Remove "hot-swapping" jewelry, standardize equip/swap times

[and into]

"Hot-swapping"—i.e., quickly swapping around—jewelry based on the current tactical situation is a very widespread practice, but is deeply problematic for a variety of reasons, but I think these are the big ones:

+ It interrupts the flow of combat by putting you into menus, unless you set up macros (which isn't very friendly to new players), and even with macros the emphasis during combat should be on doing things that engage dynamically in the combat situation—casting spells, moving, attacking—rather than optimizing your equipment set up for a small time cost that, in practice, does not matter.
+ It is repetitive and boring to swap a ring or amulet when an enemy with some specific kind of attack comes into view, in contrast to doing stuff like having to retreat or reposition yourself tactically, which is dependent on terrain and involves at least some degree of analysis and tactical thinking; if we want the emphasis to be on the latter kind of thing, letting people switch in ideal resistances for the threat immediately facing them is not good design.
+ It reduces the importance and pressure of making strategic decisions in terms of what items to equip.
+ Rings that give evocable abilities are in particular broken by this; there is a time/opportunity cost to switching, but it is so low that the "optimal" use for, say, a ring of flight, is to wear something else until you need flight, at which point you swap flight on and evoke it.


Proposed Solution

I'd propose trying to take out a few birds with one stone, in fact, by streamlining several equipment-swapping mechanisms, though jewelry-swapping is definitely the big problem here.

Removing, equipping, or swapping any item takes—let's say—50 auts (or 5 "turns")* when at normal speed (i.e., not slowed/hasted). Exception: Weapons can be unwielded, wielded, or swapped in 5 auts (one half a turn) when not slowed/hasted.

This would actually address a few problems.

+ It would make swapping anything other than weapon in a combat situation a major decision—not something that you do lightly or routinely.
+ It would eliminate the—as far as I can tell—wholly pointless distinction amongst armors in that they take different lengths of time to equip/unequip. This differentiation seems to exist purely for "realism," yet in practice this just means that you have to be really careful when trying on plate mail and backtrack to a 100% cleared area, which is frustrating, and not at all an interesting or neat differentiation between heavy and light armors.
+ Finally, by making removal/equipping equivalent to swapping, you will render completely unnecessary and thus dispensable the "do you want to keep disrobing?" messages that are extremely annoying—and which occur when you painstakingly backtrack to try on that glowing plate mail, but a hobgoblin just so happened to spawn and wander into your LOS while you were in the process of switching.
+ How much time it takes to do these various actions would be streamlined, and while it "makes sense" in terms of realism that a plate armor takes a while to put on, it will in fact be much easier to observe and learn a system in which equipping/removing/swapping things take up one unit of time (5 auts for weapon) or another (50 auts for absolutely everything else).

* Obviously "50 auts" could be 60 or whatever people deem best. Numbers here could change, I just gave what I thought would be a reasonable number.


Possible changes to mitigate consequences of the above

Now, the major issue here is that there will be higher pressure to get the resistances that you need for places like the Depths and Zot (and to a lesser extent the Vaults), where lots of elemental damage is flying your way. So, if the above is implemented, I would tentatively offer one further change:

rN, rC, and rF are limited to two pips. One pip gives 50% reduction, two pips give 75% reduction. The rF++ and rC++ properties are reserved for some special unrandarts only (cannot generate on random artefacts).

This last change might be unnecessary, but I thought I would throw it out there as well. Alternatively it might just be better to try out the other changes and then tweak the damage of elemental attacks (which tend to be quite nasty in late game obviously) a little bit, if necessary.

[KoboldLord]

I like being able to hot-swap jewelry. In the current implementation, I can see an ice dragon and put on my ring of cold resistance. If I can't hot-swap my rings effectively, I have to tediously bait that ice dragon where I need it to go, potentially all the way across the level to a stairwell or door, and then make the swap while it's chilling on the other side of this impenetrable barrier. The latter technique already works on 90% of the game, and most of us don't already use it all the time only because usually we have no particular need to. Pressuring the player to fight monsters the boring way more frequently is probably the wrong direction for development to go.

[all before]

I support the idea to reform hot-swapping. Being able to quickly swap jewelry means that all that matters is which pieces of jewelry you've collected and kept in your inventory, rather than the more interesting decision of which of those two you've decided to put on your person.

