Proposal: Let Felids use Rods

[Shard1697]

This is a short one: Felids are already capable of using/aiming wands just fine, and can wield arrows in their mouths for the purposes of sticks into snakes as well. The balance reasons and also flavor behind no weapons is obvious, but at this point, why not rods? It'd make felids a little more viable, as well as possibly a little more palatable to play once you have at least one type of(uncommon) equipable item to look out for.

If there's some super significant balance issue I'm totally unaware of, it should at least give you a different message than 'You can't use weapons.' when you try to wield them, because that doesn't really make sense considering the wands/arrows thing. Maybe something like 'You can't activate that with your mouth.'

[crate]

I believe it's currently not possible to be wielding a weapon-type-thing (this includes rods) while having the game treat it as not a weapon when you try to attack things. Meleeing with a rod is treated the same as meleeing with other weapons.

Possibly if rods turn into a thing you cannot melee with, though I'm not sure that is likely to happen.

[DracheReborn]

Or if rods turn into a thing you can evoke from inventory, like wands and elemental evokers. I'd like this to happen actually.

[Shard1697]

I believe it's currently not possible to be wielding a weapon-type-thing (this includes rods) while having the game treat it as not a weapon when you try to attack things. Meleeing with a rod is treated the same as meleeing with other weapons.

Possibly if rods turn into a thing you cannot melee with, though I'm not sure that is likely to happen.

I may be showing my ignorance here, but I doubt it'd be extremely difficult to make an exception where wielding a rod just means that felids lose their bite sub-attack(especially considering felids already have extra lives which is weird enough already). I understand that this isn't exactly high-priority considering that not many people play felids, though.
Evoking from inventory would also be nice, yeah.

[crate]

"felids can't use weapons except for some of them (rods)" is something that I am pretty sure is never happening.

Rod of striking is a thing, after all.

[dck]

That might be a bit strange given the existence of the rod of striking though; normally people wouldn't try to melee with other rods as a Fe (their rc might even autoinscribe rods to avoid this from happening carelessly at all), so this could lead to scenarios such as someone having a cat with a ton of evo who sees a rod of striking in a shop and buys it only to find out it's useless.
I would like a more straightforward interface for rods as well, however. Although that said lately rods have been getting more attention so that they require less keypresses to use, but still.

[Igxfl]

Could felids with rods just be special-cased to deal bread ration levels of damage?

[reaver]

Could felids with rods just be special-cased to deal bread ration levels of damage?

Yes, but this special case is more silly than the current "no rods" special case.

Also note Felids would lack the opportunity cost of being unable to equip a weapon with a rod active, which may pose balance (every primary conjurer Felid wields a rod instead of using unarmed) or design (when and when not to use a rod on Felid is obvious) problems.

[XuaXua]

Make Striking a special artefact Mace or Club that can be affected by EW scrolls.

Transform the rest of the rods to artefact wands; no one ever uses them for physical attacks anyway. At worst, require wands to be wielded for use. Ha, ha, Ashenzari.