Artificers should start with a rod instead of wands.

[Winwons]

Ok, let my try to explain. As an artificer, you start out with three wands with 15 charges each and some skill in evocations. These will wear out fairly quickly, even if you use them sparingly. This leaves you with only few options 1. you get lucky enough to find decent evokable items. 2. you worship Nemelex. 3. You get another means of fighting stuff online as soon as you step foot into the dungeon.*

1. It's completely luck based, so it's not really an option.
2. Is a viable option, but it is limiting you to one god choice and I'm not fond of races/classes that are limited to one god choice/have a god that only they can use.
3. Is the sensible thing to do anyway (you need other skills no matter what), but it kinda kills the point of starting out as an artificer in the first place. It would be 10 times easier to start as an assassin or something and get a few points in evocations as soon as you find something useful instead of the other way around.

In short, I think there are just not too many evokable items that you can your hands on RELIABLY to support evocations as a main means of getting things done; it really is more of an auxiliary skill for non-artificers and
I personally would like to see this becoming a full-fledged skill but I'm digress.

Long story short: Give them a rod instead of wards as a starting item so that way they are guaranteed to have something that supports their playstyle for the remainder of the game no matter what.

Vote on concept, not on numbers.

[klink]

*cough* I think you mean evocation. Invocation is for god abilities

[Winwons]

*cough* I think you mean evocation. Invocation is for god abilities

Dammnit I get these two mixed up all the time!
The terms conjurations, summoning, invocations and evocations all translate to one word in my language which could be used for any of the 4, just to confuse the heck out of me

[klink]

Oh lord I can see how that would be confusing.

ANYWAYS. I agree that artificers should start out with a rod
I also think that we should add more rods into the game seeing as we've removed so many of them. Rods are legitimately my favorite type of equipment.

[dck]

Artificer doesn't mean "person who only kills monsters in a dungeon using the v command" as far as I know, and Ar already extremely strong.
Leaving that aside, what rods do you think would be a good idea to just hand over for free in turn 1? Because I can't think of any. Do you suggest we make new crappy rods that Ar can proudly claim to start with?
I'd much rather to still be able to better-than-oneshot every monster and puff away at every wizard.

[Winwons]

Artificer doesn't mean "person who only kills monsters in a dungeon using the v command" as far as I know, and Ar already extremely strong.
Leaving that aside, what rods do you think would be a good idea to just hand over for free in turn 1? Because I can't think of any. Do you suggest we make new crappy rods that Ar can proudly claim to start with?
I'd much rather to still be able to better-than-oneshot every monster and puff away at every wizard.

Rod of Striking came to mind

[dck]

Well, what does rod of striking do?

[WalkerBoh]

Artificer's 3 wands are in my opinion the single most interesting start in Crawl and it's not even close. Nothing about this needs to be changed. Your problems center on the premise that Artificers should focus on Evocations as their main killdudes method, which I think is incorrect.

[crate]

Ar had the choice for (old) rod of striking if you go back far enough. It was terrible. I don't see why this would be re-implemented.

[Hurkyl]

Why was it terrible?

(preferably explained in a way that would also imply it would be terrible in current crawl)

[Sar]

Because it was weak as shit (1d8 of ranged and IIRC AC-checking damage, so like Magic Dart I guess).

I mean, you could make it better, or make it scale with Evo. But wouldn't that just make Ar earlygame to be a matter of pressing v-Enter-v-Enter? I mean, if you want to just kill everything in the game with your starting weapon with little regard to positioning you can make a crossbow hunter I guess, except even those guys have ammo problems in the beginning.

[duvessa]

it also had shorter ranged than magic dart and missed, and in older versions it was 1d5

[Leafsnail]

And classes which start with magic dart also generally have other spells.

[Sar]

Yeah, that goes without saying. Mages have guaranteed spell progression in their starting book, and they can worship gods that will grant them spells as well.

[crate]

I think that even if rod of striking were better it would be much less interesting than current artificer anyway. The only background comparable to artificer is really assassin: you start with a very-definitely-limited supply of a quite strong consumable (curare, wands) and have to use those to survive until you find something else that can support you. But assassin also has poison needles, and those generate quite commonly in the dungeon, and you can use those to kill a larger number of enemies than you can with artificer wands.

Having a repeatable ranged attack that does damage (and nothing else) is much less interesting, it just turns artificer into another hunter (or into another conjurer, if you'd rather look at it like a spell).

[Siegurt]

Aha! so clearly we need a "God of Rods" His name can be "Rod" , and of course his favorite color will be goldenrod.

