Balancing Charms

[autom8r]

I was looking up some info on charms and ran into these threads debating why all/many charms go against the spirit of the game and are thus broken. The logic seems to be that keeping your charms up all the time is the optimal way to play the game right now (for things like rmsl), but doing so is annoying, and not fun.

(Threads are https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?p=184611#p184611 and https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=13182)

I'm a noob, but I've run into this issue before with rmsl and stoneskin. I'll start by keeping them up as I run around the dungeon, but eventually get bored and turn them off.

It seems to me that this behavior could be fixed with a simple change to all charms: make them last until the player turns them off, but steadily drain magic while they're on. This wouldn't need to be a significant amount of magic, just enough to make it a non-trivial decision to keep them on. If the player can't spend magic on them (i.e. is out of magic), they'd expire and need to be recast. This would also fix the levitation irritation of waiting around to stop floating so I can go down the stairs by letting a player turn levitation off and then head on down.

Mechanic-wise, the player would see a message similar to 'Your haste enchantment siphons off a bit of energy' every few turns. Casting the spell again while it's still active would dispel the current instance of the buff. Thoghts?

[mikee]

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=12609

[autom8r]

Oops. Guess I should do a better job of searching

[and into]

Oops. Guess I should do a better job of searching

There have been a lot of threads about this, along with plenty of other tangentially related GDD threads about charms. So, I wouldn't be too hard on yourself. Really, as a new barfly at the Tavern, it redounds to your credit that you did any research before posting your idea.

[johlstei]

I wish they would be made permanent until you changed armor, at least until a proper solution is decided on. It is effectively what they are now (minus !brilliance shenanigans) and if it is too strong it is incentive to implement a real solution.

I'm the idiot who actually keeps stoneskin up 80% of the time when I have it, and I hate it...

[eliotn]

I just had an idea for balancing charms:

Rework some of these charms to have an infinite duration while they are memorized, turning them into an always active passive. The catch is that it will take more spell levels to learn them, the passives will only be active while failure chance is below a % (raising the % above the threshold temporarily deactivates the passive), and the spells will be reworked to scale heavily with spellpower. Maybe high charms skill lessens the spell level cost. Hopefully this gives more of a tradeoff to these charms spells.

[Siegurt]

The best solution I've seen so far is to make low level charms (generally) location specific, this is of course the most work (Redesigning and implementing roughly 10-15 spells), but also probably in the long run the best game design.

If you can't cast spells in advance of exploration, that negates the tedious aspect without negating the usefulness of the spells.

Of course, personally, I use charms in a not-quite-but-close-enough-to-optimal-for-my-purposes way by only casting them (and usually only the most useful or pertinent one or two) when I've either just come across something to fight, or by using staircases (when I come down to encounter a nasty group) to go upstairs, cast some spells, then go back down and do combat stuff. Really trying to eke out one more turn of advantage by keeping those spells always active is just not going to be the determining factor in whether you win or lose the game, like really, don't stress about it, cast appropriate charms when you encounter baddies, and you'll be (practically) no worse off, if a few points less damage per hit from stoneskin was the make or break factor for whether you died or not, then you shouldn't have been in that combat in the first place.

[KoboldLord]

Location-specific charms is not a best solution, because it is worse than the status quo. If you can prepare a specific location as your kill zone, you are obligated to lure all consequential enemies into this kill zone.

[TeshiAlair]

Just make the kill zone disappear when you step off of it/away from it in the case of a one square wind-wall like Repel Missiles.

[Siegurt]

Sorry, I should've expanded on the "location specific" suggestion (It was discussed in a prior thread, and I forget sometimes that not everyone in these forums reads every single post that happens)


Some examples:
Stoneskin becomes "Meld with earth" you absorb part of the floor into your skin, making it tougher, if you move in any direction, the spell ends immediately.

Repel Missiles becomes "wind wall", casting the spell generates several short-lived clouds in your immediate vicinity, they do nothing to impede visibility, but projectiles moving through these clouds have their accuracy decreased significantly.

Phase shift becomes "Mirrored Perception" casting this spell, creates a displaced image of yourself in the eyes of all creates in your line of sight, each of whom suffers a fairly significant penalty to hit you. (Although one might argue that this makes it more of a hex than a charm, since it effects creatures in your LOS, rather than yourself.)
----

As you can see "Location specific" doesn't mean "buff up a location and draw things to it" it means "The buff doesn't really have any value you can take with you when you move into a new location"

Wind wall might be the closest design to making 'kill zones' a viable option, but by "short lived" I mean like 8-15 turns, and trying to cast a spell then lure ranged attackers to some location you cast it earlier would be awkward and probably just get you killed anyway, besides "Optimally" you'd want full-duration protection.

