Proposal: Redesigns to Torment, Hellfire and Caster AI

[Kautzman]

Greetings all,

This is a set of ideas I've been tossing around in my head for some time and decided to put it on paper. The core concern is this: Casters and caster effects, specifically those in the extended end-game represent a poor substitute for tactical play. While casters can be interesting early, they degrade over time as the PC becomes more powerful. To makeup for their lackluster damage output in the extended end game, hellfire and torment are used to keep the player on their toes and to keep runes 6-15 treacherous. I feel like an improvement can be made specifically to the extended end game such that we don't have to rely on 'pure' damage any more, as well as tighten up caster design.

This post is specifically about the way damage is handled in the extended end game, so in regards torment and hellfire specifically...

1. It's lazy design

A lot of the game is spent finding ways to mitigate the threats that you are going to encounter. Fighting Orbs of Fire without rF is silly. Going into snake without rPois is silly. Walking into Elf without no ticks of MR is asking to get banished. You need to consider what they threats are and whether or not you have the tools to deal with them. You don't necessarily need any resistances to finish the game, but you at least have to have some kind of plan. If you want to fight an OoF without rF, then maybe antimagic will do the trick. That's at least a decision that the player makes and it's interesting. It's making the best of a bad scenario and at it's core, it's problem solving.

Hellfire and torment are the way they are because there is a very real chance that a PC will find themselves in a situation where elemental damage is a joke and physical damage can be almost totally ignored. Hellfire and torment don't care about your gear and even at rN+++, torment still does very threatening amounts of damage. The problem is that it's a lazy way to make the end game scary. That's a bandaid solution to the PC scaling into the end game and it's implemented by simply adding 'pure', unmitigateable damage to the game. Right now, it's there because it needs to be there. Now, pure damage isn't necessarily a problem and hellfire really isn't a bad mechanic except...

2. The only reason you are alive is because caster mobs are stupid

Casting mobs never act in an ideal manner and god knows that if they did in the game's current state, it'd be a disaster. The problem is here that when you are dealing with threats that are dishing out pure damage, depending on a few variables, the amount of damage that can be unleashed on you can range from 0 to 200+ depending on how they act. For reference, if you there are 2 things that can torment you, 1 thing that can hellfire, you can get knocked down from 200 HP to 0 HP in one turn. That shit don't work on paper and it's only the idiotic nature of caster AI that you can even touch extended. It's only caster AI as well that doesn't actively try to slaughter you post haste. Centaurs and Yaktaurs will shoot at you every turn they can. Melee dudes will walk up to you and beat your ass in every turn they can. Ancient liches will go full retard and cast at you maybe one out of 3 or 4 turns...except when they don't and decide that summoning a 1 and lobbing crystal spears is the best thing (which it is!). This really comes full circle back to my point at the beginning of this section: Caster AI acts really poorly compared to the rest of the game.

If you are level 4 and an orc warrior comes around the corner, you know exactly what to expect and can act accordingly. If you are level 12 and a group of death yaks is staring you down, you know exactly what to expect and can act accordingly. If you see a group of yaktaurs on D12 (do they spawn that soon? I dunno) and are low on life, you know exactly what to expect and can act accordingly. If you see an Ancient Lich, you have a list of literally 24 spells subdivided into 4 sets that he can cast at you, but there is also a good chance that the lich will just walk at you for a few turns as well... What? Why would it do that? It makes sense on some caster/hybrid mobs like Saint Roka, who can slaughter you from afar with a scary smite, or hit you for a billion damage with the sharp edge of his stick, but for a lich? All you are doing is introducing some ridiculous variance by forcing this particular class of NPC to act stupid.

Now, this doesn't mean that I think every caster should be employing the Orb Weaver strat of 'run away like a bitch oh my god I want to slit my wrist every time I see this enemy' AI, but I think we can do better than the current implementation.

Casters in Crawl have Trisomy 21, and it's part of what enables some really sloppy design with ultra-high variance which is part of why there needs to be this crutch of 'pure' damage anyway.

3. Because of how high variance is, it's impossible to play around a worst case scenario, because the worst case scenario is often times death

Like I said before, 2 tormentors and a hellfire-capable mob can kill you from 200 HP in one turn*. The tactical nature of the game kind of breaks down after awhile. Between the number of tools you have and how versatile the PC becomes, it's really hard to throw something at the player that forces them to utilize clever positioning or think about their kite/retreat path, when even the dumbest of melee PCs can have RMsl and Flight castable. So you just employ difficulty the way Ninja Theory does and just jack up numbers until something becomes scary. As I see it, pure damage -- as it is currently implemented -- is being used if not as a tactics-replacement, at least as a supplement to the idea.


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How to fix it

Fixing this without introducing some other kinds of problems is pretty hard. Any adjustments to systems at hand can have terrifying side effects and to say it'd be 'simple' is comical at best. That said, here's what I came up with as starting points

Torment no longer does damage

Torment doesn't do damage anymore. Instead, torment applies a debuff that stacks up to 3 for some number of turns. The torment debuff incurs rN- and adds an additional 10-20 of negative damage from every source of damage taken, increasing by 10 for every stack of torment. Torment checks MR and has a spell power dependent on who is casting it. For most end-game monsters, I think a spell power of 225 is appropriate, giving it a 63% chance to be applied against MR of 200. The chance to add additional stacks is reduced by a 1/3rd for every stack, so assuming those numbers stay constant, the chance to add a second and third stack would be 42% and 28% respectively.

The idea here is that torment by itself isn't that threatening, but with other enemies, it becomes a really serious threat. It'd also give MR a little more value and make pots of cancellation more precious. Choosing when to engage with the debuff and when to retreat and figuring out what you can get away with would be a big part of managing it.

Hellfire does elemental damage and makes itself scarier

Hellfire does more normalized damage (I'm thinking like 25-40 instead of 3-60) and checks fire resistance and applies a -rF debuff for some number of turns. Alternatively, hellfire could just check against your lowest resistance among rC rF and rN and shred that instead, making it exceptionally scary if you are walking around with no resistances in a specific slot. The goal here is to remove pure damage as a crutch to still inflict threatening damage to the player.

Casters act like they know how to cast

Give casters the ability to make better decisions. If you are at max range, a lich that can cast OoD will probably cast OoD, but give that spell a cooldown. They way I'd implement caster AI is to give them sets of tiered spells and force a cooldown on each tier. So something like OoD might be a Tier 1 spell, but Mystic Blast might be Tier 3. Casters will probably always reach for that tier one spell, but if you can dodge or mitigate it, you don't have to deal with it again for some number of turns. This could also have an interaction with antimagic, where instead of incurring a fail chance, the internal CD has a chance to be delayed. This is somewhat dangerous though as if you round a corner to 3 casters, the results could be pretty devastating.

