Komodo dragons are pretty annoying

[Cheibrodos]

Dealing with komodo dragons, and more specifically their sickness-inducing bites, is a tedious endeavor that involves mashing 5 for a long time and sometimes randomly losing stats just because. There is some theoretical synergy from sickness amplifying the effects of the poison of other lair-dwelling creatures, but this happens so rarely I never even consider the possibility, and when it does happen, I always have an extra potion of curing. Komodo dragons are tough enough monsters on their own, and their bites, while flavorful, don't do much good to make fighting them more interesting. Sickness is a fine mechanic in really hectic places like the abyss where you will be hurting for hitpoints, but in a mostly relaxed place like lair I don't see the point.

So, what could be done to make fighting them more pleasant? Here are a few ideas to hopefully get things going.
-Remove sickness
-Replace their bites with a different effect: Poison, slowing, weakness, rP-, etc.
-Reduce the out-of-combat annoyance of sickness by lowering the duration and/or removing stat drain

For a more complicated suggestion for komodo dragons: The septic status effect. This would be similar to ghoul rot or perhaps flaying, where a portion of your health is unable to regenerate. This would go away as the character gained exp, and it would obstruct health regeneration, which I gather was the point of giving komodo dragons sickness in the first place.

[KittenInMyCerealz]

Aren't Komodo dragons there mainly to introduce the Sickness mechanic to newer players?
Imho they are just fine, and you usually have more than enough potions of curing in each game.

[Arrhythmia]

Aren't Komodo dragons there mainly to introduce the Sickness mechanic to newer players?
Imho they are just fine, and you usually have more than enough potions of curing in each game.

The problem isn't "I have to spend my potions of curing", the problem is "I have to wait around hitting five to not spend my potions of curing".

[KittenInMyCerealz]

Aren't Komodo dragons there mainly to introduce the Sickness mechanic to newer players?
Imho they are just fine, and you usually have more than enough potions of curing in each game.

The problem isn't "I have to spend my potions of curing", the problem is "I have to wait around hitting five to not spend my potions of curing".

You don't "have to" do anything of the sort. Its you who is making the game boring for yourself, not the game. you have the option of using !curing or just ignoring the whole sickness and continue on, if you aren't deeply wounded.
Not that the sickness lasts long either, i think red one is ~100 turns, and stat drain probly occurs once per lair from Komodos.

[Cheibrodos]

Aren't Komodo dragons there mainly to introduce the Sickness mechanic to newer players?
Imho they are just fine, and you usually have more than enough potions of curing in each game.

The problem isn't "I have to spend my potions of curing", the problem is "I have to wait around hitting five to not spend my potions of curing".

You don't "have to" do anything of the sort. Its you who is making the game boring for yourself, not the game. you have the option of using !curing or just ignoring the whole sickness and continue on, if you aren't deeply wounded.
Not that the sickness lasts long either, i think red one is ~100 turns, and stat drain probly occurs once per lair from Komodos.

So I have to waste a potion if I want to avoid bringing myself one step closer to carpal tunnel syndrome? If nothing fun is happening anyway, I say just get rid of it for something better.

Stat drain from sickness like this is, as you said, completely inconsequential. So why is it there?

[Arrhythmia]

Why should I need to personally handicap myself, i.e., be more likely to die due to poison or confusion, to make the game more fun? Shouldn't the game just... you know... be fun?

[KittenInMyCerealz]

a) don't fight the komodo dragon
b) fight it and use !curing to get rid of the sickness
c) fight is and press the "5"-key 1-2 times :OOOOOOOOOOOOOO (i know, horrible, right. it's not like you're pressing that same fucking button after every fight once anyways.)
d) kite it / fight it from range and don't get sickness at all
f) use a wand to engage it safely

as you can see, there is quite many option for this "problem"

as for your counter-arguments, same things could be said for every god damn monster there is in crawl.
why should i personally handicap myself and use !curing to cure poison, while i can just wait it out - lets remove poison

I do actually agree that the duration of sickness could be lowered a bit, from that max 200-ish turns to 100 or something. It doesn't do anything outside of the battle, and battles rarely last even 100 turns, especially in lair.

[Arrhythmia]

c) fight is and press the "5"-key 1-2 times :OOOOOOOOOOOOOO (i know, horrible, right. it's not like you're pressing that same fucking button after every fight once anyways.)

I do not think "a related bad thing exists in crawl" is good justification for a bad thing in crawl.

[dpeg]

Nausea, i.e. chunk-induced sickness, was removed because it was utterly aggravating to rest off the effect -- the infamous 5-mashing. Back then, we said that the sickness (suppressing all regeneration) effect might make some sense, but only tactically. That's why it stayed on monsters. Personally, I don't think it's too bad on komodo dragons but that doesn't mean the situation couldn't be improved upon, of course. Whatever happens, I think having ways to suppress regeneration is a good way, it should just stop earlier when no battle takes place. Therefore I'd prefer status quo over removing komodo dragons (or their bite, but then they'd have no perk anymore).