On a slightly more serious note, the closest thing to a "rod that you could start with as your primary tool, and invest XP in with reasonable hope of having it be useful down the road" would be the rod of clouds, and that's only because the type of clouds you get upgrades with more evo.

However even that's way to powerful for starting equipment, and lackluster later (Although it probably *is* effective as long or longer than some starting spellbooks)

Hm, if we really had some inkling to give artificers something really special, give them a guaranteed gadget shop on D:1, no guarantee it'll have good stuff in it, and it will take you a while to collect the gold needed to buy anything really useful, but it would be unusual as a starting kit at least.

I personally, however, am of the opinion that artificers don't need a power bump.

[xentronium]

Could change wand of random effects to have infinite charges...

[WalkerBoh]

But no one has even been able to give a reason why Artificer needs a change in the first place...

[PleasingFungus]

Artificer's 3 wands are in my opinion the single most interesting start in Crawl and it's not even close. Nothing about this needs to be changed. Your problems center on the premise that Artificers should focus on Evocations as their main killdudes method, which I think is incorrect.

I think the biggest problem with crawl's backgrounds is communicating what they actually are to the player, tbh.

See also the assassin, and arguably the wizard and necromancer.

[Roderic]

Aha! so clearly we need a "God of Rods" His name can be "Rod" , and of course his favorite color will be goldenrod.

I would support Rod Eric

[Sar]

Could change wand of random effects to have infinite charges...

Find powerful enemy, kite it to stairs, stand on stairs, shoot wand, did it kill the enemy? Good. Did it heal/haste/invis it? Walk up, repeat.

Doable with finite wand (and probably isn't a bad thing!), but silly with with infinite wand.

(Edit: worth noting that /random effects has mostly damaging effects, and some of them are quite strong for getting it on turn 0 already.)

[dck]

What so you don't want endless full LoS bolts of lightning in D: 1 do you hate fun

[Leafsnail]

You could also keep zapping yourself with it (in a safe place) until you get haste.

[Lasty]

Rod of clouds-type design would work poorly in that rod of clouds just produces harmless thin mist at low power and then suddenly makes the transition into mephitic and damaging clouds as you level up evo . . . and the very powerful damaging clouds can start to appear at relatively low evo. None of the existing rods are reasonable in this context, though rod of striking is a little like starting with a crossbow at present: you begin the game with an endgame-capable weapon that just needs some training and scrolls. Of course, we're trying to fix that issue, not duplicate it.

That's aside from the point people have already made: the current set of three wands is both strong and very interesting, and Ar is one of the better/more interesting backgrounds right now.

Overall I think this post reflects a confusion that I've seen from a lot of posters: the assumption that whatever skill they start with has to be the skill that carries them through the entire game, rather than understanding that it's a starting package that's meant to be leveraged into creating whatever type of character suits your circumstances/preferences. I don't know if there's a way to make this clearer to players in-game, but it might be worth looking into.

[Sar]

@Leafsnail: Or until you drain all your skills to 0 (though it's less relevant on D:1, I guess).

[dck]

Less relevant because you kill yourself with the first offensive beam.

[XuaXua]

Could change wand of random effects to have infinite charges...

Introduce that, and you'd have to introduce "wand breaking"; the act of being able to snap a wand in half before discarding it so a monster doesn't pick it up.

Otherwise, half of the lava in the lava pits would be from discarded wands of random effects.

[neil]

Could change wand of random effects to have infinite charges...

Introduce that, and you'd have to introduce "wand breaking"; the act of being able to snap a wand in half before discarding it so a monster doesn't pick it up.

Otherwise, half of the lava in the lava pits would be from discarded wands of random effects.

Monsters can no longer pick up items you have seen.

I'd be more worried about zapping your infinite wand at a wall until it finally gives you digging.

[XuaXua]

Could change wand of random effects to have infinite charges...

Introduce that, and you'd have to introduce "wand breaking"; the act of being able to snap a wand in half before discarding it so a monster doesn't pick it up.

Otherwise, half of the lava in the lava pits would be from discarded wands of random effects.

Monsters can no longer pick up items you have seen.

I'd be more worried about zapping your infinite wand at a wall until it finally gives you digging.

Not if you give the wand an ability that may or may not create (un)friendly earth elementals from said wall.

[Lasty]

You zap the wand of random effects at the giant gecko. The wall reforms into several hostile earth elementals!

O.o

[cerebovssquire]

Digging is still useful to characters capable of defeating multiple earth elementals.

[Hirsch I]

or you can just, IDK, walk away. those things are pretty slow, aren't they?