Barkeep
Posts: 3890
Joined: Wednesday, 14th August 2013, 23:25
Location: USA
Sunday, 26th October 2014, 21:54
Enemy vulnerability/immunity to confuse
Also inspired by a thread in Advice: https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13988
There is currently a great deal of opacity concerning what enemies can be afflicted by confuse and how this is portrayed to the player. While the bigger (and more specific) problem may be that confusion immunity is badly communicated to the player, I will argue that having many enemies that are immune to confuse is itself unnecessary and also problematic for other reasons. I'll address the first point (bad communication) first, however.
If an Enchanter comes across an oklob plant, and tries to cast ensorcelled hibernation on it, the spell actually won't be cast and you will get a message to the effect that no susceptible enemies are in LOS (this does not take in-game time) and informing you that you can cast the spell anyway with capital-Z. If you do force-cast it at the oklob, you will simply get the message that the oklob is unaffected (regardless of whether you overcome an MR roll or not). Oklobs are also immune to confusion. And yet, if you cast the confuse spell, you get no warning message about no viable targets in LOS, and even more strangely, if you target the oklob you will often get the message "the oklob resists"; if (and only if) you beat the oklob's MR roll with the confuse spell, then you get the message, "The oklob plant is unaffected."
Now, on one level, with regard to the messages, this is just a bug (and should be fixed), but I think there is a deeper problem in the simple fact that some enemies are susceptible to hostile enchantments in general, and yet immune to confusion. I think this is bad for two reasons:
1.) A certain subset of enemies are immune to confuse but it is not often clear how or when this would be the case, at first glance. I don't think that having this property apply to a subdivision of enemies is particularly interesting.
Nor (to preempt the inevitable complaint) is it particularly good flavor. Plant-type enemies are apparently sentient (or responsive/reactive) to some degree—oklobs follow basically the same AI as other enemies, they are susceptible to enslavement, etc.—so why not allow confusion to affect them? More to the point, other mindless enemies (e.g., zombies, skeletons, jellies, etc.) are susceptible to confusion. There is no consistency here to begin with, and thus (already) no coherent flavor as to why some mindless enemies are confusion-immune while others are not.
2.) For a character already using hexes, and for an enchanter in particular, the odd "susceptible to enchantments in general, but confusion-immune" enemy is still susceptible to enslavement. There have actually been instances in which I enslaved enemies I would have rather confused and stabbed, tell them to wait, go get some other melee brute or two and kite them back to the first confuse-immune guy, enslave it, and let the enemies I kited kill my new short-term ally for me. I've actually done things like this in teh game, and it is not fun. Many characters who have trained hexes and are casting confuse at stuff will also have slow or enslavement (or both) available, which means you can get around the enemy, but you can't just get direct stabs against them via confusion. This doesn't come up *that* often, but when it does, it tends to be very grating and highly un-fun.
So I propose letting confuse hit everything that is not immune to hostile enchantments. This not only fixes the buggy messages, but also an underlying feature of current game design that is problematic.
There is currently a great deal of opacity concerning what enemies can be afflicted by confuse and how this is portrayed to the player. While the bigger (and more specific) problem may be that confusion immunity is badly communicated to the player, I will argue that having many enemies that are immune to confuse is itself unnecessary and also problematic for other reasons. I'll address the first point (bad communication) first, however.
If an Enchanter comes across an oklob plant, and tries to cast ensorcelled hibernation on it, the spell actually won't be cast and you will get a message to the effect that no susceptible enemies are in LOS (this does not take in-game time) and informing you that you can cast the spell anyway with capital-Z. If you do force-cast it at the oklob, you will simply get the message that the oklob is unaffected (regardless of whether you overcome an MR roll or not). Oklobs are also immune to confusion. And yet, if you cast the confuse spell, you get no warning message about no viable targets in LOS, and even more strangely, if you target the oklob you will often get the message "the oklob resists"; if (and only if) you beat the oklob's MR roll with the confuse spell, then you get the message, "The oklob plant is unaffected."
Now, on one level, with regard to the messages, this is just a bug (and should be fixed), but I think there is a deeper problem in the simple fact that some enemies are susceptible to hostile enchantments in general, and yet immune to confusion. I think this is bad for two reasons:
1.) A certain subset of enemies are immune to confuse but it is not often clear how or when this would be the case, at first glance. I don't think that having this property apply to a subdivision of enemies is particularly interesting.
Nor (to preempt the inevitable complaint) is it particularly good flavor. Plant-type enemies are apparently sentient (or responsive/reactive) to some degree—oklobs follow basically the same AI as other enemies, they are susceptible to enslavement, etc.—so why not allow confusion to affect them? More to the point, other mindless enemies (e.g., zombies, skeletons, jellies, etc.) are susceptible to confusion. There is no consistency here to begin with, and thus (already) no coherent flavor as to why some mindless enemies are confusion-immune while others are not.
2.) For a character already using hexes, and for an enchanter in particular, the odd "susceptible to enchantments in general, but confusion-immune" enemy is still susceptible to enslavement. There have actually been instances in which I enslaved enemies I would have rather confused and stabbed, tell them to wait, go get some other melee brute or two and kite them back to the first confuse-immune guy, enslave it, and let the enemies I kited kill my new short-term ally for me. I've actually done things like this in teh game, and it is not fun. Many characters who have trained hexes and are casting confuse at stuff will also have slow or enslavement (or both) available, which means you can get around the enemy, but you can't just get direct stabs against them via confusion. This doesn't come up *that* often, but when it does, it tends to be very grating and highly un-fun.
So I propose letting confuse hit everything that is not immune to hostile enchantments. This not only fixes the buggy messages, but also an underlying feature of current game design that is problematic.
- For this message the author and into has received thanks: 3
- Arrhythmia, duvessa, Hurkyl