Some minor changes to resistances

On the back of the Hellfire and Torment changes, I'd like to see resistances go from 50/35/20 to 50/37.5/25. I'd like the see rN put on the same scale to keep it threatening, since torment damage will be checking that resistance. It'd also make resistance shredding a bit scarier and keep damage relevant.

These kinds of ideas are pretty rough and without some thought, brainstorming, and testing, they aren't something I'd ever condone to just ship, but I hope they are at least a starting point for a conversation.

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Considerations

This list of changes is huge and scary and fundamentally reinvents pretty big portions of the game. Even as early as D3, intelligent Orc Priests and Orc Wizards are going to be threatening in different ways that can easily result in monstrous amounts of damage to the PC that early. Changes to torment makes some monsters way more threatening and other monsters a joke. This isn't a complete list of potential considerations surrounding these changes, but just some of the big ones.

The Good

- With the changes to torment, development gets significantly more knobs to turn when making adjustments. It could be a very easy way to make further changes in the future to extended end game without simply throwing 'more' at the player.
- There would be room for casting mobs to enjoy much tighter design. When you can start to direct which spells get cast in which order, there is a lot of potential to make casters threatening in different ways for different reasons, instead of just giving them a spell list.
- All kinds of damage would always check the player's gear and mutations. No longer would the end game have to rely on pure damage to be threatening. Gear is always, always relevant for all sources of damage. I think this is a big win for a game where a huge portion of the progression is dictated by gear.

The Bad

- Monster design for those with torment and hellfire would need to be revisited. Some monsters would become jokes. Tormentors by themselves would be really terrible and would probably need more than torment. It'd be a lot of work.
- Monster design for casters across the board would need to be revisited. As I mentioned earlier, one orc priest and one orc wizard coming into LoS vs a level 5 PC can very easily be a death sentence. Their'd have to be a solution to avoid 3 smites in 1 turn when you happen to turn the wrong corner. Casters would have a lot more front end and it'd probably be problematic.

The Ugly
- I can't imagine that the first version of the game that ships with changes such as these will be very tightly tuned. If you are willing to tear down a lot of the systems that make the endgame challenging and rebuild them, it's probably going to be very hard and/or very easy in places where it shouldn't be. Re-tuning the extended end game is going to be hard, with the only consolation being that it'd probably be relatively easy to iterate on. No matter what, the road will be rocky.
- All this together would be a tremendous amount of effort. The list of changes here is not even close to complete.

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Finally...
So after I've spent a week thinking about how I'm going to rag on Dungeon Crawl, and a half-dozen hours typing and retyping this up, I guess it's important for me to state that I really like this game and I find it really exceptional. I think the devs do a fantastic job and compared to most other games I have *strong opinions* about, the sins that DC:SS commits are quite minor. If we are being honest, this is nitpicking about a relatively minor aspect of the game I don't think the game itself is somehow fundamentally flawed or 'bad' because of torment, hellfire, or caster AI. Please don't interpret this as a 'Blizzard doesn't care about Shamans' post, because it isn't intended as that.

[tedric]

Seems very well-reasoned and got me thinking about certain aspects of Crawl design that I'd never considered before -- especially in extended, which I don't reach all that often.

Caster AI does seem rather inconsistent, and improving it would definitely cause a lot of balance issues especially in the early game. But long-term I'd really like to see caster behavior become a little more predictable.

One minor question: In a small number of games I end up with equipment that grants 3 or more pips of most/all resistances. How would proposed!Hellfire deal with this for purposes of "shredding" resists? Say my character has 4 sources of rC+ and rN+, and 5 sources of rF+. Assuming a coin-toss between rC- and rN- as my lowest resists, proposed!Hellfire picks rC-. Would the 4th (usually extraneous) source of a pip keep me at rC+++? In other words, would extra pips of a resist count as "Hellfire insurance" even though they don't further decrease actual elemental damage?

[bananaken]

One minor question: In a small number of games I end up with equipment that grants 3 or more pips of most/all resistances. How would proposed!Hellfire deal with this for purposes of "shredding" resists? Say my character has 4 sources of rC+ and rN+, and 5 sources of rF+. Assuming a coin-toss between rC- and rN- as my lowest resists, proposed!Hellfire picks rC-. Would the 4th (usually extraneous) source of a pip keep me at rC+++? In other words, would extra pips of a resist count as "Hellfire insurance" even though they don't further decrease actual elemental damage?

If Cerebov's sword is any indication, rF+++ and rF++++ are identical. Cerebov will strip you down to rF++ if you are afflicted by his melee attack, so I assume any other "resistance stripping" attacks would behave similarly.

It's worth noting that while this concept is a more obvious way of making other enemies and damage sources potentially threatening, it needs not be the only way to do so. I do like the idea of keeping things dangerous without relying on how torment/hellfire currently works.

[crate]

I don't really agree with making monster AI smart, because that is such a dramatic change that the game you end up with is not going to be crawl. It might make for a good game, just as a roguelike with non-persistent floors can be a perfectly fine game. However, just like a roguelike with non-persistent floors, I have my doubts that it would really feel like crawl. (My biggest gripes with crawl AI already are actually the ways in which it tries to be "smart" (ranged AI is the biggest culprit) since it really doesn't accomplish what it was supposed to accomplish.)

I think torment is very well-designed, actually. There are very real ways to deal with it, though they involve player skill instead of just using items. Have you read evilmike's post about it? viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3443&#p43566

You can argue about hellfire but the entire reason it exists is to be basically a bigger version of smite. Changing it to not be such would effectively be the same as removing hellfire entirely (so really your task here is to argue that "big smite" has no reason to exist, which I'm not sure I agree with). It has a very unfortunate name.

[Kautzman]

I don't really agree with making monster AI smart, because that is such a dramatic change that the game you end up with is not going to be crawl. It might make for a good game, just as a roguelike with non-persistent floors can be a perfectly fine game. However, just like a roguelike with non-persistent floors, I have my doubts that it would really feel like crawl. (My biggest gripes with crawl AI already are actually the ways in which it tries to be "smart" (ranged AI is the biggest culprit) since it really doesn't accomplish what it was supposed to accomplish.)

I think torment is very well-designed, actually. There are very real ways to deal with it, though they involve player skill instead of just using items. Have you read evilmike's post about it? viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3443&#p43566

You can argue about hellfire but the entire reason it exists is to be basically a bigger version of smite. Changing it to not be such would effectively be the same as removing hellfire entirely (so really your task here is to argue that "big smite" has no reason to exist, which I'm not sure I agree with). It has a very unfortunate name.