Also, I like this idea:

rN, rC, and rF are limited to two pips. One pip gives 50% reduction, two pips give 75% reduction. The rF++ and rC++ properties are reserved for some special unrandarts only (cannot generate on random artefacts).

Except why not make all resistances one pip? The current system encourages new (and not-so new) players to think that getting multiple pips of resistance is very important, instead of encouraging the (more valid) thought that resistances don't matter that much and instead one should concentrate on tactics. It seems like this part of your proposal is headed in that direction, and_into, but why leave the rare second pip? It seems more likely to make players think they're lacking something when really they aren't.

[Bim]

I'd prefer for resistances to be more important rather than just removing them/moving them to one pip just because they don't currently do that much. After all the cutting down of mechanics we certainly don't need to take more out, especially when this is a valid tactical consideration.

[duvessa]

Weapon swapping is actually the swapping I would most like to get rid of.

This proposal doesn't solve the worst case of jewellery swapping (ring of regeneration), and I'm not convinced the others are actually problematic. Of course, as KoboldLord pointed out, you wouldn't actually be preventing those cases either.

I agree standardizing the time taken for armour swapping would be good, but how does this in any way solve

you have to be really careful when trying on plate mail and backtrack to a 100% cleared area, which is frustrating, and not at all an interesting or neat differentiation between heavy and light armors.

? 100 aut is still a long goddamn time to spend with reduced defenses; I'd still go back to a safe place.

That said there is one aspect of this that I do like: making equipping/removing/swapping take the same amount of time. It's pretty bad that there are circumstances where it's better to manually remove one ring and put on another (taking two 5 aut actions), instead of using the provided interface for swapping (one 10 aut action).

[Psiweapon]

I think this proposal is a suggestion for adding fake difficulty. Basic premise out of the way now, reply:

"Hot-swapping"—i.e., quickly swapping around—jewelry based on the current tactical situation is a very widespread practice, but is deeply problematic for a variety of reasons, but I think these are the big ones:

+ It interrupts the flow of combat by putting you into menus, unless you set up macros (which isn't very friendly to new players), and even with macros the emphasis during combat should be on doing things that engage dynamically in the combat situation—casting spells, moving, attacking—rather than optimizing your equipment set up for a small time cost that, in practice, does not matter.

What flow? It's a turn based game.

By the same reasoning, the spell, abilities, status and inventory screens should be disabled while monsters are around because they "distract you from combat". Hope you remember each and every single assigned letter for anything useful, and that your muscle memory doesn't play any games, because otherwise you're screwed.

I thought that if you were too embossed in combat to look at your options and think about them, you were doing it wrong.

+ It is repetitive and boring to swap a ring or amulet when an enemy with some specific kind of attack comes into view, in contrast to doing stuff like having to retreat or reposition yourself tactically, which is dependent on terrain and involves at least some degree of analysis and tactical thinking; if we want the emphasis to be on the latter kind of thing, letting people switch in ideal resistances for the threat immediately facing them is not good design.

Because seeking cover or going upstairs every time a different elemental attack rears it's ugly head is neither boring nor repetitive, much less grudging and time-consuming.

+ It reduces the importance and pressure of making strategic decisions in terms of what items to equip.
+ Rings that give evocable abilities are in particular broken by this; there is a time/opportunity cost to switching, but it is so low that the "optimal" use for, say, a ring of flight, is to wear something else until you need flight, at which point you swap flight on and evoke it.

Teleport control and flight by their very nature are only occasionally needed except in particular branches or if you are teleporting around as a general strategy (good luck with the contamination!). Going around with cTele and flight rings equipped while you have any other sorts of rings in your inventory isn't exactly needed.

Ring of invisibility could be different if your toon happens to be an evocations specialist AND an invistabber without invisibility spell (And I doubt that happens often, except maybe KoBe's)

Proposed Solution

I'd propose trying to take out a few birds with one stone, in fact, by streamlining several equipment-swapping mechanisms, though jewelry-swapping is definitely the big problem here.

The bottom line here actually is "jewelry-swapping is a problem because it could conceivably be reworked to make the game more difficult", right?

Removing, equipping, or swapping any item takes—let's say—50 auts (or 5 "turns")* when at normal speed (i.e., not slowed/hasted). Exception: Weapons can be unwielded, wielded, or swapped in 5 auts (one half a turn) when not slowed/hasted.