I was in no way suggesting Oklob-farm style permanant (or even long duration) effects which would charm an area indefinitely, or even long enough that it'd be useful to lure things to it.

[dpeg]

Siegurt: I wasn't aware of this proposal, and I think it has very good potential. A huge advantage is that we can address the spells one by one, instead of setting up a completely new system at once.

[Siegurt]

Here's the link to my original chunk of suggestions on that front:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=12609&p=178728

By no means are those fleshed out proposals, but there's probably a few in there that are worthwhile.

[KoboldLord]

Sorry, I should've expanded on the "location specific" suggestion (It was discussed in a prior thread, and I forget sometimes that not everyone in these forums reads every single post that happens)


Some examples:
Stoneskin becomes "Meld with earth" you absorb part of the floor into your skin, making it tougher, if you move in any direction, the spell ends immediately.

Repel Missiles becomes "wind wall", casting the spell generates several short-lived clouds in your immediate vicinity, they do nothing to impede visibility, but projectiles moving through these clouds have their accuracy decreased significantly.

Phase shift becomes "Mirrored Perception" casting this spell, creates a displaced image of yourself in the eyes of all creates in your line of sight, each of whom suffers a fairly significant penalty to hit you. (Although one might argue that this makes it more of a hex than a charm, since it effects creatures in your LOS, rather than yourself.)
----

As you can see "Location specific" doesn't mean "buff up a location and draw things to it" it means "The buff doesn't really have any value you can take with you when you move into a new location"

Wind wall might be the closest design to making 'kill zones' a viable option, but by "short lived" I mean like 8-15 turns, and trying to cast a spell then lure ranged attackers to some location you cast it earlier would be awkward and probably just get you killed anyway, besides "Optimally" you'd want full-duration protection.

I was in no way suggesting Oklob-farm style permanant (or even long duration) effects which would charm an area indefinitely, or even long enough that it'd be useful to lure things to it.

A perfectly adequate percentage of gameplay is already taken up by camping a one-tile-wide hallway and killing everything that comes down it. Good and fun combat involves player movement, or at least decisions on whether it is or is not a good idea to move to a different position for tactical advantage. When I pull a herd of death yaks in Lair or a densely-packed swarm of monsters from a vault in Depths, that's naturally going to turn into a running battle that extends halfway across the level. I'm going to manage corners and monster pathing to ensure that I can get my hits in without letting them gang up on me. On the other hand, if defensive buffs are simultaneously worth using and can't be used on the move, then the overwhelming best strategy is invariably going to be to lure them into a pre-prepared corridor, run my powerup suite, kill them, rinse and repeat with the same corridor.

I would rather charms and charm-like effects be expunged from the game than to see them be optimal at the cost of player movement. If you want movement to have a painful cost associated with it, Chei is already in the game.

[Wahaha]

You're assuming that the benefit of stationary charms would always be higher than the benefit of movement. That's not likely to always or even often to be true (for example stoneskin would probably not save you from death yaks). It will also happen that the benefit of movement will sometimes outweigh the benefit of standing still in the middle of a fight, leading to making a decision like "do I move and lose the buff". Finally, there's only one charm spell that was proposed that discourages movement, stoneskin, so this concern is pretty irrelevant anyway.

[johlstei]

A lot of charms could probably be straight repurposed as hexes, rMissiles could give an LOS debuff to enemy projectile accuracy, stoneskin to damage, etc. I guess to be really the same they'd have to be irresistable, if that's what we want. I don't know if that's a great solution (would we end up back at "enchantments" or are there enough good charms to hold the school?), but if it's on the table it's an option for lots of things.

[Siegurt]

Well, and keep in mind the stoneskin replacement suggestion is for a 2MP spell, it's not like you can't cast stoneskin, whack on some yaks, reposition then re-cast in combat etc.

Another "location specific" effect I had in mind was one which caused all the floor tiles in LOS to give you some bonus for a duration (presumably they'd like light up, or be a cloud overlay or something) and be unable to be recast until the effect wore off. This would give you *some* freedom of movement, while making it non-optimal to cast while exploring. I'm not sure it would be a good stoneskin replacement, but as a mechanic it might fit somewhere.

Leda's liquifaction/Silence (decreasing radius) are also not bad mechanisms for making charms not-spamoptimal

[crate]

Well the big thing about both Leda and Silence is they have pretty significant drawbacks to the player, which is of course why they work (if Silence didn't self-silence you'd be recasting it all the time). So if you want to do something like that you need to have a reason the player wants the effect to be gone.