Monster AI is a matter of perspective and I'll give you that it'd radically change the way casters in crawl would behave. I prefer games to be very tight and 'intentional' in design.

-

Something I should have addressed in the OP which I didn't was evilmike's famous 'torment' post, which addresses not the design of torment, but this quote specifically:

Honestly, I have always hated torment because of how limiting it makes the game.

Just to be perfectly clear here, I don't think torment is overpowered, or hard to deal with, or otherwise in need of a nerf. I think the design of torment is lazy and boring. Just because it shaves off a lot of HP doesn't make it not boring. At the end of the day, it does damage and you play around it like you would any other spell, except it doesn't require a beam so even less so. It's role in the late game is to be scary and mission accomplished I guess, but it's scary in the absolute laziest way possible. I think Crawl can find a better implementation of 'scary' than torment in it's current form.

Finally Hellfire. Hellfire isn't just big smite. I mean, if you look through it through the lens of the game, then yeah, I guess that's apt, but it's role through the lens of design is much like torment's: Make something scary. Much like torment it's a really lazy way to make something scary. Any time you introduce any kind of pure damage into a game wherein a major way of progressing is equipment, you've taken the easy way out; pure damage is the easiest way to make something threatening in the event that the PC reaches a state where little else is. The answer here isn't to make something do pure damage, but to make something scary through some other mechanic that still checks your PCs stats. Gear remains meaningful against all forms of damage and like I said in the OP, that's a huge win for a game.

If you can design a game with as much content as Crawl and keep things challenging without resorting to cheap design tactics like pure damage or something like a Death Ray in ADOM, then you have done something really phenomenal, because that's a hard thing to do.

Part of this process will be to look at these kinds of mechanics in terms of what they do for the game, not what they are in the game. Yeah, if someone says, 'Get rid of hellfire', you might want to check that, but saying, 'Hellfire is fundamentally lazy, here is a better alternative', then you can't keep looking at it with, '...We are getting rid of hellfire?' in the back of your head.

[One-Eyed Jack]

Hellfire "checks" the hp stat. It hits gargoyles more than trolls, for example.
You seem to be using pejorative terms like "lazy" and "cheap" to describes something that is actually juat simple and straightforward. I can understand dissatisfaction with ranged ai (although that is a very weighty issue itself) but that doesn't mean that hellfire is in any way problematic, and I think most people would agree that simplicity and straightforwardness do not limit tacticality in any way

[Kautzman]

Hellfire "checks" the hp stat. It hits gargoyles more than trolls, for example.

You've missed the point completely.

You seem to be using pejorative terms like "lazy" and "cheap" to describes something that is actually juat simple and straightforward. I can understand dissatisfaction with ranged ai (although that is a very weighty issue itself) but that doesn't mean that hellfire is in any way problematic, and I think most people would agree that simplicity and straightforwardness do not limit tacticality in any way

Simple doesn't mean lazy. Lazy means you've taken the path of least resistance to solve a problem with no concern for the design implications. Short of an instant-kill mechanic, pure damage is the easiest way to keep things scary forever. This also is a time when your players have the most tools. If flat damage is your idea of interesting in the part of the game where design is allowed the most liberty, then I'd insist that you are high, drunk, or both. An example of where simple works best: Ogres. Ogres do one thing. They move at normal speed and hit hard. That's simple, but in context it's also really effective in design. Creating an HP sponge that hits you really hard at a time when you are forced to improvise to deal with it forces interesting decisions from the player. It's the first enemy a lot of players see that requires something more than tabtabtab and it's the first enemy that forces a player to think about spells like conjure flame, or items like wands, or alternative weapons like blowguns. This is a good thing and the simplicity is part of what makes it that much stronger in design. Torment and Hellfire don't do that because you are far, far past the part of the game where 'lots of damage' requires some special tactics or clever planning. You know where torment works really well? Menkaure. By himself, he's kind of scary but his spellset in a vacuum is actually threatening at that stage in the game. You have less to deal with it and because of that, simpler mechanics work a lot better.

I mean no offense here, but the first line in your post kind of indicates to me that you have a misunderstanding of what the intent of these changes are and where torment and hellfire have room to be better in design than they currently are.

[crate]

So, if you go back in history far enough, hellfire used to be resistable (by AC). That was specifically removed so that hellfire could purposely be not resisted by anything. It is literally just a big smite (except with (sometimes) different targeting).

it does damage and you play around it like you would any other spell

But this isn't actually really the case. There are several ways in which it is different, the most notable of which is torment literally cannot kill you. Maybe you would like to argue that more monsters like "Tormentor" should exist (I have said in the past that I think this should be the case), because it is true that the various Fiends and Gloorx all are quite capable of killing you. Tormentors, on the other hand, pretty much don't (directly) kill anyone.

Gear remains meaningful against all forms of damage and like I said in the OP, that's a huge win for a game.

It is not evident to me that this is true. In fact it's also false in that gear is actually still relevant: how fast you can kill the monster still depends (at least sometimes) on what items you have. But even if you ignore that, I do not see why it is necessarily the case that items should be meaningful against all forms of damage. (And in fact would still not be true: smite still exists, and so does flay, though I would assume you have the same problems with these attacks?) But since this seems to be the premise of your argument, I suggest that you actually support this.

One nice thing about specifically not caring about resistances or AC or EV is that you can make the effect damaging for characters with basically any set of equipment you like, while simultaneously not being so damaging that it is impossible to deal with without specific resists. I think, personally, that this is a good thing. Your suggestions for torment and hellfire (which are, by the way, specifically designed to work like I'm suggesting here) don't work this way--you make hellfire into "fire except it hurts more the second time it hits you", and torment against low MR characters would be irresistible in your suggestion and against characters without rN would deal lots more damage. I'm having a hard time seeing how to replicate this "scary for everyone, but immediately fatal for no one" type of attack with things that check resistances--crawl characters can get some really ridiculous defenses against resistible things, after all. (And technically there are several ways to resist torment anyway.)

[KoboldLord]

I can tell that the OP has put some time and effort into thinking about this, but I still think that the OP's solution is worse than the original problem. I don't want to grind equipment in the Abyss to get a set of maxed-out resists so I can handle Hellfire. If it doesn't give me the chance to resist, it gives me a threat that is worth thinking about without me being able to trivialize it with pure dumb luck or with persistent item trawling. Torment is also a surprisingly slick design that makes other monsters more threatening without actually being threatening itself. While a place for the proposed replacements could be found in the game if somebody wants to code them, I would not like to lose the effects that we already have because they are good effects and I like the impact they have on the later parts of the game.