Why make weapons an exception at all? Branded weapons mean you can switch-in an optimal offense against the current monsters you're facing, instead of making your loadout a strategic choice. Thus, tactical weapon switching should not be viable. If we take artifact weapons into account, they can bring back the exact problem you're trying to solve with rings, so definitely weapons shouldn't be tactically swappable.

This would actually address a few problems.

+ It would make swapping anything other than weapon in a combat situation a major decision—not something that you do lightly or routinely.
+ It would eliminate the—as far as I can tell—wholly pointless distinction amongst armors in that they take different lengths of time to equip/unequip. This differentiation seems to exist purely for "realism," yet in practice this just means that you have to be really careful when trying on plate mail and backtrack to a 100% cleared area, which is frustrating, and not at all an interesting or neat differentiation between heavy and light armors.

Somehow backtracking once in a blue moon when an interesting armor drop happens is frustrating, but needing to do the same every time a strong elemental attack appears where you didn't expect it isn't.

I can't really fathom the values you're using here.

+ Finally, by making removal/equipping equivalent to swapping, you will render completely unnecessary and thus dispensable the "do you want to keep disrobing?" messages that are extremely annoying—and which occur when you painstakingly backtrack to try on that glowing plate mail, but a hobgoblin just so happened to spawn and wander into your LOS while you were in the process of switching.

A centaur comes into view!
The centaur shoots an arrow of cold! The arrow of cold hits you! Ouch, that really hurt!

Do you really want to keep taking off your ring of fire? [ Y / N ]
y
Y or N only, please.
y
Y or N only, please.
Y
You keep taking off your ring of fire.

The centaur shoots an arrow of cold... et cetera, you can guess how it ends.

+ How much time it takes to do these various actions would be streamlined, and while it "makes sense" in terms of realism that a plate armor takes a while to put on, it will in fact be much easier to observe and learn a system in which equipping/removing/swapping things take up one unit of time (5 auts for weapon) or another (50 auts for absolutely everything else).

Then it would, in fact, be even more easy to learn a system in which changing any piece of equipment took exactly the same time, period.

* Obviously "50 auts" could be 60 or whatever people deem best. Numbers here could change, I just gave what I thought would be a reasonable number.


Possible changes to mitigate consequences of the above

Now, the major issue here is that there will be higher pressure to get the resistances that you need for places like the Depths and Zot (and to a lesser extent the Vaults), where lots of elemental damage is flying your way. So, if the above is implemented, I would tentatively offer one further change:

rN, rC, and rF are limited to two pips. One pip gives 50% reduction, two pips give 75% reduction. The rF++ and rC++ properties are reserved for some special unrandarts only (cannot generate on random artefacts).

Does this mean most items that grant a vulnerability would cease doing so? In that case, this particular change could be worth it; otherwise items that grant vulnerabilities would be even more useless - rings of fire and ice would be particularly suicidal.

This last change might be unnecessary, but I thought I would throw it out there as well. Alternatively it might just be better to try out the other changes and then tweak the damage of elemental attacks (which tend to be quite nasty in late game obviously) a little bit, if necessary.

I'm really sorry for being this caustic, but the only sense I can make out of this whole post is "this game is too easy for me now, and I need added difficulty, people below my skill level are not worth taking into account"

Sometimes I feel like this game will end up streamlined into oblivion. What I don't get is why I keep playing it seeing how incredibly bad I am at it.

[crate]

It seems to me that jewellery-swapping is in fact probably not a problem (yes, it has problems; however, it also has benefits, which I hope I do not have to explain), and also is something expressly encouraged. There is no possible way that the devs have overlooked that it is possible, and there is of course a very easy "fix" (making it take longer) that does not require other changes at all. Since this has not been implemented in the past, the only reasonable conclusion is that it has been decided that jewellery is supposed to be swappable in combat, and the decision is that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

(As an aside, I'm really confused by your resistances change suggestion, since it does absolutely nothing in the vast majority of all cases. rF+ is already 50% resistance; rF++ is already unnecessary almost everywhere.)

[tabstorm]

Do you seriously object to hitting P[letter] or whatever to swap your ring every now and then vs. a fire giant or something? Again, I know that design considerations are only made around idealized optimal games in which a player would be swapping rings constantly, but it never happens in a real game played by a human (I hope). Sometimes I feel this mentality leads to ideas like this one that would suck to actually play with (imo). I feel like in practice this would just lock down the ring choices of most chars to rF and MR, and sometimes EV/AC rings, anyway, but I guess 50 aut might give you enough time around a corner to switch to a resist ring, not that you even need to do it most of the time. I certainly wouldn't like to be paralyzed/banished more often due to this kind of change.

