Feature request: change spell durations

[kuniqs]

Make non-contaminating spell status effects decrease their duration only when monsters are visible.
In other words: make them work like repel/deflect missiles work right now.
Constantly recasting them while auto-exploring is just annoying.

[Sprucery]

What about invisible monsters?

[kuniqs]

"Something hits you!" ;P

[Sprucery]

But would the presence of invisible monsters decrease the duration before they hit you? If your Ozo's armour melted away suddenly for no reason, you would know that something invisible must be nearby.

[kuniqs]

Then how is 'slow healing' mutation working? Do ghouls stop regenerating when there's an (unknown) invisible monster in LOS?

[PleasingFungus]

(1) spells cast out of combat don't work very well, since spell success rates become fairly meaningless (outside schools that have serious miscast effects, e.g. transmutations); this breaks e.g. the thing where heavy armour/strength matter. (this is a major problem with *msls' current design). your design encourages players to recast their buffs after every fight and to re-re-cast them until they're successful, at no meaningful risk or cost. not good.
(2) the invisible monster thing
(3) repel/deflect missiles don't work like that

[duvessa]

(1) spells cast out of combat don't work very well, since spell success rates become fairly meaningless (outside schools that have serious miscast effects, e.g. transmutations)

which worked great for alter self!

[kuniqs]

(1) spells cast out of combat don't work very well, since spell success rates become fairly meaningless (outside schools that have serious miscast effects, e.g. transmutations); this breaks e.g. the thing where heavy armour/strength matter. (this is a major problem with *msls' current design). your design encourages players to recast their buffs after every fight and to re-re-cast them until they're successful, at no meaningful risk or cost. not good.
(2) the invisible monster thing
(3) repel/deflect missiles don't work like that

1 - Make all those spells' miscasts glow you. This way you can't miscast more than ~5 times without mutating yourself. Or give exploration-expiring status effects.
About the recasting - you can always back up stairs, take off your armor and cast all buffs.
2 - How this ghoul healing really works? I'm curious.
3 - They have a % chance to go away every time they deflect something? How about doing the same thing for, say, necromutation? You have 'duration' of 5. Every time you recieve damage there's a % change (proportional to damage done and inversely proportional to spellpower) the duration will go down by 1,2, whatever.

Keeping track of your buff durations is another thing you have to pay attention in already attention-heavy game.

[dolphin]

Do away with duration and spell failure for Charms and replace it with 2 things:

• Let spellpower competely govern the usefulness of the Charm. Spellpower 0 should be useless and, with high-level spells, dangerous. Missiles should not be repelled, nothing should be Regenerated, Darkness should be loud as hell... Casting in robes and then switching to armor would be pointless.
  
  
• Instead of using MP as usual, let Charms take approximately 3 * Spell Level of maxMP (Rmsl is 2, so it would take 6 maxMP and 2 MP). This will keep you from leaving all the best things up permanently without a deep mana pool and make you choose what you need. To complement this, Charms may need a cooldown period to keep you from continuously swapping during combat.
  

Naturally, there will be some exceptions. Death's Door is intrinsically duration-based and should continue to be. Other spells such as Regeneration and Control Teleport may need a Contamination component or exponential hunger to keep them in check.

Edit: link to the discussion of Duration Spells on the dev wiki.

[PleasingFungus]

which worked great for alter self!

I was just thinking of something like e.g. necromutation, which is a temporary effect with potentially permanent costs for miscasting

alter self was ofc an entire other kettle of fish

[PleasingFungus]

1 - Make all those spells' miscasts glow you. This way you can't miscast more than ~5 times without mutating yourself.

this accomplishes nothing; glow is another temporary cost recovered by resting, just like the existing mp cost for miscasting buffs. pointless

Or give exploration-expiring status effects.

not necessarily bad but too vague to say

About the recasting - you can always back up stairs, take off your armor and cast all buffs.

...do you think that's a good thing to encourage? That's certainly not something you can do with most buffs at present, but it would be in your system...

2 - How this ghoul healing really works? I'm curious.

I looked it up; slow healing is triggered by invisible monsters, as long as they're hostile & not firewood (e.g. "plant", "bush"). Note that ghouls have slow healing 1, which only halves natural regeneration; that's a fairly subtle effect over the relevant timescale (the time between "entering LOS of an invisible enemy" and "discovering that enemy"). Not sure if it'd be more of a problem for buffs.

3 - They have a % chance to go away every time they deflect something? How about doing the same thing for, say, necromutation? You have 'duration' of 5. Every time you recieve damage there's a % change (proportional to damage done and inversely proportional to spellpower) the duration will go down by 1,2, whatever.

This is *msl, except not really related to the spell (what does necromutation have to do with taking damage?). The problems with that family of spells have already been discussed to death...