Caster AI is another issue, but making them always choose the obviously intelligent choice would make them much more annoying when they are not a threat and impossibly more lethal when they are a threat. Monster spell sets would need to be gutted, because the player isn't going to be any better at handling near-human-intelligence spellcasters than monsters are. At the very least, you would limit the number of viable builds the player can use because it is absolutely mandatory to kill any spellcaster AI that appears in LOS before it gets a second turn, regardless of the starting positioning or the other monsters on the board.

[Quazifuji]

I'll just time in with my personal opinion: Torment and Hellfire are not necessarily inherently bad mechanics. I think a lot of people in this thread have made very good arguments in their favor.

I do, however, think that they are way too prevalent in extended. The problem isn't that they are used as an extended threat, but that it sometimes feels like extended relies too much on them. Out of the five tier 1 demons, arguably the 5 most threatening non-boss, non-Pan-Lord enemies in extended, three use torment and one uses hellfire. Hellions and Tormentors, arguably the most dangerous tier 2 demons, are known for spamming hellfire or torment, respectively. Out of the six types of enemies present in Tomb, Trapdoor Spiders and regular mummies are almost trivial to anyone doing Tomb, Sphinxes only appear in one spot, Guardian mummies are fairly easy and possbly most threatening because of their death curses and large numbers, and the last two, by far the most threatening enemies in the area, use torment. Out of the hell and pan lords, the game's biggest, most threatening bosses, 4 use either torment or hellfire, and two of the remaining four come with demons who have torment or hellfire.

Basically, around half, if not more, of the most threatening enemies in extended use either hellfire or torment. There are some non-hellfire or torment users that are threatening - some of the Pan demonspawn, Executioners, Lom Lobon, Mnoleg (Cerebov and Asmodeus don't use torment but come with brimstone or ice fiends, respectively) - but it feels like a disproportionate number of the major threats in extended use torment or hellfire. Torment and Hellfire might feel more interesting as threats if they were a bit less common and there were more major threats that didn't have them. But as is, it feels like the majority of non-popcorn fights in 10 of the game's runes revolve around hellfire and torment.

So I don't necessarily think Torment and Hellfire should be revamped, but I'd like to see many of the enemies that use them revamped. Keep their existence, keep Hellions, keep tormentors, but maybe remove them from some other enemies and find other ways to make sure they stay threatening. Part of the reason that torment resistance feels so essential for the end-game isn't just that it's so incredibly threatening, but that it's so commonly present on all the enemies that are already threatening. Tormentors are a very interesting enemy. They're like flayed ghosts - mostly harmless on their own, but incredibly dangerous when paired with other enemies. Torment is less interesting on enemies like Ice Fiends or Brimstone Fiends, where its lack of ability to kill you is irrelevant because the enemies have plenty of other ways of killing you anyway.

[Sar]

I love torment, I think it's a great design. Fist time seeing your HP being cut in half is a great moment and makes you respect those fiend dudes. There are many ways to deal with it, as detailed in the excellent evilmike's post, and most of those ways don't involve resistance hunting and juggling, which IMO is great.

Edit: pls don't nerf fiends they're cool

Edit #2: I also thought about cooldowns a bit and it seems like it will encourage stuff like "so this lich cast ood this means his ood is now on cooldown for X turns and he will cast spells X or Y", which will require some meta knowledge about cooldowns and I am not sure I like that.

[ontoclasm]

Other people have said more elegant things than I about torment and hellfire, so I'll stick to what I know, which is UI design. "Smart" casters work fine in a number of games, and I agree that having monsters cast in a more predictable way could be fine. But sadly many of the methods that might allow that, including your suggestion, have "memory issues": I as the player need to know what state a monster is in, AI-wise, so that I can predict to the best of my ability what it will cast. Crawl's current casters "succeed" at this by dint of always being in the "cast a random, non-useless spell*" state. A truly intelligent caster that always casts the best spell would also work, because then at least I know what's coming. But if they've got cooldowns, MP, etc. then I need to know what's going on with those -- in fact, under your system, knowing it is often literally the difference between life and death.

So that means that I as the developer need to communicate it. I think I saw an SA post about having to write down the state of every caster, and that's what we've gotta avoid; if a player saves in the middle of a fight and comes back two months later to find herself with 10 HP next to an ancient lich, how does she know on which turn in can cast LCS? Unfortunately, on console at least I have literally one character in one of 14 colors to display this with. xv lets us show more, but then the player has the xv the caster every turn. Tiles isn't much better; adding a status icon is easy but every one we add increases the already-annoying visual clutter, especially considering monsters might already have like 4 or 5 icons stuck to them. And then we have to do this for every single caster in view.

e: For an example of a game that makes use of your suggestion, try TOME4; just about every ability is on a cooldown, often with a cooldown length varying by stats/skills, and the main thing it does is make it really hard to keep up with what a monster will do (and even which of your own 40ish skills and passives are active).

[One-Eyed Jack]

IYou've missed the point completely.

The answer here isn't to make something do pure damage, but to make something scary through some other mechanic that still checks your PCs stats.

The degree to which hellfire or smiting are dangerous/scary is dependent on how much HP the player character has, which is dependent on Fighting, mutations, species, and potentially items (this is max HP, obviously current is also a factor.) You can assert that all damage should depend on AC or EV to defray it but other than glibly saying that attacks that ignore them are "cheap design tactics" there's really no difference between them and attacks that don't ignore AC/EV, except how much damage they do (obviously.) From the perspective of the player, a 40 damage fireball against 20 AC isn't meaningfully different than a 30 damage blast of Hellfire against 20 AC; the existence/prevalence of the latter contra the former does, however, affect the strategic decisions of the player slightly (by making AC marginally less important to raise.)

It's also weird that you bring up Death Rays in ADOM because they are essentially the opposite of hellfire (they rely on a binary resistance that is usually granted from equipment.)

If flat damage is your idea of interesting in the part of the game where design is allowed the most liberty, then I'd insist that you are high, drunk, or both... Torment and Hellfire don't do that because you are far, far past the part of the game where 'lots of damage' requires some special tactics or clever planning.

Dealing damage is the only way that the vast majority of enemies have of being dangerous to the player at any point in the game; Hellfire/smiting is no different. I don't know what kind of extended games you are playing, but if an enemy with hellfire enters LOS for me it certainly affects the tactics I employ during that fight. Enemies possessing Hellfire are potentially very threatening, especially to characters with low HPs. evilmike's post, for example, mentioned how landing near Hellion island essentially forces the use of consumables or specific spells - i.e., special tactics.

Is the early game more interesting than extended? Yes, but that has little to do with Hellfire and a lot more to do with consumables and XP.

[bananaken]

Is the early game more interesting than extended? Yes, but that has little to do with Hellfire and a lot more to do with consumables and XP.