If you just want to up difficulty, maybe the XP curve should be addressed instead..

[all before]

I'm confused--not that people are criticizing and into's proposal but by the line of reasoning that disagreement has taken. It seems like most people are saying 1) hot-swapping as it exists currently isn't a problem, and 2) and into's solution makes the current situation worse than it already it is. These two arguments aren't the same, and while I maybe see what people are saying with 2, I really don't get 1. The problem that and into's post is diagnosing seems to me clearly and unquestionably true. If I have a set of resistance rings, and I see a monster that uses a certain type of elemental attack, I quickly put on the ring that allows me to resist it. There's no thinking to be done about the decision, it's obviously the right action and has almost no drawbacks. That's boring gameplay. It may be the case that, as people have suggested, slowing swap time in fact encourages an even more tedious behavior on the player's part, but that doesn't change the fact that swapping as it stands now leads to uninteresting decisions.

So maybe rather than attacking the post as absurd, wanting a "fake" difficulty increase, allergic to a simple interface interaction, etc., people could try to come up with ways of modifying and into's suggestion, or come up with other ways of addressing the issue?

[and into]

@ tabstorm: No, people don't excruciatingly optimize jewelry for every encounter but "hot-swapping" jewelry is nonetheless extremely prevalent/common. I do think this goes against ideals of DCSS game design but it is also a practical issue in that people actually do it.

The purpose of the proposal is not to increase difficulty in the abstract, but to get rid of a bad mechanism in the game. As I said you could slightly buff resist rings (protection from magic in particular should maybe give more than +30 or +40 or whatever it is to your MR) or lower damage a bit from fire giants and the like to keep difficulty roughly the same.

Again, if the interesting aspect of equipment is supposed to be about making (sometimes tough) strategic decisions, then jewelry swapping is a bad mechanism and should be removed, with difficulty balanced around its removal. On the other hand if developers want you to be able to take advantage of basically every ring that spawns and that you can lug around, then that's fine, but it seems to make equipment tactical in ways that are bad, as putting on rings for a specific situation makes your character a good deal stronger but is also very repetitive and boring.

@ KoboldLord: Yes you can run upstairs or around a corner to swap a ring even under this proposal... So? If it takes (let's say) five turns, then swapping out jewelry requires that you can almost surely get away from the target anyway, which means you can come back whenever you like (even going to get wands or whatever), if you really wanted to, so having the option to swap rings in that kind of situation seems completely fine; I'm fine with folks changing equipment but it should have a higher time cost so that deciding when to do it actually matters, and isn't something you can (nearly) always do if you wish. That's basically the case now, wouldn't be if my proposal were implemented. Also, just practically speaking, I don't see a lot of people swapping out robes tactically, which takes 6 turns, so I'm pretty sure if jewelry swapping took 5 turns you wouldn't see nearly so much of it, though it would still be something you could do. Increasing the time cost seems sufficient to address the problem.

[Snaaty]

This is certainly an important topic.

One idea that came to my mind is this: Implement the changes and into proposed but allow the player to wear 4 (numbers not set, of course) Rings at a time, but only two of them can function at the same time. Activating a different ring you're already wearing costs no (or some?) time, changing rings costs the 5 turns.

That way the player has to decide, which rings he thinks the most useful for his current area, while at the same time you're not entirely screwed in areas where you really don't know whether you will run into a Frost Giant or Fire Giant, for example.
This could keep some strategic importance to jewelery, while at the same time not ramping up the difficulty too much.
Of course this idea would need some sort of in-game explanation, so it makes some sense.
Also, for some (many?) characters having four different rings right at their hands is probably all they need, so maybe make it just 3?

[crate]

Again, if the interesting aspect of equipment is supposed to be about making (sometimes tough) strategic decisions

Why do you assume this applies to all equipment? That makes no sense to me from looking at equipment in crawl.

