Hurkyl wrote:tabstorm wrote:How about this:
Along with removing dragon slaying brand, remove pain/disto/holy brands from spawning normally on weapons (only on randarts), and make it exclusive to their respective gods. This allows for some level of danger to be maintained in early D with stuff like elec, venom, and drain, while averting a situation where a player trying to play optimally would be taking on all monsters with glowing weapons in a paranoid fashion in order to avoid abyss trips or random huge damage from holy.
What does randomly spawning disto brand add, anyway? It just is a random annoying abyss trip for players who don't want to tediously take down every enemy with a glowing weapon without getting melee'd by them.
Elec is already enough reason to be paranoid about glowing weapons. I've been one-shot by a dagger of electrocution far more than I've been abyssed in early D.
That's basically my point. In the early game there is enough danger from non-distortion glowing brands so that you still must act carefully around them. After Lair or so it is almost always irrelevant what the glowing brand is, since the chance of distortion is very low and the chance of being banished on first hit is even lower, so it is a waste of real life time to behave cautiously around every glowing weapon by the midgame for a vanishingly small chance of being annoyed by an abyss trip.
Have I gotten banished on first hit from an enemy with distortion? Yes, a few times.
Was the resulting abyss trip extremely tedious and unfun? Of course, it's the abyss.
Was it preferable to carefully avoiding or using ranged against every enemy with a glowing weapon that I could otherwise easily kill? Definitely.
With that said, my understanding is this:
Design decisions are to be made by considering idealized games where the player always acts optimally.
In such a game, a player should act very cautiously around every enemy with a glowing weapon, using ranged attacks, etc. to avoid the vanishingly small chance of being banished on the first hit from a distortion weapon, even if the player could win the encounter no matter what the brand the enemy is using is. If this is not tedious I don't know what is.
The holy and pain brand suggestion was more for design symmetry.