My experience, at least, is that Torment and Hellfire take center stage so often in the last 10 runes that it can get quite repetitive. Obviously hellfire doesn't come into play as often, and you tend to have a *lot* more flexibility when dealing with it since hellfire lacks smite targeting, and usually the only hellfire burst source are hellions which are relatively squishy.

Which brings me to my other point: Kautzman is proposing spells that could potentially replace Hellfire+Torment, but why not just have these introduced as new spells that could appear in certain areas of extended in place of Hellfire+Torment (or in some cases, all of them at once )? They need not be introduced in their current form as suggested, but I'm wondering if brainstorming some interesting threats that could help diversify extended (while being able to rival a spell like Torment) is something that the devs are willing to entertain. I certainly would love to see something like it.

Along the same vein, improvements in caster AI need not be universal, but perhaps something you'd only run into in extended areas or certain uniques: say demon lords and unique pandemonium lords. What I'd love to see here when implementing smarter AI in this case would be to provide a challenging fight but with opportunity to perhaps employ new tactics you normally couldn't use. For example:

Lom Lobon has some experimental AI, upon encountering him he will prioritize using his level 9 spells when applicable, but there's a tradeoff:
- Some flavor text that warns you he is about to use Glaciate - "Lom Lobon gestures. The air around you begins to freeze!"
- If you're at melee range specially, Lom Lobon will be very likely to use Tornado - "Raging winds begin to form around Lom Lobon!"
- If you're at range (where glaciate is less effective and/or misses), he will be much more likely to cast other spells like conjure ball lightning (maybe this could check for the player having rElec as well)

For Glaciate you could leave the effective range before he casts it, or Lom Lobon could even choose the cast point for Glaciate during the warning, allowing you to get behind him with a blink or something to that effect. For tabby characters you can simply tab through him, but the flavor text could pause you for a while (so you read it and hit enter so you do something about it or keep tabbing). This would balance out the theoretical, dramatic increase in casting the level 9 spell.

Tornado would be a little trickier to balance, since even with a warning it'd be very difficult to avoid, but maybe Lom Lobon needs it?

That would leave 7 other lords of course, but I'm wondering if things like this are being considered.

[Quazifuji]

Is the early game more interesting than extended? Yes, but that has little to do with Hellfire and a lot more to do with consumables and XP.

My experience, at least, is that Torment and Hellfire take center stage so often in the last 10 runes that it can get quite repetitive. Obviously hellfire doesn't come into play as often, and you tend to have a *lot* more flexibility when dealing with it since hellfire lacks smite targeting, and usually the only hellfire burst source are hellions which are relatively squishy.

Which brings me to my other point: Kautzman is proposing spells that could potentially replace Hellfire+Torment, but why not just have these introduced as new spells that could appear in certain areas of extended in place of Hellfire+Torment (or in some cases, all of them at once )? They need not be introduced in their current form as suggested, but I'm wondering if brainstorming some interesting threats that could help diversify extended (while being able to rival a spell like Torment) is something that the devs are willing to entertain. I certainly would love to see something like it.

This is basically what I was trying to say, but said much more succinctly. The reason Hellfire and Torment feel lazy, to me, isn't because they're bad designs, but because it feels like the vast majority of threatening enemies in extended have at least one of the two, which makes the design of extended's threats feel lazy. Having more diverse diverse threats in extended would make torment and hellfire a lot less annoying.

[crate]

Well the problem with making threats in extended that rely on things other than hellfire/torment is that crawl resists are too strong. You could go the orb of fire route, if you want, where you make the damage really big even with resistance ... but then you run into the orb of fire problem of making them unfightable without the resist you need. Now, if rF+++ gave something like 50% resistance instead of 80%, then this route would be a lot more reasonable to take (since the difference between "as much resistance as possible" and "no resistance at all" is so much smaller). Executioners already exist for "scary melee" threats (and again, the danger here is that probably you don't want to make extended impossible except for super beefy characters; execs are already the single most important monster for you to be able to deal with in Pan because you can't escape them the way you can pretty much everything else).

In fact balrugs are already pretty darn strong if you don't have rF, but of course basically everyone who does extended does have rF, and that cuts their damage in half.

[Wahaha]

When we had Forest people were saying it was as hard as Pan. I think it kind of was. I don't think it's that hard to create monster sets with an extended game difficulty that don't use hellfire and torment. Just give them stats that are slightly higher than 3 rune monsters. For example simply buff the original forest spriggan monster set and it becomes extended game difficulty. Of course spriggans are stupid enemies because of EV but you get the point.

[crate]

Well the thing about spriggan monsters is they're all Executioners: if you cannot defeat them they are absolutely terrifying since you also mostly cannot escape them. But you might note that Executioners rarely kill players in Pan--this is because once you reach the threshold of being able to kill them, they're not very dangerous, and since you know they're going to be in Pan you simply don't go there unless they're not deadly. I admit to not being very knowledgeable about Forest (I went in and in about three minutes found an elemental wellspring and left forever) but I believe its difficulty was basically this kind (and then of course with spriggans you have the additional problems involved with high-EV low-AC low-HP monsters also). Fast monsters are very variable difficulty in this manner (except for the ones that are just always scary, like Gloorx or orbs of fire, except for sufficiently durable characters even those aren't scary but I'm going to ignore that because it's exceptionally rare to be that strong).

This is similar to how Spider is way, way more dangerous to weak characters than Snake is (especially if you go back to before shock serpents were added) but pretty similar in difficulty or even less dangerous to strong characters.

(as an aside Spriggan Defenders actually are pretty strikingly similar to unhasted executioners once you consider that defenders get a weapon)

[Quazifuji]

Well the problem with making threats in extended that rely on things other than hellfire/torment is that crawl resists are too strong. You could go the orb of fire route, if you want, where you make the damage really big even with resistance ... but then you run into the orb of fire problem of making them unfightable without the resist you need. Now, if rF+++ gave something like 50% resistance instead of 80%, then this route would be a lot more reasonable to take (since the difference between "as much resistance as possible" and "no resistance at all" is so much smaller). Executioners already exist for "scary melee" threats (and again, the danger here is that probably you don't want to make extended impossible except for super beefy characters; execs are already the single most important monster for you to be able to deal with in Pan because you can't escape them the way you can pretty much everything else).

In fact balrugs are already pretty darn strong if you don't have rF, but of course basically everyone who does extended does have rF, and that cuts their damage in half.

