Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 3037
Joined: Sunday, 2nd January 2011, 02:06
wands and evocation
Currently evocations doesn't really do anything for wands. Wands are one of the staple evocations tools, so that doesn't really make sense. Evocations is currently slated for a miscellaneous items overhaul that will hopefully make the items it is useful for more interesting, but that'll take some time. I don't think it's even on the 0.9 plan. Making evocations usefully affect wands is simple enough to start testing quickly.
The basic premise of my proposal is simple. Currently, we have multiple wands that do thematically the same thing. A wand of flame throws a little bit of fire, and a wand of fire throws a big bolt of fire. I propose that we merge similar wands and make them throw a weak or a strong effect according to your evocations. If you want a little popgun to kill runners, you still don't need to invest much xp in evocations because the little effect will do for that purpose. If you want to reliably get the strong effect, you have to invest quite a lot.
For the sake of example, I'm dividing wands into attack and support varieties. Attack wands have a three-tier level of effect, and support wands have two tiers. Having some two-tier wands that start improving in the gap between the two tiers of the three-tier wands gives evocations specialists something to aim for at more points in their career. The division between attack and support seems natural and intuitive, but it isn't essential. Specific numbers are also subject to adjustment after testing.
Attack wands have three effects, no more than two of which are possible at any particular level of evocations. An unskilled user will typically waste the majority of a wand's potential when trying to use it, but as that user approaches competence they will get the proper effect more and more often, until they never make those beginner errors again. At evocations 0 and a wand of fire, a starting character will get a Bolt of Fire 20% of the time. The rest of the time, some of the energy is wasted and the character gets only a simple Throw Flame effect. As that character's evocations skill goes up, they get the Bolt of Fire effect 5% more often per skill level of training, topping out at 100% Bolt of Fire at evocations 16.
Characters who are of exceptional skill with evocations can effectively overclock their attack wands, getting a radically superior effect at the normal charge cost. A starting character cannot possibly evoke this special effect even with outside assistance, and even a peerless genius will not be successful every time. At evocations 21, that old wand of fire that has served our example character so well in the past will produce Fire Burst instead of a simple Bolt of Fire 5% of the time. This chance similarly goes up until it hits 35% at evocations 27. When the Fire Burst kicks in, the player should get a message to that effect during targeting in order to prevent accidental self- or ally-targeting. Since the final effect an only be accessed intermittently, it can be fairly powerful.
Example attack wands:
Wand of Fire: Throw Flame, Bolt of Fire, Fire Burst
Wand of Cold: Throw Frost, Bolt of Cold, Cold Burst
(Fire Burst and Cold Burst are smite-targeted explosions that resemble Fire or Ice Storm. They deal heavy elemental damage and leave clouds, but they do not have the resistance-piercing benefits of the real spells. Immune monsters are still immune.)
Wand of Lightning: Shock, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Burst
(Lightning Burst is a smite-targeted attack that hits one target and then chains to nearby targets, much like Chain Lightning. It can, of course, chain back to an unlucky user.)
Wand of Draining: Pain, Bolt of Draining, Bolt of Ruin
(Bolt of Ruin hits monsters in a line with Agony, deals some negative energy damage afterward even if they resist, and sickens them even if they survive that.)
Wand of Venom: Sting, Bolt of Venom, full-LOS Poisonous Cloud
Wand of Disintegration: Disintegrate, Bolt of Disintegration, Cataclysm
(Bolt of Disintegration is the absorbed function of the wand of digging, but deals damage to monsters in that line just in case you were using for combat instead of utility. Cataclysm does the same thing, but then uses a Rapid Deconstruction-like effect on all wall tiles bordering the Bolt-targeting. Surviving monsters take extra damage from every adjacent affected wall tile.)
Wand of Raw Magic: Magic Dart, Mystic Blast, Orb of Destruction
This leaves a gap between 16 and 21, so a casual user of evocations will probably stop at 16 (or lower, if wizardry-like boosts are eventually added) for the guaranteed effect. An immediate incentive is needed to keep evocations specialists going, so support wands can follow a two-tier system that conveniently covers this spawn.
A beginning character can use a support wand fairly well. They get subtly better as evocations go up in that the more offensive ones get better at piercing magic resistance, but you can use the basic effect immediately even without training evocations. At evocations 8, however, you pick up a notably better effect 5% of the time, which steps up for each level of evocations much like the better effects of attack wands. A wand of confusion will normally hit a single target with a confusion effect, and it may or may not resist, but in the hands of a skilled user it may hit all hostile targets in sight with that effect, each of which may or may not resist. At 27 evocations these wands always work to full effect, as the chance of getting the better effect is 100%.
Example support wands:
Wand of Healing: Potion of Heal Wounds effect, same effect plus remove status effects
(Basically, the better effect is to remove poison, confusion, rotting, and sickness as if it was a cross between a potion of healing and a potion of heal wounds.)
Wand of Teleportation: Teleport Self, controlled Teleport Self with normal scattering
Wand of Hasting: Swiftness, Haste
Wand of Confusion: Confusion, Mass Confusion
Wand of Slowness: Slow, Paralyze and then Slow if the target resists
Wand of Invisibility: Invisibility, Invisibility plus Blink
(Monsters lose track of the player after the better effect until they can overcome stealth unless they have Sense or See Invisible.)
Wand of Polymorph: Polymorph Other, Degeneration
Wand of Enslavement: Enslavement, Enslavement and then Confusion if the target resists
Wands get their charges adjusted based on their new utility, but they will probably be mostly used for their weak effects and discarded by most characters. Characters who invest heavily in evocations in order to use the new wands should be able to use them quite a few times before they run out, because they can't just mash 5 to get their charges back like a caster can.
Wands of Random Effects probably wouldn't be true wands under this system. They'd probably be a Xom-pleasing miscellaneous item that happens to share identification with wands.
So… Any thoughts? I think this is worth mulling over, but I admittedly did basically pull the numbers out of a hat. There's likely something that I haven't thought of.
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