The Tavern

This is a piggyback off of my other thread on wand of digging/disintegration, but I split it into a new thread so as not to confuse the other one.

Proposal:
Remove wand of flame and frost. Wand of cold and fire now scale based on Evocations skill. At skill 0, they act as wands of flame/frost, and their bolt depth/damage scales up with increasing evocations skill. As an example, at 5 skill you have a 1d3 penetration range for a wand of fire (might hit one, two, or three enemies in a row). I don't feel like working out the formulas right this second, but that's the general idea.

Other wand types already scale with Evocations skill (mostly the hex-based ones), and I see no reason it can't work with the conjurations-based wands too. Lightning/draining could be changed to work similarly, even though there are no low-power equivalents currently (but shock and pain are options, and would be similar to their frost/cold and flame/fire counterparts).

I know Evocations is already strong and this just encourages training it even more, but that doesn't feel like a huge problem to me. These changes aren't very glamorous, but small improvements like these that improve the clarity of the game and reduce clutter are still significant to make, in my opinion.

This is a really severe nerf to these wands, though. Not entirely sure that's warranted... I think I'd prefer making ?recharging rarer, and/or simply cutting wands of flame and frost.

I think the numbers can be tweaked to make this as much of or as little of a nerf as you want. You can also make an argument that wands of fire/cold (and lightning and draining) are severely overpowered in the early game (and unfairly so when in the hands of enemies).

The core of the idea though, is that flame and frost are 100% redundant with fire and cold. If you have fire/cold, the only reason you would ever use flame or frost is because you want to save the better wands for badder things. Like, I'll use flame on an eel because I want to conserve my fire wand for harder things like hydras. But I don't think this decision is interesting enough to warrant the clutter of two additional item types. Instead, I think my proposal creates a more interesting decision, that being whether to invest early in Evocations to make your kind of crappy wand into a not-so-crappy wand.

Edit: Strictly cutting flame/frost is also okay to me. It would certainly be simpler, but I thought there was some room for a more interesting mechanism to take its place instead. Rework rather than just remove, and all that.

probably this shouldve been in the first post, since I actually had no idea this was the reasoning behind this proposal

I'd rather not make wand of fire/cold worse at 0 evo than it is currently. Personally I think the fact that there are multiple consumable versions of haste, teleportation, heal wounds, and invis is much worse than that there are different power level fire attack wands, and having both low-tier attack wands and high-tier attack wands seems fine. You can certainly argue that there don't have to be so many different attack wands, which is reasonable, but I don't personally like just outright removing the best ones.

There was a proposal to remove flame and frost and magic dart and add a wand of exploit weakness, which does a minor ranged attack of whatever type the target is vulnerable to, with magic dart if no vulnerabilities exist. The new wand would retain a lot of situational effectiveness later game instead of rapidly becoming floor trash.

It was not only proposal, but even a patch. I'd actually like this one to be implemented.

I drop frost/flame/darts instantly. Why sit there clicking it, aiming, firing, just for 1 hp damage if that, when you can mystic blast/great mace them to death in a hit or two?

I'll generally keep one of the weak ones for spore management during that low-mana portion of hybrid characters or to polish off a fleeing enemy.

I think the tele/haste/invis wands should be merged into a "wand of escape": Zapping it makes the target invis very briefly (5-7 turns max instead of min 14) and causes fog. Essentially, this is a magician's trick- throw down a smoke bomb, and when it clears you are gone. If used on an enemy, it has a brief (1 or 2 turn) confuse or wander effect.

Invis and haste are offensive wands though (invis for stabbers, haste for, well, everyone). They just happen to be usable for escape too.

Right, but IMO they are far too strong as offensive wands, being very reusable versions of two very strong potions/spells.

Or perhaps the spells are what's far too strong, being infinitely reusable versions of two very strong wands.

Spells require a lot of investment, wands do not.

I think the best solution here is to remove the wands of flame/frost/magic darts. The exploit weakness one sounds cool, but even without it, I generally never use the weaker attack wands outside of rare cases like a jelly that I have no other option for. I'd gladly use draining/fire/cold on a jelly instead, just depends on what I found so far.

Fire/Cold can be important for dealing with hydras when you're failed to find any of the much better ways to deal with them. Very limited charges, but can be enough to get you past one or two hydras should running not be more simple. I wouldn't want to lose that option because my character has 0 evo, which most characters do in early lair.

Why use attack wands on jellies/eels when you can just polymorph them?

Because carrying around an attack wand makes more sense than carrying around polymorph simply because there are so few enemies you want to poly

You always want to carry a polymorph wand anyway because brown ugly things

I really wish player poly worked like monster poly.
Just have monsters turn into a bat or something dumb and give them the fear status to make them run away.

And death drake shape shifters.