Not every fight has to revolve around damage from a single element, though. You could have resistance shredding abilities and/or abilities that target your weakest resistance, as suggested by OP. You can also have abilities that are partially resistable, like fire storm and glaciate - this gets around the "there's too big a difference between no rF and rF+++ to balance for both". You can also have enemies or fights where multiple elements are present - in much of extended, you only ever need one or two resistances at a time, so you can easily swap rings or even armour (since you know what resistance you're going to need ahead of times, such as with the Hell branches). (Yes, it's possible to get +++ resistance for everything, but that's a pretty rare extreme unless you're Pan or Abyss scumming, and the game shouldn't be balanced around Pan or Abyss scumming).

I think the key here is that you don't need every threat to be threatening to every end-game character. I know that's obvious, but giving torment to 3 out of 5 tier 1 demons makes it feel like it's not. It feels like a way of forcing certain monsters to be threats to every character. I'd like to see more different monsters that give trouble to different characters - nothing that's impossible to kill for any one character, but more emphasis on a diverse set of threats so that end-game is less about preparing for certain particular threats and more about preparing for a wide variety and being able to deal with the ones you're less prepared for.

[bananaken]

I think the key here is that you don't need every threat to be threatening to every end-game character. I know that's obvious, but giving torment to 3 out of 5 tier 1 demons makes it feel like it's not. It feels like a way of forcing certain monsters to be threats to every character. I'd like to see more different monsters that give trouble to different characters - nothing that's impossible to kill for any one character, but more emphasis on a diverse set of threats so that end-game is less about preparing for certain particular threats and more about preparing for a wide variety and being able to deal with the ones you're less prepared for.

I'm sure this has been mentioned a million times already, but I guess as a reminder: another side effect of the frequency of torment as the biggest threat is that necromutation almost trivializes most extended branches.. get a source of clarity and you're gravy. Being undead also does this, but I assume this is balanced out by the hurdles undead characters need to get past during the early game as well as having other passive disadvantages like ghouls/mummies do. Lichform characters need to worry about holy attacks, but most are melee or require you to walk into them like Ophans do. This means if you're a ranged character you just finish them off at range. The other thing to worry about is dispel undead which lacks smite targeting so it's generally easier to avoid compared to torment. Pearl dragons are probably the notable exception here, but they're exceedingly rare outside of holy themed pandemonium floors. Basically keeping necromutation on is a no-brainer unless you know you're about to run into pearl dragons (should be obvious when) or you're face tanking a shadow fiend (less likely scenario vs any fiend being visible).

So yes, Torment does work well at giving a wide variety of characters a threat in extended.. except when you're immune to it. When you are, the things you worry about instead of torment pale in comparison. Yes, it's not practical for all characters to get Necromutation castable (or even find the spell). Of course, the focus shouldn't just be to provide more threats to necromutation/undead characters in extended, but things should be more threatening somehow to these guys. Like you said, more variety of dangers that give trouble to different characters (be it new spells, monsters, environmental changes, AI changes, etc).

This is obviously not trivial, but if the addition of the bennu is any indication, I'm guessing the devs do want to introduce a more diverse set of threats.

[crate]

Because resists are so strong in crawl you can just walk around with rF rC (this takes precisely 2 ring slots that you will have by Pan) and you're pretty much good. If you have enemies using more than 2 elements then you basically just run into "well I hope I get lucky and it chooses the one(s) that I have resists equipped for".

I mean yes there are obviously ways to make monsters threatening other than torment and hellfire (for characters with lots of resists), but in the end they all seem to me to either end up 1) being actually pretty much equivalent to hellfire (but usually involving a lot more jewellery swapping, so it's actually worse lol) or 2) absolutely pancaking characters with bad/average equipment (and my assertion is that this is not a good thing, or at least is not a good thing if it's the only way monsters are threatening to really buff characters).

(1) here includes things like "resistance shredding" (If you lose a rank of rF every time this newfire hits you, then it works exactly like hellfire after some number of attacks. If you go to the extreme and it gives rF---- after one hit (putting any character hit to rF- status) then it's exactly like hellfire except you get one attack of variable damage first. If you make it strip down resists more slowly, then you're making it more dissimilar to hellfire but also making it less likely to actually be threatening to the characters that hellfire is specifically designed to threaten); and things like "uses so many elements you can't resist them all" (this is like giving a monster hellfire but also giving it non-hellfire, resistable spells--you can resist the ones that aren't hellfire just fine either way. Except both of those still run into the problem that sufficiently well-equipped characters still resist the monster, though said characters are going to become increasingly more rare as you increase the shredding/number of elements. And since the end result is pretty much the same as hellfire, why should hellfire be removed/reworked if that's the case?)

And if you're making monsters that aren't threatening to characters with tons of resists, this is the wrong topic to be discussing that, since that is the exact reason torment and hellfire exist so of course those are going to be the monsters that we care about here. There's nothing wrong with Executioners and Balrugs as monsters, really, and they're quite scary to a lot of characters. They also are not supposed to be threatening in the same way that hellfire monsters or torment monsters are.

[Siegurt]

The one suggestion I saw which I found vaguely interesting was the debuff that makes you take more damage (Whether it's themed as negative energy or not isn't fundamental to the idea)

So a smite-targeted attack, which causes (melee?) attacks to do more damage to you for a short duration, has the potential to be dangerous.

This is not *much* different than the current implementation of acid (a temporary debuff on AC) however I think just adding more reasons to have rCorr in the extended game wouldn't be very interesting (It just makes other amulet choices less viable)

[araganzar]

I think the new ideas are great. I would not want to see Torment or Hellfire modified overall because a lot of thought has gone into their use as mechanics in extended and in balancing encounters.

What I find boring about extended is once I get my toolset, the Pan and Hell runes all kind of blend together. It would be cool if some of the ideas like resistance stripping and armour ablation made their way into the game along with other thematic changes differentiating the Hells. That way the mechanic can be tested only affecting one or two zones or a small minority of encounters. Great work has been done and continues to be done differentiating abyss/pan/hell. It also might force extended players to make more gear and spell loadout choices rather than gearing against torment.

Putting any AI into a game that's open source would be make it easier, I think. If I knew liches tend to blink away from melee I could change my gear and tactics to abuse that. If they became efficient spell casters I would have to prioritize Silence. Given that Silence is a hard stop to enemy casting, it seems counterproductive to optimize casting. The way it works now produces an average dps for the caster with notable spikes. You get a more dangerous worst case scenario but that is made up for by most casters being relatively fragile. I would rather see them be given new abilities we have to deal with than have their behavior smartened up.

[PleasingFungus]

This is not *much* different than the current implementation of acid (a temporary debuff on AC) however I think just adding more reasons to have rCorr in the extended game wouldn't be very interesting (It just makes other amulet choices less viable)

I would like there to be some reason to have rcorr in extended, which there isn't at present; that said, it of course shouldn't be a dominant threat in the way that hellfire or torment are. I'm also fond of the debuff that makes you take more damage as a new effect, though, as you said, the details are (and should be) negotiable.

