifying jewellery and probably to the identification at all, since you have tons of scrolls for every randart. Just imagine this refreshing minimalism and clarity and you'll want to implement this.

[and into]

Agree with all the above. ?Identify can always be made somewhat more scarce, if needed, to retain the same balance of knowledge vs. unknown for >90% of all meaningful cases. This just avoids the non-meaningful, convenience-only uses of ?identify.

Tangential but broadly related: If this hasn't been addressed already, blurry vision should not affect strategic scrolls if no enemies are in LOS. (Any of the ?enchant foo, ?brand weapon, ?remove curse, ?identify, ?curse foo. Also ?random uselessness I guess, just to avoid prolonging read-IDing needlessly. Again these particular scrolls would bypass the blurry vision roll only if no enemies are in LOS.)

[TeshiAlair]

I gotta say, the ID minigame is basically irrelevant at this point. The only possible interesting thing that can be done with it is having abilities "unlock" as you gain exp, and ?identify lets you see what abilities could potentially unlock, but that's a stretch.

[nicolae]

I gotta say, the ID minigame is basically irrelevant at this point. The only possible interesting thing that can be done with it is having abilities "unlock" as you gain exp, and ?identify lets you see what abilities could potentially unlock, but that's a stretch.

Abilities already unlock with XP for some species.

Would it be feasible if everything were IDed to begin with except for randarts, and identify scrolls become a late-game commodity for your randarts rather than a thing you need from D:1. (Kind of like Diablo's system, I think.)

[and into]

Early on you want to ID potions and scrolls. Later on you want to ID randarts and wands (if you don't have good evoc level) and any potions/scrolls you didn't ID before.

duvessa's proposal doesn't make the ID minigame any less relevant (except maybe a few fringe cases), just less obnoxious. Note that making randart jewelry properties ID on wear actually makes ID choices *richer* and less superficial—currently wear IDing randart jewelry is almost always dumb because you are unlikely to find out anything. Now there's actually a meaningful cost/benefit comparison. If making this stuff wear ID makes ?identify too abundant, that can easily be changed via some tweaks to spawn rate, while still retaining all the greater rationality, clarity, and straightforwardness that the OP's proposal would bring. So win-win, actually.

[and into]

Would it be feasible if everything were IDed to begin with except for randarts, and identify scrolls become a late-game commodity for your randarts rather than a thing you need from D:1. (Kind of like Diablo's system, I think.)

I think that would be bad. At that point just remove IDing entirely. But I think OP's proposal is actually not nearly as radical as people are making it out to be. The point is that you *can already ID* these properties, just in a tedious manner. Just like you could always ID ring of hunger by comparing how long it took to go from sated to hungry, so making it auto-ID made sense. The only thing the OP does is remove the illusion that (outside of some very rare cases) scroll IDing jewelry is anything but a convenience that is nonetheless, strictly speaking, not best play (unless you are swimming in ?identify).

Also, making some things unknown at beginning is not spoilery, but having certain properties be identified based upon weird behaviors that involve more intricate knowledge of the game than what you would usually discover via regular play experience... Yeah, I think that begins to border on (true definition) of spoilers for Crawl's purposes.

[Leafsnail]

The amulet of faith could theoretically make amulet IDing interesting (if it weren't almost always the amulet you want to wear anyway).

[duvessa]

The amulet of faith could theoretically make amulet IDing interesting (if it weren't almost always the amulet you want to wear anyway).

Making jewellery identify when equipped would not change this at all. In fact you might have noticed that faith already identifies when equipped if you have a god!

[Leafsnail]

Yeah that wasn't meant to be against this proposal, just an observation re: the identification game. I don't see any real reason to keep jewelry from IDing on wear.

[tasonir]

I support this idea; but would like to see it go hand in hand with about 10% less ID scrolls. That should be enough, and any more would likely be a bit too much.