Amulet of accuracy

[tasonir]

Goal: Give players the option to reduce misses with melee + ranged attacks at the cost of their amulet slot.

There's already an amulet of inaccuracy, so there's some precedent for this. It likely won't be much of a buff, if any at all, to players as there are other amulets which are arguably better than this (faith, possibly regen, rMut/rCorr when they are needed, etc). It will increase flexibility somewhat, of course, and help make combat somewhat more predictable, even if it still is possible to miss repeatedly. I believe this amulet will be greatly appreciated by a significant subset of crawl players, possibly even more than it's genuinely worth to their characters, and it probably a lot simpler and transparent than rewriting crawl's melee code.

The exact scale of the accuracy bonus can be adjusted for balance, but I suggest that it should be relatively large, and feel significant and noticeable to the player. This is the reason it's not simply an amulet of slaying - the goal is to forgo giving damage so that a large amount of accuracy can be given.

Possible downsides:
1) Objective, optimal players may identify this instead of finding faith.
2) The "acc+X" modifier has been otherwise removed from the game and returning it feels odd.
3) Melee and ranged combat may be affected differently by getting the same bonus.

Responses:
1) suck it, optimals!
2) I don't think it would be too terrible to return the mod, but for simplicity, we can also not show the mod at all - the amulet of inaccuracy does not display how much it lowers your accuracy by either.
3) I know ranged accuracy was historically higher than melee, I'm not sure if the ranged combat rewrite changed this. I don't think it would cause problems to make ranged combat more accurate either; they are still paying with their amulet slot after all. So I don't think there's a problem here - I am just less sure what ranged accuracy is like these days. I would be fine with the amulet only boosting melee accuracy but suggest that it applies to ranged for consistency with all other accuracy/slaying bonuses aside from archery gloves. Trying to avoid a second special case.

[Sandman25]

I suspect it will be optimal to put the amulet on and off often since all amulets except faith and gourmand are swappable and are not really needed all the time. It can be an unrandart with curse property, probably even with usual slaying instead of accuracy.

[tasonir]

Amulet swapping is definitely an issue since not all amulets have a slow warm up period. I'd say this could have a warm up period itself to address that, as I'd like it to be more common than an unrand, although the unrand is also option. If it was an unrand then there's certainly more room for "power" and so slaying would be possible. I'd still prefer the simpler, common amulet though.

[jejorda2]

What if the current amulet of inaccuracy:
-Decreased accuracy after being removed until some amount of XP is gained
-Reduced the accuracy penalty, gradually becoming an accuracy bonus, as XP is gained
(Less XP is required to negate the removed amulet than to reach positive Acc equipping it)

[milski]

I think there are two problems with that rework.

The first is that you have made the negatives of an amulet of inaccuracy worse. Previously, you just needed a remove curse scroll and you were fine; now you still suffer penalties for a while, which could be a death knell early on.

Secondly, the positives seem to go against the typical Crawl goodplayer philosophy of "don't sacrifice surviving now for a boost later." An amulet that explicitly asks you to weaken yourself now to gain strength in the long run is the exact opposite of what you typically want to do in Crawl, and I don't think anything else acts in that way excepting maybe taking a bad Ru sacrifice that doesn't jump you to the next tier.

[Brannock]

Amulets in general are fairly weak right now IMO. I find myself hunting down "regeneration and wearing it until I need another utility amulet and swapping that in (rCorr for Slime, rMut for Abyss/Zot, Clarity as necessary). They don't have remotely the same punch as rings do.

[KittenInMyCerealz]

It would be fine for it to give base 2 accuracy and that would increase the longer you have it on, to max 4-7? would reset back to 2 every time you remove it.

[tasonir]

if we're going with the slow warm up idea, I'd model it off gourmand, and do something like:

  Code:

func amuletAccuracyBonus(turnsWorn: Int) -> Int
{
    if (turnsWorn >= 100)
    {
        return 10
    }
    return turnsWorn/10
}

Swift syntax is funny. In any case it's just +1 accuracy per 10 turns you wore it, capping at 10 accuracy at 100 turns. You wouldn't get any benefit swapping to it mid-fight, but if there are no monsters in sight you could hit 5 once and be at the maximum bonus already. I think gourmand does take a bit longer (200-300 turns?) but it's in the same ballpark.