[KoboldLord]

You're assuming that the benefit of stationary charms would always be higher than the benefit of movement. That's not likely to always or even often to be true (for example stoneskin would probably not save you from death yaks). It will also happen that the benefit of movement will sometimes outweigh the benefit of standing still in the middle of a fight, leading to making a decision like "do I move and lose the buff". Finally, there's only one charm spell that was proposed that discourages movement, stoneskin, so this concern is pretty irrelevant anyway.

I was charitably assuming that the immobility variant of Stoneskin would be buffed in power so it was reasonably plausible that you'd want to use it under any circumstances. Assuming the immobility was just tacked onto status quo Stoneskin, there would be no plausible in-game scenario where it wouldn't be clearly better to spend that turn and mp on an actual attack instead.

If buffs have to have an enormous drawback included 'to prevent spamming', then they're probably going to have to be the power level associated with Haste, Repel Missiles, or Silence rather than the modest incremental bonus provided by most existing buffs. Otherwise the buff is worse than useless, because it costs more resources to use than it could ever possibly pay back.

[Wahaha]

It would be worth using any time a melee monster is approaching you which is almost literally every fight against a melee monster. Harder to use than the current stoneskin which is free AC at all times but there are a lot of situations where you'd use it. I would even recast it with a monster next to me depending on what the monster is and the situation and no it doesn't have to be a really weak monster.

Edit: but yes I do think it would deserve giving more AC.

[Siegurt]

The suggestion isn't 'immobility', it is 'movement cancels remaining duration' (and the original proposal had some knock back resistance as well, but that is hardly interesting)

[KoboldLord]

It would be worth using any time a melee monster is approaching you which is almost literally every fight against a melee monster. Harder to use than the current stoneskin which is free AC at all times but there are a lot of situations where you'd use it. I would even recast it with a monster next to me depending on what the monster is and the situation and no it doesn't have to be a really weak monster.

Edit: but yes I do think it would deserve giving more AC.

Monsters have finite hp. If you are investing in earth magic, you have offensive earth spells you could spend that mp on instead, otherwise you would spend that xp on something else that gave you vastly better returns. A Stone Arrow or a Sandblast instead of the melee-range Stoneskin you used would have depleted that monster's hp and mitigated the damage it deals against you by means of giving it the severe attack penalties associated with being a dead monster.

The math really isn't hard. 2-4AC from Stoneskin reduces an average of 1-2hp per incoming attack. This isn't irrelevant, but if you're trading that reduction for receiving an additional attack because the enemy survives longer, you have a pretty elementary division problem to determine whether you end up ahead. The offense vs. defense numbers in Crawl are such that you will never find a consequential enemy where losing a turn isn't cost-prohibitive on such a small incremental buff.

If you're currently casting Stoneskin while in melee with death yaks, I strongly suggest you stop doing that.

The suggestion isn't 'immobility', it is 'movement cancels remaining duration' (and the original proposal had some knock back resistance as well, but that is hardly interesting)

If you are going to cancel the remaining duration by moving, how are you going to make back your initial investment of turns or mp? If you cast the spell, you've already made the decision that you don't plan to move. Granted, this is different than Silence or Liquefaction in that you can retract a poor decision after the fact, but if you aren't making mistakes in the first place this won't make a difference.

[Wahaha]

A few points:
-earth spells have less than LOS range.
-spending 1 turn on an AC buff becomes worth it very quickly with an increasing amount of hits that you take even if that turn replaces stone arrow. Monsters, aside from having finite hp as you pointed out, also have finite damage.
-following the above, taking a lot of hits can easily happen vs multiple monsters even if they're hitting you one at a time
-sometimes characters train earth and not conjurations (statue form and a few rarer reasons). Even as an EE that is going conj/earth, early in the game I don't train conjurations much at all.
-sometimes you don't even want to spend mp on stone arrow
-if stationary stoneskin isn't good enough it can be buffed until it is, that was always a given.
-the goal is to make it a better spell than "constantly recast to get a permanent AC bonus" so if you have any better suggestions they are welcome.
When I said it's "worth using any time a melee monster is approaching" I have to admit that is an exaggeration because I was thinking of a melee character scenario, but it's still worth using, just not "always".

If you are going to cancel the remaining duration by moving, how are you going to make back your initial investment of turns or mp? If you cast the spell, you've already made the decision that you don't plan to move.

By benefiting from the buff during the duration that it was active. Kill a yak and walk away from the rest. Casting it doesn't mean that if you move before it ends it wasn't worth it.

[crate]

If you ignore the power level concerns (if you can fix it with numbers then it's not even a problem) then I think it's pretty clear that stationary stoneskin is a better-designed spell than current stoneskin, if you take as an assumption that the current state of "you can walk around with this spell active all the time by recasting it" is a bad thing (and the crawl devs have pretty strongly shown that they believe that is the case). Fixing the power level is easy. Fixing flaws in how the spell works (regardless of its power level) is much harder.