In fact, if you exclude Ash-worshippers (because of curses), this much seems to be the case to me: armour is a strategic decision, weapons and jewellery are not. Why must jewellery be the same as armour? Why is that better than the current situation? (Since it requires work to change the status quo, changes must be better, not merely "just as good".) (In fact, I could argue that "armour should be swappable like jewellery" by using the same "equipment should behave the same way" argument that you seem to be trying to use.)

It is true that jewellery-swapping is annoying to do, as a player, but I agree with minmay that by far the worst case of this is ring of regeneration, since with other rings you are sacrificing one in-combat benefit (e.g. a ring of slaying) for a different in-combat benefit (e.g. a ring of rF+), and it is apparently a decision to allow players to freely swap ring benefits around like this.

[and into]

I appreciate the backup all before, but I don't mind caustic or tough-worded responses.

I do take exception to Psiweapon's suggestion that the proposal is somehow in bad faith or that I just want to make the game tougher. First of all, I'm not a particularly good player; second of all, that clearly wasn't the point and I even threw out an (admittedly not very good) idea for changing resistances or just suggested lowering max damage from some of the tough mid- and late game sources of elemental damage.

Also, I guess I wasn't clear enough in OP, but the whole idea of making swap/equip/unequip take same amount of time is so that all those "do you want to keep XXXX ?" messages can go away. If you choose to change equipment it will take X non-interruptible turns. Maybe 5 turns is too high or low, the number can be changed obviously.

I'll address the analogy to weapon swapping and why it is misplaced, since that came up a few times. For better or worse weapons are inextricably tactical anyway (some more than others—at the extreme, consider blowguns), but nearly all of them are very much active in their usage, you equip it to use it, and so equipping a different one changes something about the dynamic of combat in a way that isn't the case with jewelry-swapping so as to get just the right resistance, which only gives completely passive damage mitigation.

While you can swap in an artefact weapon for resistances, you are almost certainly altering your damage input by doing so (if the resistance weapon is better for damage also you'd just use that obviously), unless you are only killing the things with god abilities or spells or whatever and using the weapon you want to swap to as a "caster weapon." — But then note that you have to use different tactics to take advantage of that lower-damage weapon in a different way.

There's also the fact that in order to use ranged combat you need to equip a bow/xbow etc., and also the whole interface is smoother and better supported when it comes to swapping weapons. Most of the things that make jewelry swapping for tactical purposes annoying basically don't apply to weapon swapping. Which is why it makes sense to treat them as two different things. I don't see any point, however, to giving different armors different equip times (though if I'm missing something here I'd welcome rectification).


Now... All that being said, crate's probably correct, I'm sure developers know that people swap jewelry around tactically, but I wanted to start a discussion about why nonetheless. While it is obvious, it hasn't been raised explicitly and a proposal to alter it hasn't appeared in GDD, at least for a while (I did a search but didn't go back indefinitely, it is possible I missed something of course).

Again, if the interesting aspect of equipment is supposed to be about making (sometimes tough) strategic decisions

Why do you assume this applies to all equipment?

I haven't assumed anything. Yes armor is clearly strategic, and it may be fine for jewelry to be more tactically oriented, and it may be the case that only specific rings (or just one ring) is actually problematic to such a degree that they need to be addressed. However jewelry swapping makes strategic choices regarding your armor less meaningful; that's part of my point, I apologize if that didn't come across well in the OP. I don't think it is good if the stuff you look for on body armor and shields (+AC and resistances) and commit to by wearing, can be swapped in at a whim via rings at very low cost. Those aspects of equipment choice that are strategic are not as tough/important/meaningful as they should be once you've found enough pieces of jewelry to carry around in your inventory. I question the design, here.

Anyway we do at least agree that ring swapping is not very fun, so it is at least a problem on that level, though probably that aspect of the problem could be solved primarily through a cleaner/smoother interface for equipping/swapping jewelry, or something. "It is unfun" seems to be a very good reason to change something, although yes, for that specific aspect of the problem, there would be many ways to change it and my specific proposal might not be the best (and certainly would not be the only) way of addressing the repetitiveness/tedium involved in ring-swapping.

[tabstorm]

I find ring swapping fun in a sense because I know that it will increase my chances to avoid a long abyss excursion without getting in the way of me playing the game too much by having to avoid all banishing monsters, which makes me very happy.

