rPois in trunk is just meaningless

[d3k0]

Hi all,
this post if from a player who never won Crawl till now, so you know my experience is low.
But, from the point of view of a not-so-experienced player, rPois as actually works in trunk (0.16-a0-263-g9fbdb5d) is useless/meaningless.
I try to be concise. If I fight anything with the proper resistance, hard fights become considerably easier. Impossible fights become possible. And so on.
So, rAnything is actually very meaningful and special. For example, dealing with Nikola with rElec is easy. Facing Nikola without rElec is just suicide, at least with low HP chars.
The same happens with Drakes, Centaurs with flame bows, and so on.
But with rPois as actually is, this does not happen at all.
I know that NOW rPois has "levels" (still not reflected in the UI), but as player I think that for example one level of rPois is enough to counter Adder venom, and one level is enough to help manage wolf spiders.
Examples:
run #1: SpHu. Some problems with adders (fast and poisonous). Found rPois ring. Thought: Wow, now I am fine! The first adder poisoned me to almost death. Tried with other 2 adders, and discovered that the ring was almost useless (my impression was: 20 damages of poison with ring becomes maybe 15-16, not a big difference).
run #2: SpSomething. In Lair, found Spider Nest entrance, full of spiders, mostly Wolf Spiders. Almost died without rPois. Went away, changed equipment, and went back, with rPois. Pulled one spider, bittten once, used last potion, bitten for the second time, killed spider and left with half life. Half of the remaining bar was red, the other half was yellow. Died by poison for lack of remaining potions.

The point here is not how much difficult poisonous enemies are for low-hp characters (I am not the right person to judge how much difficult crawl is).
The point is that from a player perspective rPois is almost useless, and far less useless than other resistances.

Thanks for any reply!

[Sandman25]

rPois is less predictable than rF+/rC+/rN+ etc. but it still is very useful. Probably other elemental resistances should be changed instead, e.g. rF+ should decrease fire damage by 0-100%, rF++ by 0-133%, rF+++ by 0-150%. As you see average decrease is kept (50%, 66%, 75%). That would make game more interesting, currently rF+++ makes fire attacks of most monsters too weak to care about.

[Sar]

rPois lowers damage of spells like PArrow and Venom bolt by 66% now (used to be 50%). So your Nikola equivalent would be great nagas, Aizul and Arachne.

I know that NOW rPois has "levels" (still not reflected in the UI)

Pretty sure those are for monsters only.

[Lasty]

I heard something similar from agentgt in ##crawl recently, but I disagree. rPois does two main things: 1) reducing how often you receive poison status from poison-branded attacks, and 2) reducing the damage of poison conjurations like venom bolt and poison arrow. Recently rPois went from protecting you in case 1) 90% of the time to protecting 66% of the time, and in case 2) went from blocking 50% of the damage to blocking 66% of the damage.

Overall, I consider this to be a buff, since venom bolt and and poison arrow were always more dangerous than incremental poison from branded attacks, but clearly some people disagree.

[TeshiAlair]

I think it is the randomness of poison procing/poison duration that "feels bad."

[PleasingFungus]

At some point I'd like to experiment with making rPois reduce the amount of poisoning by a fixed %, rather than reducing the chance of poisoning. Seems possible to implement, now that we have deterministic poison.

[Lasty]

I think PF's suggestion would give a better feel overall, since it would give a less spiky damage distribution on poison-branded attacks. I'd have to change my rcfile to remove the "you are poisoned!" stop, but I probably need to drop that anyway. :p

[and into]

rPois also completely stops some specific things like poison clouds and gives 100% protection against confusion from mephitic cloud/swamp drake breath. There are also more poison clouds in the game than there used to be (reavers) and more parrow and maybe even venom bolt (thanks to all the stuff that can spawn in depths) so rPois is more meaningful now than ever.

However it is true that rPois is not very useful in early game, because in early game, outside of a few unusual enemies (like ghosts with meph cloud), all rPois is doing is stopping you from getting poison status from venomous attacks. But basically all resistances are situational, and the situations in which they are useful tend to be rarer in early game. rPois is not all that different in this regard.

[PleasingFungus]

However it is true that rPois is not very useful in early game, because in early game, outside of a few unusual enemies (like ghosts with meph cloud), all rPois is doing is stopping you from getting poison status from venomous attacks. But basically all resistances are situational, and the situations in which they are useful tend to be rarer in early game. rPois is not all that different in this regard.

"Just stopping you from getting poison status" can be a very significant bonus, even in the early game - notably, the adder becomes much less dangerous for characters which start with rPois, and it's very dangerous without!