[Klown]

You can restore all of the stats with restore abilities though, right?

[Leafsnail]

why should i personally handicap myself and use !curing to cure poison, while i can just wait it out - lets remove poison

Isn't this exactly why poison damage was changed to be deterministic

[tasonir]

Stat drain from komodo dragons is extremely important if you're playing a DD. I'd be in favor of keeping komodos and their sickness bite. What could be done is to change sickness to expire faster if there are no monsters in LOS. So say you have 80 turns of sickness, you fight for 10 turns with monsters in sight, your sickness counter is now 70 and nothing is left, double the rate and it takes 35 turns for sickness to end. Or you could increase it even more, x5 and you're not sick after 12 turns, for example. This would be somewhat similar to what happened to slow healing mutations.

But I wouldn't want to see sickness entirely removed from them.

[archaeo]

  Code:

Cheibrodos: i mean we could get silly with something like "septic", where you have a portion of your health unable to regenerate
Cheibrodos: and exp gets rid of it
Cheibrodos: Kind of like a weak, semi-permanent flaying
archaeo: I was literally just thinking about that
Cheibrodos: But that was too complicated for the initial post
Arrhythmia: i like it
...
Cheibrodos: if someone else would propose that I'd appreciate it

Ok.

(This comes from a conversation re: a "melee drain" effect of some sort that would replace sickness. Sickness is pretty toothless in Lair; if you really wanted something scary, a moderate effect with an XP-based timeout would be stronger.)

[sage]

I've been wondering for a little while how to fix komodo dragons, or whether they should just be removed. Septic sounds fairly interesting; any chance you could give me some more specifics? How much HP/HP% is "rotted" per bite, caps on rotting, etc.

[Cheibrodos]

I've been wondering for a little while how to fix komodo dragons, or whether they should just be removed. Septic sounds fairly interesting; any chance you could give me some more specifics? How much HP/HP% is "rotted" per bite, caps on rotting, etc.

I wouldn't be able to tell you what would be best without play-testing, but if I had to spitball some numbers to try:

-Lose between 1-5% max health per bite

-Maximum 30% health can be septic, or the equivalent of a temporary rank 3 frailty mutation. We don't want people getting rekt by the next spiny frog due to one encounter gone wrong.

-The sepsis is removed through exp gain, like draining.

-About the removal of the effect by potions, I think it might be a bad idea for the same reasons removing drain with potions was considered a bad idea. It doesn't have to mirror draining in this regard, though, since loss of max HP can be pretty urgent for low-HP races just getting to lair.

-Undead shouldn't be affected.

Edit: There was some logistics discussion about sepsis that came up in tiles chat.

-To separate from rot while still telling the player exactly how many HP points they are missing, sepsis could be displayed in the status bar using Song of Slaying's format. Ex. Sep(1), Sepsis(1), Sptc(1).

-There was objection to the removal of sepsis by experience gain, but so far it is the only way I can think of to achieve something better than sickness. Experience gain is directly tied to making your body stronger (HP gain, higher stats), so it's not a far cry to use that method here to remove a disease.

-What would the septic status effect actually achieve in terms of gameplay? I found it best to compare it to fighting a neqoxec or corroding enemy. If you engage them poorly, you get semi-permanent effects that make future encounters harder. I think that's worth a try.

-Komodos are bruisers even ignoring the effects of their bite. Their stats or frequency may need to be adjusted if a suggestion like this were ever implemented.

[duvessa]

Well imo the best solution for now is to just get rid of the sickness since it has basically no gameplay effect aside from annoyance. Komodo dragons are usually the second hardest speed 10 thing that is likely to generate on early lair levels (for some characters the first hardest), so unless you want to just get rid of speed 10 melee stuff entirely (a reasonable position!) it probably makes more sense to remove crocodiles etc. before removing komodo dragons entirely.
Sepsis isn't different enough from draining to be a good addition, in my opinion (unless you replace draining with it, and I suppose in that case I might actually prefer it).

[Cheibrodos]

Well imo the best solution for now is to just get rid of the sickness since it has basically no gameplay effect aside from annoyance. Komodo dragons are usually the second hardest speed 10 thing that is likely to generate on early lair levels (for some characters the first hardest), so unless you want to just get rid of speed 10 melee stuff entirely (a reasonable position!) it probably makes more sense to remove crocodiles etc. before removing komodo dragons entirely.
Sepsis isn't different enough from draining to be a good addition, in my opinion (unless you replace draining with it, and I suppose in that case I might actually prefer it).

I definitely agree that even if my idea is not implemented, something should be done to reduce the hassle. I just can't resist the special snowflake urge to give Komodos a unique effect.