I just don't agree that ring swapping is any more boring than anything else with a menu in the game. Plus, if you want non-repetitive and interesting tactical combat, this is probably not the game for you, seeing as there have been huge threads on the game's limited tactics and repetitiveness. Plus, I think in practice it will just mean players wear MR and rF/rC or AC/EV as I said earlier, so it won't even be a strategic decision. With that said I think your position is basically sound. I just don't like it because I don't want to have to wear a ring of MR constantly despite having something "better" from a combat-numbers POV, or always run upstairs to swap when monsters with annoying hexes come into view.

[Leafsnail]

Having the item slot that's most annoying to change (due to the fact that you have to choose which to take off) as the tactical one seems like a bad idea to me. I'm not so sure how to fix that though. The main ideas I've had are
- Move the broadly tactical effects (like resistances) to the amulet slot (and then the strategic amulets to rings)
- Replace one ring slot with a "bracelet" slot and change the tactical rings to be in that one

The ring of regeneration thing seems like it could be fixed by giving it a gourmand-style leadup time.

[and into]

Plus, if you want non-repetitive and interesting tactical combat, this is probably not the game for you, seeing as there have been huge threads on the game's limited tactics and repetitiveness.

Seeing as how I've enjoyed the game since 0.5 I'm pretty sure Crawl is a game that I like. I also don't recall any threads in which many people were griping about how the game has limited tactics and repetitiveness... In certain specific instances or with respect to certain things (mashing 5, for instance)—yes, sure. But on the whole two things that really distinguish Crawl is that it is very replayable and that the decision-making (especially regarding tactics) is often pretty deep and there's not always a clear or easy "best answer" to every scenario.

At any rate, I don't find the tactics in the game repetitive or boring in general, I'm just drawing attention to one thing that I think can be improved, and offered an idea on how to improve it.

[johlstei]

I think swapping jewelry is okay, but you could help the ring of regen situation by making it only equippable at max hp.

[Psiweapon]

My apologies:

I didn't really believe the proposal to be in bad faith - I assume that anybody who cares enough about the game to make a proposal also cares enough about the game to make their proposals in good faith, that is, any proposal that doesn't find itself promptly shafted to CYC was put forth as a perceived improvement to the game.

My previous post is meant only to reflect my particular view of the issue at hand, how do things look from my perspective.

Back on track:

I don't think that removing all tactically available defenses save for consumables, spells and abilities is a good idea. The overwhelming majority of equipment is strategic, making them *all* strategic would make equipment much more monotonous.

This idea would also make some deaths much less preventable: Maybe you have a ring of rC, but in the 5 turns it takes for you to put it on, that hobgoblin already killed you with a wand of cold - I assume the first 4 turns and a half are spent rummaging through your inventory to actually find the ring you want, which coincidentally was hiding under a stack of 3 unidentified scrolls of magic mapping.

The difficulties the game throws at you which rings are supposed to help you against, are varied and unpredictable enough that armor and artifact resistances are actually good because they let you cover those needs strategically, instead of needing to bring a crazy-prepared jewelry exhibit with you at all times. With non-tactical rings the player would be much more screwed without lucking out on armor because s/he wouldn't even have the chance to come crazy-prepared to a fight.

[Patashu]

Also, I guess I wasn't clear enough in OP, but the whole idea of making swap/equip/unequip take same amount of time is so that all those "do you want to keep XXXX ?" messages can go away. If you choose to change equipment it will take X non-interruptible turns. Maybe 5 turns is too high or low, the number can be changed obviously.

This is a really bad idea:
1) There are basically no other games where swapping rings is an difficult action requiring 5 turns to complete.
2) Every time anyone ever comes from one of those games to DCSS and forgets that in this game swapping rings takes 5 turns, they will do it mid combat and get destroyed by whatever they were fighting. Analogy: Nethack doesn't stop you from eating a corpse that you'll choke and die on.
Even if it's a lower amount - 2 turns - you can be absolutely destroyed in 2 turns (two crystal spears is more hp than 90% of characters have). And if it's 1 turn, we're back at the status quo again.

My opinion: Instead of trying to fight hotswapping, embrace it. Come up with interface improvements for hotswapping, like how ' swaps between a and b without having to think about what letter everything is on. Discussion: What kind of machinery would make ring hotswapping easily configurable and require memorizing less letters? Or is no machinery needed, and instead a guide on how you should use existing commands to set up macros and be happy thereafter should be written?