[d3k0]

I like PF idea very much, always speaking from the perspective of a player. rF makes fire enemies easier. If I understand the mechanics correctly, rPois does not, because if it only diminishes the probability of being poisoned, this makes maybe half of the monsters (the "lucky" ones) as dangerous as if rPois would not exist at all. Hope this is clear enough, english is not my primary language.

EDIT: I dont know if this is correct or not, but I get the poisoned status constantly. Maybe "less often", but I get it anyway, also with rPois. By the way, I died several times because of "after fight posion effect"

[johlstei]

I like PF idea very much, always speaking from the perspective of a player. rF makes fire enemies easier. If I understand the mechanics correctly, rPois does not, because if it only diminishes the probability of being poisoned, this makes maybe half of the monsters (the "lucky" ones) as dangerous as if rPois would not exist at all. Hope this is clear enough, english is not my primary language.

EDIT: I dont know if this is correct or not, but I get the poisoned status constantly. Maybe "less often", but I get it anyway, also with rPois. By the way, I died several times because of "after fight posion effect"

This isn't true, because many monsters try to poison you more than once. Even if a monster poisons you on a given attack, future attempts and/or previous attempts might have failed, making the monster easier overall.

[d3k0]

Yes, but statistically speaking... let's say for sake of simplicity that big poisonous monster "P" attacks 3 times. Let's say, also for simplicity, that you have (without rpois) 50% of probability of being poisoned.
So, without rpois, during a single fight with P:

12.5% of the times, all 3 attacks will hit with poisonous effect
37.5% of the times, 2 attacks will hit with poison and 1 without
37.5% of the times, 1 attack will hit with poison and 2 without
12.5% of the times, all 3 attacks will hit without poisonous effect

So, if we say that 2 poisonous effects are "very dangerous", 12.5%+37.5%=50% of the fights will be "very dangerous"

If rPois hlaves the probability (so from 50% of being poisoned to 25%), chances become:

1.5% of the times, all 3 attacks will hit with poisonous effect
14% of the times, 2 attacks will hit with poison and 1 without
42.2% of the times, 1 attack will hit with poison and 2 without
42.2% of the times, all 3 attacks will hit without poisonous effect

So, we still have 1.5+14=15.5% of "very dangerous" fights (about 1 on seven).

Hope math is correct.

The idea here is that not ALL fights are LESS dangerous, only FEWER fights are dangerous.

[KoboldLord]

If rPois is meaningless, it's likely because poison status is meaningless. Reducing damage from Poison Arrow is very desirable, but monsters with that spell aren't all that common relative to monsters with normal venom-branded attacks. Venom-branded attacks are usually irrelevant because the damage over time is unreasonably low compared to the physical damage over time that those same monsters typically deal with their normal attacks. Consequently, during the fight the poison ticks are the least worrisome thing going on, and after the fight it is trivially easy to quaff one potion off of your stack of 30 or just mash 5 if it wasn't going to be fatal anyway.

To make venom-branded monsters more interesting, I suggest having poison status tick less frequently, but hit for perhaps 25% of the player's current hit points instead. Kind of like a mini-torment. Poison resistance cuts off a chunk of that, or alternatively it could reduce the chance of having poison damage tick, or increase the chance of having poison status wear off. The expected damage can even be the same as with status quo poison, just with more alarming spike damage. Possibly even to the extent of it ever being worthwhile to quaff curing for poison while still in combat.

As a side benefit, a D1 character who has not yet found even one potion of curing won't be killed because a random adder or kobold happened to proc poison for more than that character's maximum health. If you can deal with the source of the poison, the poison itself won't kill you.

[duvessa]

stop saying rPois reduces poison arrow damage by 66%
it reduces poison arrow's poison damage by 66.67%, but not its physical damage
poison arrow's total damage gets reduced by 46.67%

[Sar]

That explains things.

[Roderic]

Aren't adders the main source of early deaths? And spiny frogs and black mambas can ruin your Lair exploration. Besides, between d:5 and d:10 for sure you found a bunch of killer bees. For all these cases rPois is still desirable in early game/pre-branches

[Sar]

Adders do kill you with poison, yes. Bees mostly kill you by being super-fast and super hard to hit (and they come in groups because why not). Spinies are faster than you and hit like trucks. Mambas are way faster than you and hit very strongly too. Poison is secondary in these cases.

Edit: though I remember having problems with adders as a Naga, so clearly poison is not the only thing they have.

