'5' should channel instead of rest when free

[Hurkyl]

When a player has a source of free channeling -- e.g. mummy/lichform with Sif/Staff of Energy, then '5' should channel until MP is full rather than resting normally.

(exception: when Barbs is active, you should rest normally until Barbs are gone before channeling)

[KoboldLord]

Alternatively, channeling could be reworked as a passive ability that is always on. I don't need to mash aa over and over when there is a food cost and a handy pile of chunks, either. Mummy channeling is not some special case that uniquely needs a special ability to avoid tediously spamming a minor ability while not under any kind of threat.

[Hurkyl]

Alternatively, channeling could be reworked as a passive ability that is always on. I don't need to mash aa over and over when there is a food cost and a handy pile of chunks, either. Mummy channeling is not some special case that uniquely needs a special ability to avoid tediously spamming a minor ability while not under any kind of threat.

Reasonable too. I was admittedly being lazy and not wanting to think through how to deal with the edge case where food supplies are running tight and you don't want to spam channel.

But since you brought it up, I suppose you could have an ability that lets you turn automatic channeling on and off if you need to.

(or I suppose, if we believe food really is plentiful, just remove the hunger cost)

[Hurkyl]

Or both act like a ring of regeneration whose effect scales with evocations/invocations.

The staff of energy, for example, could grants 0.25 MP regeneration per turn and costs 6.25 nutrition per turn at 0 evocations, and 1 MP regeneration per turn and 25 nutrition per turn at 27 evocations. This is roughly the same rate of regeneration and the same costs you get with the current staff of energy, except that it is a buff because you don't have to spend turns evoking it. So maybe the numbers would need to be adjusted a bit.

Changing Sif's channel energy to work the same way would probably be way too strong if it bears any resemblance to the rate of regeneration you can currently get.

[Patashu]

(exception: when Barbs is active, you should rest normally until Barbs are gone before channeling)

What about corrosion? Or can you repair corrosion while channeling?

[Hurkyl]

(exception: when Barbs is active, you should rest normally until Barbs are gone before channeling)

What about corrosion? Or can you repair corrosion while channeling?

I think corrosion just goes away after time.

[snow]

Just write a Lua script to do that. And to swap gear to eat poison chunks. And to warn you if you're about to cast invisibility while contaminated.
Basically any sort of automatic action or warning can be done with Lua.

[Patashu]

Just write a Lua script to do that. And to swap gear to eat poison chunks. And to warn you if you're about to cast invisibility while contaminated.
Basically any sort of automatic action or warning can be done with Lua.

But anything that's a 'no brainer' should be baked into the game, and not require fucking around with LUA.

[Hurkyl]

Also, writing a Lua script requires being able to find the documentation and examples/tutorials for the API crawl exposes.

[snow]

Also, writing a Lua script requires being able to find the documentation and examples/tutorials for the API crawl exposes.

None of that actually exists by the way. You literally have to read Crawl's source code to find which LUA hooks exist.
Anyway, my point was that there's too many things like that and if the devs tried to fix them all they'd never have time to do anything else. Off the top of my head: recasting deflect missiles before exploring if it's down, printing randomly generated pan lord weaknesses so you don't have to xv them, a force more when a unique or ghost comes into view, automatically butchering and eating corpses as a troll on exploration (I had a bot for this by the way; it broke now that corpses are no longer items).