[crate]

Oh, right, on the subject of making removing/wearing armour uninterruptible ... I suspect that is unlikely to happen, because it was actually uninterruptible in the not-too-distant past and was specifically changed to be interruptible. I'm not aware of any reason for the devs to want to revert this change.

(Though standardizing the amount of time to change armours is perfectly fine, of course.)

[duvessa]

2) Every time anyone ever comes from one of those games to DCSS and forgets that in this game swapping rings takes 5 turns, they will do it mid combat and get destroyed by whatever they were fighting. Analogy: Nethack doesn't stop you from eating a corpse that you'll choke and die on.

NetHack actually does prompt you for this in many circumstances.

[Patashu]

2) Every time anyone ever comes from one of those games to DCSS and forgets that in this game swapping rings takes 5 turns, they will do it mid combat and get destroyed by whatever they were fighting. Analogy: Nethack doesn't stop you from eating a corpse that you'll choke and die on.

NetHack actually does prompt you for this in many circumstances.

My understanding is that it prompts you sometimes, but not always (e.g. it is possible to eat a corpse, get no prompts and be dead as a result),

[Dung Elf]

Rings already come with an opportunity cost equal to 1/52 of inventory space.
Ring swapping makes more character builds viable. Although some micro-management is involved in taking advantage of jewellery collection, I feel that turn-based games do not need to eliminate micro-management completely. Excessive micro-management certainly can lessen enjoyment of playing, but throwing away strategic options also contributes to making gameplay more dull. I mean, why not get rid of jewellery altogether? It makes game easier and benefits power gamer who can take advantage of more things.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Having the item slot that's most annoying to change (due to the fact that you have to choose which to take off) as the tactical one seems like a bad idea to me. I'm not so sure how to fix that though. The main ideas I've had are
- Move the broadly tactical effects (like resistances) to the amulet slot (and then the strategic amulets to rings)
- Replace one ring slot with a "bracelet" slot and change the tactical rings to be in that one

The ring of regeneration thing seems like it could be fixed by giving it a gourmand-style leadup time.

This is a really good point. A lot of players don't mind tactical weapon and jewellery swapping. Rings are annoying because of the prompt asking which hand. So having three distinct jewellery slots would sort of fix that. It would make Octopodes a bit awkward I guess. It would also allow some differentiating between strategic and tactical item attributes on jewellery, if that is actually desirable.

In short: 2 interchangeable ring slots are the main source of annoyance.

[giovform]

I vote to keep swapping... avoids ultimate equipment builds, which is boring.

I'll be off topic... crawl is turn based and I view it more like a chess game. In my opinion a lot of changes here are being made to make the game faster to play (avoiding menus, etc) because it can get tedious due to the size of the dungeon and the number of combats. The suggestion is to reduce the number of levels and popcorn/mid level fights (why still 7 levels for each hell branch? Everyone just go to the nearest down stair anyway, Just 2 or 3 levels would be fine). Recently I was very sad to see that another aspect of management was taken out - the weight limit. I ended the game carrying 28 potions of cure mutation, collected in just one Ziggurat... no more mutation fears while far away from the stash, I can carry all of them with me, and even better (worst), they can't be destroyed now...

[johlstei]

Somehow I don't think you had much to worry about re:mutations regardless of how far you had to walk to cure them. I'm not a dev but I can't imagine the post-ziggurat phase of the game is the one they are optimizing here.

[giovform]

No, you are right, it's the entire game.

[and into]

I'll be off topic... crawl is turn based and I view it more like a chess game. In my opinion a lot of changes here are being made to make the game faster to play (avoiding menus, etc) because it can get tedious due to the size of the dungeon and the number of combats. The suggestion is to reduce the number of levels and popcorn/mid level fights (why still 7 levels for each hell branch? Everyone just go to the nearest down stair anyway, Just 2 or 3 levels would be fine). Recently I was very sad to see that another aspect of management was taken out - the weight limit. I ended the game carrying 28 potions of cure mutation, collected in just one Ziggurat... no more mutation fears while far away from the stash, I can carry all of them with me, and even better (worst), they can't be destroyed now...

Crawl is not nearly as elegant as chess, obviously, but drastically reducing the need to stash and autotravel back to a stash has made the game more elegant, not less.

Anyway, to get back on topic... "Ultimate equipment builds" are easier with ring-swapping. Under this proposal, barring ridiculous artefacts (which have same effect even if ring-swapping is allowed) you would have to make more careful/difficult choices in terms of what you want to protect your character from. At least that would be the hope—to make those decisions matter more, not less.