[and into]

However it is true that rPois is not very useful in early game, because in early game, outside of a few unusual enemies (like ghosts with meph cloud), all rPois is doing is stopping you from getting poison status from venomous attacks. But basically all resistances are situational, and the situations in which they are useful tend to be rarer in early game. rPois is not all that different in this regard.

"Just stopping you from getting poison status" can be a very significant bonus, even in the early game - notably, the adder becomes much less dangerous for characters which start with rPois, and it's very dangerous without!

I feel I need to treat early adders as serious threats on many characters whether I have rPois or not. They are faster than you and can do a good bit of damage for the first few levels. The poison does make them a bit more punishing just because many characters don't have a lot of HP at the point they are common, but claiming that adders become "much less dangerous" with rPois I would consider an overstatement.

But, anyway, my main (and more on-topic) point is that rPois is roughly on par with other resistances in early game and, thanks to some recent changes, has struck me in recent games as being more useful in late game than it was in the past (even if MR, followed by rF and rC, are all still more important than rPois).

[Wahaha]

Edit: never mind

[johlstei]

Yes, but statistically speaking... let's say for sake of simplicity that big poisonous monster "P" attacks 3 times. Let's say, also for simplicity, that you have (without rpois) 50% of probability of being poisoned.
So, without rpois, during a single fight with P:

12.5% of the times, all 3 attacks will hit with poisonous effect
37.5% of the times, 2 attacks will hit with poison and 1 without
37.5% of the times, 1 attack will hit with poison and 2 without
12.5% of the times, all 3 attacks will hit without poisonous effect

So, if we say that 2 poisonous effects are "very dangerous", 12.5%+37.5%=50% of the fights will be "very dangerous"

If rPois hlaves the probability (so from 50% of being poisoned to 25%), chances become:

1.5% of the times, all 3 attacks will hit with poisonous effect
14% of the times, 2 attacks will hit with poison and 1 without
42.2% of the times, 1 attack will hit with poison and 2 without
42.2% of the times, all 3 attacks will hit without poisonous effect

So, we still have 1.5+14=15.5% of "very dangerous" fights (about 1 on seven).

Hope math is correct.

The idea here is that not ALL fights are LESS dangerous, only FEWER fights are dangerous.

Ahh, I see what you're saying, rPois always has a chance that you roll poorly and it does nothing, meaning a worst case encounter will always be the same as if you didn't have it, which is a difference from rF+. A best case encounter will also cause it to do 0 damage, unlike rF+. I'd be interested in playing a version of crawl where all resistances worked like poison in that sense instead of the other way around. Even with your example numbers, 50% of fights being really dangerous probably makes clearing a branch untenable, while 15% may not, it's far from meaningless. Obviously you ought to run away before you are two poison attacks away from dying, but fewer of those bad fights means fewer resources spent getting through them, and to me that's a huge win.

I guess I just don't think about encounters in retrospect like that. You can look back on a really bad encounter and say "rPois didn't help me at all", but instead I tend to think about the marginal danger of spending another turn in range of a given set of enemies, and rPois certainly helps there. In the crawl worst case you are killed by the first giant gecko you find every time, it's really a game of minimizing the probabilities of the bad effects, and being able to run when you do.

[ackack]

Re: the danger of various poisonous monsters, I think there are a couple that got meaningfully more dangerous with new poison, although they come later in the game. The most notable for me are swamp dragons, which I find pretty brutal without rPois now.

[crate]

The problem with poison always was and still is that damage-over-time is not a good mechanic, especially when you get a magic cure that instantly removes the damage-over-time.

The only situation where it ever ends up working differently from instant damage is if you have some way to actively change your regeneration rate, but I really do not believe that regen spell and regen rings are a good reason to keep damage-over-time existing. (Of course the magnitude of the instant damage depends on your regeneration rate also.)

So because of this the most important effect of rpois is the same effect you get from e.g. rF: you reduce the impact damage of various poison attacks.

[khalil]

The problem with poison always was and still is that damage-over-time is not a good mechanic, especially when you get a magic cure that instantly removes the damage-over-time.

The only situation where it ever ends up working differently from instant damage is if you have some way to actively change your regeneration rate, but I really do not believe that regen spell and regen rings are a good reason to keep damage-over-time existing.

There is a slight difference. A cure potion used on instant damage just heals you by the standard amount, whereas a cure potion used on the poison status heals you by the standard amount plus whatever damage you were going to take from the poison in the future. Plus, when you get fatally poisoned you can just chug a cure potion and walk off without having taken that much damage, or chug a heal potion so that you have more HP than the poison will take away, whereas with instant damage you just die, no matter how many potions you have in your inventory.