[Hurkyl]

I think the new ideas are great. I would not want to see Torment or Hellfire modified overall because a lot of thought has gone into their use as mechanics in extended and in balancing encounters.

Has it? I was under the impression that comparatively little effort has been given to balancing/improving extended, based on the fact it is optional and the least frequented part of the game.

[Lasty]

1. It's lazy design

A lot of the game is spent finding ways to mitigate the threats that you are going to encounter. Fighting Orbs of Fire without rF is silly. Going into snake without rPois is silly. Walking into Elf without no ticks of MR is asking to get banished. You need to consider what they threats are and whether or not you have the tools to deal with them. You don't necessarily need any resistances to finish the game, but you at least have to have some kind of plan. If you want to fight an OoF without rF, then maybe antimagic will do the trick. That's at least a decision that the player makes and it's interesting. It's making the best of a bad scenario and at it's core, it's problem solving.

Hellfire and torment are the way they are because there is a very real chance that a PC will find themselves in a situation where elemental damage is a joke and physical damage can be almost totally ignored. Hellfire and torment don't care about your gear and even at rN+++, torment still does very threatening amounts of damage. The problem is that it's a lazy way to make the end game scary. That's a bandaid solution to the PC scaling into the end game and it's implemented by simply adding 'pure', unmitigateable damage to the game. Right now, it's there because it needs to be there. Now, pure damage isn't necessarily a problem and hellfire really isn't a bad mechanic except...

I think you have the wrong end of this stick. Orbs of Fire are just an equipment check (in the context you specify -- overall I think they're an interesting enemy). Equipment checks aren't actually very interesting most of the time. At best equipment checks are a strategic planning/spoiler check: I know I'm going to run into OoFs in Zot:5, so I don't go in until I have equipment that greatly reduces that threat. At worst, they're a luck check. Neither of those is actually very interesting, especially not if you've played the game through a few times.

Hellfire and torment are two threats you can't equipment-check away: you have to use tactics to manage hellfire and torment-users instead of just knowing that if you stack enough AC and fancy enough rings you win. You're forced to use tactics, and often forced to use consumables/spells to manage them. If anything, we need more threats like torment and hellfire. Honestly, I'd rather remove every non-AC/EV resistance from the game than do what you're suggesting.

Also, fwiw, I don't think you've done a good job of supporting your "lazy design" claim, which makes the claim itself lazy. I also think you're wrong about Crawl being "a game wherein a major way of progressing is equipment". Loot definitely plays a role in character power growth, and particularly powerful loot can dramatically affect player power at a given point in the game, but character skills also play a big role in player power, and player skill determines how well power gets applied to actually progress the character. It's fun to have loot be an element in how well a character progresses through the game, but if that role gets outsized, it makes the game worse overall -- we certainly should not be actively trying to increase the how much loot affects power by turning all threats into equipment checks.

I think you raise interesting points about spellcasting monsters, but I think a lot of responders also have raised good points, and having considered the arguments, I'm inclined to think that adding "smart" casters to crawl would be a bad choice.

edit: adding omitted but critical 'not'

[damiac]

Reminder: While torment can't be 'equipment-checked' away, it can very much be 'race or necromutation-checked' away. When 1 spell (or even certain race selections) makes you immune to torment, which based on dev comments is critically important to extended difficulty, it's a pretty clear sign of a problem. If I get a character who can cast necromutation to extended, now the only 'real threat' is hellfire, and the quite rare dispel undead.

So either way, it's clear the status quo is not doing what it's supposed to do. 1 spell turns off what's supposed to be the biggest challenge of extended.

[johlstei]

Getting necromutation castable has huge opportunity cost and is definitely not something that every character going to extended gets.

[damiac]

That's very true. So only a certain subset of characters are immune to the effect that is critically important for the challenge of extended. I don't see how that's any less of a problem.

[Sar]

daily reminder that Necronomicon contains a spell that makes the caster literally literally invincible

[johlstei]

daily reminder that Necronomicon contains a spell that makes the caster literally literally invincible

Seriously, I don't know what "meta" people are following that demands one learn necromutation but rarely says anything about death's door. It's bizarre. The other spell that returns all(most) of your hitpoints seems pretty good too.

[Sar]

Yeah, Borg is super-good too (and demands almost twice less XP than DDoor). But I guess invincibility and... invincibility are not as good as a spell that provides immunity to one type of damage because uh, it's a form?

[damiac]

Yeah, that's as true as it is irrelevant...

Also, we aren't talking about it being a demand that people learn necromutation, only that torment, which has been described in this thread as critical to the difficulty to extended, can be shut off with the spell. If torment is critical to extended, and necromutation turns off torment, then necromutation breaks extended. This is a problem, relevant to the thread because it's all about torment.

Follow this flowchart: Is torment important for extended?
Yes, No --------------------> remove torment
|
Does necromutation make torment not do any damage?
Yes, No ---------------------> wrong, yes it does
|
Necromutation makes an important part of extended not do any damage.
Yes, No----------------------> How did you get to this part of the flowchart then?
|
Problem. An important part of extended is disabled via this spell.

[johlstei]

I guess my point was that learning necromutation is a huge drain on spell slots and skill XP. It's a pretty large sacrifice to get it up and running, and so instead of suffering due to torment, you are suffering due to necromutations drawbacks and by not having all the things you could have had instead of it. Death's door makes both torment and hellfire not do any damage instead of just torment, and borg's doesn't care how many times you've been tormented because you heal to full. Necromutation might just be the worst spell in that book.

[Sar]

  Code:

Follow this flowchart: Is taking damage important for Crawl?
Yes, No --------------------> remove taking damage
|
v
Does Death's Door make you immune to any damage?
Yes, No ---------------------> wrong, yes it does (well actually you can probably get confused and go take a swim at lava and die which is obviously a bug)
|
v
Death's Door prevents you from taking damage.
Yes, No----------------------> How did you get to this part of the flowchart then?
|
v
Problem. An important part of Crawl is disabled via this spell.

yay flowcharts (also mine is prettier)

[damiac]

Well, aside from the fact that your flowchart is wrong, as death's door only makes you immune to damage while it's active, and it includes a window in which it cannot be active, plus it has the obvious drawbacks you listed (While I will agree that overall it's a much better spell than necromutation), none of that has much to do with the topic at hand, regarding the importance of torment and hellfire in extended. Necromutation is very much relevant to the discussion, since if torment is important, necromut is messing with an important element.

Same general comments with Borgs, it's better than necromut, it's a good spell, it's well balanced by its built in drawbacks, it's irrelevant to the topic, etc...