[Patashu]

If you want to go down this route, I would suggest instead of jewellery taking multiple turns to swap, it swaps in the speed it does now, but takes X turns to activate.

[Hurkyl]

If you want to go down this route, I would suggest instead of jewellery taking multiple turns to swap, it swaps in the speed it does now, but takes X turns to activate.

Or make it like Gourmand: you get rF+ soon after putting on a ring of protection from fire, but 100 turns later you get rF++ and 1000 turns later you get rF+++. And it resets back to 0 if you ever take it off.

Can these numbers be set properly to avoid people spamming 5 in a safe place when they switch gear?

[Patashu]

If you want to go down this route, I would suggest instead of jewellery taking multiple turns to swap, it swaps in the speed it does now, but takes X turns to activate.

Or make it like Gourmand: you get rF+ soon after putting on a ring of protection from fire, but 100 turns later you get rF++ and 1000 turns later you get rF+++. And it resets back to 0 if you ever take it off.

Can these numbers be set properly to avoid people spamming 5 in a safe place when they switch gear?

This would not work well with Crawl's current mechanics at all.

[Dung Elf]

If you want to go down this route, I would suggest instead of jewellery taking multiple turns to swap, it swaps in the speed it does now, but takes X turns to activate.

This is a direct nerf to all characters not relying on avoiding enemies through various means. For characters that can disengage and wait out swap delay this changes nothing, all others get less benefits from rings.

[Velikolepni]

One thing that the roguelike Sil does is to have negative items whose bad effects are felt even if the item is not equipped. For example there is the foo of Treacherous Paths that increases the generation of OOD monsters as long as the foo is in the player's inventory. We might thus consider the following:

1) Have some bad rings/amulets like inaccurracy, loudness, hunger and so on, come with positive effects as well such as regeneration, slaying, etc. This makes them desirable in some situations despite their drawbacks (Thus leading to interesting choices hopefully)
2) Let them have their negative effects (at least partially) affect the player as long as the item is in the inventory. This should remove the rationale to item swap most of the time.

Right now, if players finds a randart ring of dam+5/hunger, they have an insentive to not wear the ring when not in battle. The proposed change would hopefully eliminate this.

[wheals]

One thing that the roguelike Sil does is to have negative items whose bad effects are felt even if the item is not equipped. For example there is the foo of Treacherous Paths that increases the generation of OOD monsters as long as the foo is in the player's inventory. We might thus consider the following:

1) Have some bad rings/amulets like inaccurracy, loudness, hunger and so on, come with positive effects as well such as regeneration, slaying, etc. This makes them desirable in some situations despite their drawbacks (Thus leading to interesting choices hopefully)
2) Let them have their negative effects (at least partially) affect the player as long as the item is in the inventory. This should remove the rationale to item swap most of the time.

It's quite possible that this works well in Sil but it has one advantage in a system like that: it doesn't have persistent levels (i'm pretty sure, being descended indirectly from angband) the way crawl does. This means you can't just drop such an item when you don't need the bonuses and pick it back up later. In crawl, since that's quite easy, this is basically the equivalent of making swapping to the item take X more turns, where X is the time to go to where you dropped it and back.

Right now, if players finds a randart ring of dam+5/hunger, they have an insentive to not wear the ring when not in battle. The proposed change would hopefully eliminate this.

That would be (one of the) reason that Hunger/Sust were removed as rings/artefact properties in trunk.

[Moanerette]

"Ultimate equipment builds" are easier with ring-swapping. Under this proposal, barring ridiculous artefacts (which have same effect even if ring-swapping is allowed) you would have to make more careful/difficult choices in terms of what you want to protect your character from. At least that would be the hope—to make those decisions matter more, not less.

There is already a hierarchy of resistances, though. If you have rF and/or MR rings, you're generally going to wear those ahead of rC, rPois or rN (unless you're entering a branch or portal where you know one of the 'lesser' resistances would be very useful, which your proposal wouldn't affect). I don't see how such a change would make the choice more difficult; it would just give unexpected encounters with monsters firing wands/arrows/bolts of cold more lethality. It also seems to impinge on Ash restrictions, at least in effect; being unable to hot swap is something you have to carefully consider if you fancy joining Ash. I dare say I might be missing something, but that's how it seems to me.