[Tiber]

I'm not as on-board with removing everything in the name of not inconveniencing players, but reducing the duration of sickness or the sepsis idea seem fine to me. That said, another option for dealing with sickness is regeneration. The spell is a bit more tedious, but it does help reduce turncount expenditure ever so slightly.

Just a general thought regarding sickness, it seems to me that the mechanic synergizes well with poison, but there isn't really a monster that takes advantage of it, to my knowledge. If the komodo dragon or some other creature got both, that would make the sickness condition more tactically relevant.

[Leafsnail]

As far as I can tell sepsis would just make it so that Komodo Dragons are a thing you should always walk away from (assuming you can't gun them down at a distance).

[skjarl]

The whole thing is kind of silly because komodo dragons don't cause sickness in real life. That has been recently debunked. They poison you ->http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-06/animal-fun-facts-does-komodo-dragon-really-kill-bacteria-filled-bite

So just make them poisonous and everyone is happy, right?

[bcadren]

Specific to fixing sick; what if sick worked like Slow Healing 1-2. IE it wears off after a couple turns of having no enemies in your LoS. With the situation calm, your rest cured you quickly. It would eliminate the tedium without changing the battle effect.

[Cheibrodos]

The whole thing is kind of silly because komodo dragons don't cause sickness in real life. That has been recently debunked. They poison you ->http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-06/animal-fun-facts-does-komodo-dragon-really-kill-bacteria-filled-bite

So just make them poisonous and everyone is happy, right?

But that's boring.

[Viashino_wizard]

The whole thing is kind of silly because komodo dragons don't cause sickness in real life. That has been recently debunked. They poison you ->http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-06/animal-fun-facts-does-komodo-dragon-really-kill-bacteria-filled-bite

So just make them poisonous and everyone is happy, right?

But that's boring.

We could always spice it up by giving them curare bites.

[skjarl]

We could always spice it up by giving them curare bites.

This ---------------^^^

But no, seriously, don't do that.

[partial]

I never understood why komodo dragons give sickness from a flavor standpoint

komodo dragons aren't poisonous iirc so it seems random. maybe give it to gray rats instead (bites from which often transmit diseases--black plague anyone?)

[and into]

From a flavor point of view it does make sense.* From a game play perspective probably not.

*Auffenberg described the Komodo dragon as having septic pathogens in its saliva (he described the saliva as "reddish and copious"), specifically the bacteria E. coli, Staphylococcus sp., Providencia sp., Proteus morgani, and P. mirabilis.[29]

Also some monitors in the same genus as komodo do appear to have (mildly) venomous bites. For the most part they got dirty disease-ridden mouths though. (Only in the wild though, apparently.)

[damiac]

Well, according to that linked study, their mouths are actually a bit cleaner than most species mouth's, which is to say, teeming with bacteria, but no more than usual.
They've just got boring old venom glands, and inject boring old venom into their prey. I heard it's not even deterministic...

[MiraclePrism]

On a related note, can we remove sickness melee from other monsters too? Purple ugly things and ghouls have this too, and there sickness still accomplishes nothing. For purple very ugly things and ghouls you're even likely to quaff curing anyways because they also cause rot status.

Ancient zymes in the abyss is pretty much the only time sickness matters. I think it would be fine to reduce sickness to zyme's custom effect. Ghouls are fine causing rotting, and probably give purple ugly things drain brand instead.

[Matanui3]

Aren't Komodo dragons there mainly to introduce the Sickness mechanic to newer players?
Imho they are just fine, and you usually have more than enough potions of curing in each game.

The problem isn't "I have to spend my potions of curing", the problem is "I have to wait around hitting five to not spend my potions of curing".

Easy fix: Sickness does not cure itself naturally.
There. Now you don't have to hit 5 any more.

Be careful what you Wish for.

[sage]

The actual fix is that komodos lost sickbite. I'll probably think over purple ugly things and such later.

[Brannock]

What's the purpose of komodo dragons now, then? They aren't that much tougher than yaks and yaks have a special feature of appearing in packs.

[dck]

I think 18 isn't the same as 34 even though one could say most speed 10 melee only enemies are fairly similar and one would be right in moderation.

[johlstei]

Komodo dragons do a lot of damage and, on primarily melee guys, are much scarier than yaks to me.

[Quazifuji]

Yaks also come in packs, while komodo dragons tend to be solitary. In terms of toughness, Yaks are closer to crocodiles. If there's a speed 0 melee enemy in the lair that's redundant with yaks, I think it's crocodiles, not komodo dragons.

[johlstei]

Hippogriffs seem kind of redundant with yaks as well, though I guess EV is stronger vs yaks and AC is stronger vs hippogriffs. Crocodiles are definitely.

[Hirsch I]

proposal, give sickbite to crocodiles and hippogriffs.