I will agree that your flowchart is prettier.

[Sandman25]

Removing immunity to Torment from Necromutation is like removing increased speed from Haste.

Edit. Probably even worse. Haste does not make you vulnerable to unavoidable damage and does not treat confusion almost as paralysis.

[Sar]

as death's door only makes you immune to damage while it's active

So does Necromut.

it includes a window in which it cannot be active

So if Necromut had a small delay between recasts and wasn't extendible it would be okay?

since if torment is important, necromut is messing with an important element

Serious talk: I just cannot see why a super-expensive spell that makes you immune to one certain extended threat and blocks the usage of much better spells (that make you essentially immune to that threat and pretty much all other threats, duration being irrelevant in 99% of cases since you are smart and will end the fight before it runs out) makes that threat "irrelevant". You invested a metric fuckton of XP into it. It works. It arguably wasn't even a good investment but whatever! It's a hard counter, sure, but many games have hard counters - this particular is not cheap or even necessary. I'm sorry, I just don't see it.

I will agree that your flowchart is prettier.

ty, I tried <3

[crate]

man who here remembers when borg was level 5 and in the book of death
those were the days

[Sar]

What, did it work like it works now otherwise? What version was that?

[Lasty]

I'm not even sure who is arguing that torment is critical for extended, aside from damiac. All the arguments I read from other posters were implying that it's a good feature of extended, not a critical feature of extended.

Even if we ignore that, even damiac admits that hellfire also part of this conversation, but for some reason damiac is arguing that Necromutation is busted without acknowledging that it does nothing to shield you from hellfire, and in some ways makes hellfire more dangerous: you can't drink !hw or cast borg or death's door to recover from damage.

[Hurkyl]

(argh, thanked the above by misclick)

I'm not even sure who is arguing that torment is critical for extended, aside from damiac. All the arguments I read from other posters were implying that it's a good feature of extended, not a critical feature of extended.

Even if we ignore that, even damiac admits that hellfire also part of this conversation, but for some reason damiac is arguing that Necromutation is busted without acknowledging that it does nothing to shield you from hellfire, and in some ways makes hellfire more dangerous: you can't drink !hw or cast borg or death's door to recover from damage.

I had interpreted damiac as reacting to the claims that torment is an instance of "threaten everyone despite how they're built", which is false whether or not torment (or hellfire) are good designs and whether or not the balance of extended relies too heavily on them.

But while nobody has outright said so, I certainly felt that many of the posts do have the undercurrent of asserting that balancing extended requires that the only defenses are your HP stat* and avoiding exposure.

*: Of course, it wasn't really said like this: it was couched as ignoring AC/EV/resistances.

[Sar]

Well torment doesn't actually ignore resistances, perhaps people were talking of hellfire?

[damiac]

What I"m actually saying is this: If necromutation cancels torment, and extended is still OK even when people play through it with necromutation, then clearly torment isn't necessary for extended to be OK.
Otherwise, if torment is necessary for extended, then necromutation is not ok.

It can't be both, they're mutually exclusive. Either torment isn't necessary for extended, or necromutation ruins extended.

[Sar]

Could you please point out people ITT who are saying torment is "necessary" or "crucial" for extended? Because I did a search and all I see either people saying there are too much sources of it or people saying it's a good attack.

[Sandman25]

What I"m actually saying is this: If necromutation cancels torment, and extended is still OK even when people play through it with necromutation, then clearly torment isn't necessary for extended to be OK.
Otherwise, if torment is necessary for extended, then necromutation is not ok.

It can't be both, they're mutually exclusive. Either torment isn't necessary for extended, or necromutation ruins extended.

Necromutation cancels Torment but has its own serious drawbacks so Torment still affects extended even for character under Necromutation.

[damiac]

Well the problem with making threats in extended that rely on things other than hellfire/torment is that crawl resists are too strong.

This is the only quote I could get from this particular thread basically saying torment (and hellfire) are necessary for extended to have any challenge.

But elsewhere it's been said quite a few times, characters in extended are just too tough for regular attacks, so the only attacks that are viable against the player are directly against his HPs, like torment and hellfire.

It's also been said when those topics come up that hellfire itself isn't really threatening, due to its relatively low damage, and only the existence of torment is what makes it threatening in extended.

Now, in this thread, it's been said that nothing whatsoever in the game is threatening, because death's door is guaranteed invincibility, but whatever...

My point is, and has been, if torment isn't necessary for extended to be challenging, it's such an unpleasant effect that the game would be better without it. Conversely, if torment is necessary for extended to be challenging, aren't necromutation/mummies a big problem?

Of course, if death's door trivializes the entire game, that's another issue to be addressed, but I think people are only saying that to 'disprove' that necromutation is good for some reason, as you can't talk about necromut without someone jumping up and down screaming about borgs and death's door being better.

[Sar]

It's also been said when those topics come up that hellfire itself isn't really threatening

Actually I think almost every time torment/hellfire are brought up people will call torment "a spook" and hellfire "a real threat".

it's been said that nothing whatsoever in the game is threatening, because death's door is guaranteed invincibility,

Well, you don't start with DD memorized and castable so some things are threatening.

it's such an unpleasant effect

Why is it unpleasant? Because I disagree. I think some other people here are. This really sounds like a personal preference, which is fine, but probably not the best basis for game design decisions. Probably.

I think people are only saying that to 'disprove' that necromutation is good for some reason, as you can't talk about necromut without someone jumping up and down screaming about borgs and death's door being better.

Well. Unless you follow Sif, you get those 3 spells in a nice human skin-wrapped package called "Necronomicon". Necromut is Necro/Tmut, fittingly, the latter being a school only really used by unarmed brawlers (who probably don't want Nmut anyway since Blade Hands do insane damage much with lesser investment, and you can't use both). Death's Door is Necro/Charms, Charms being kind of a "must have" school (not in the amounts needed for DDoor, obviously, but still). Borg is a single school spell. So in terms of investment it's Borg>DDoor>Nmut. In terms of power? Probably the same! And Nmut blocks the other two spells. So, mentioning them together makes a lot of sense.

Now, ~trivializing~. People often say that after you reach Lair or so every death is your fault. This is probably very close to truth, at least I can always name a mistake that lead to such death. I still make those mistakes, mind you! Sometimes though, these mistakes are less obvious. If you die with Borg, your mistakes are literally: 1. Not pressing Borg button on the turn before (possibly) receiving lethal damage; 2. Letting your mana be lower than 8. No fancy shmancy positioning or tactics or whatever. Just this.

You can argue for Borg/DDoor removal now, I suppose.

[johlstei]

You could also miscast Borg assuming it's not at 0%.

[Sar]

Whoops, yeah. I dunno how I missed that.