Buff ashenzari transfer knowledge

[Berder]

As I've heard, it's unusual for players to use Ash's transfer knowledge ability much. It's a shame for the top ability of a god to be underused. Why isn't it used more?

• One factor might be because characters just don't need to switch skills.
  
  • However, aren't there times when you find a great artifact you'd like to use that's not your currently trained weapon?
    
  • As another example, suppose you trained hexes which become less useful in extended, and want to switch to conjurations
    
  • Or maybe you trained ice magic but never found glaciate, and want to get firestorm instead.
• But I think the main factor is just that the transfer knowledge ability is weak.
  
  • It only transfers half of the skill XP.
    
  • It only does it slowly as you gain XP.
    
  • It takes a long time and multiple uses before you've transferred enough.

Proposed fix:

• Transfer Knowledge works instantly
• Transfer Knowledge transfers 90% of the skill XP from the source skill to the destination skill, afterwards setting the source skill to 0.

Possible objections

• What if I don't want to transfer all the XP?
  
  • You can start training the source skill immediately after transfer, then, to get some of it back. That will take time and that's okay.
  • I think the times when you do want to transfer all the XP (switching weapons, abandoning a school of magic) are greater in number than the times when you only want to transfer half.
  • Transferring all the XP has a greater gameplay effect, so the ability would figure more prominently in those games where it is used. Therefore the average impact of the ability, overall, would be greater.
• Would this make the ability too powerful?
  
  • First note that the preceding objection is in contradiction to this one. You can't simultaneously believe transfer knowledge would be too weak and too strong.
  • I think it would be OK. It wouldn't catapult Ash to Troglike overpoweredness.
  • The ability is underused currently so making it stronger is a good thing.

• But wait! I do use Transfer Knowledge a lot already.
  
  • Alright, then your experience differs from mine and KoboldLord's.

[Sandman25]

IMHO transfer knowledge is useful/fine as is and Ashenzari does not need a buff.
Sif Muna allows to amnesia spells, Ashenzari allows to amnesia skills. With Sif Muna I often learn spells which I would not learn with other gods, with Ashenzari I often train skills which I would not train with other gods.

[Berder]

IMHO transfer knowledge is useful/fine as is and Ashenzari does not need a buff.
Sif Muna allows to amnesia spells, Ashenzari allows to amnesia skills. With Sif Muna I often learn spells which I would not learn with other gods, with Ashenzari I often train skills which I would not train with other gods.

Alright - added a poll.

[Sandman25]

I am not sure why the poll says "depend much". It is not supposed to be spammed and is not used as life saver. It is useful to learn Fireball/Venom Bolt knowing in advance that you can transfer knowledge later if you are unlucky to never find Bolt of Fire/Poison Arrow. Also it allows to use any great artefact which was generated in your game.

[Berder]

I am not sure why the poll says "depend much". It is not supposed to be spammed and is not used as life saver. It is useful to learn Fireball/Venom Bolt knowing in advance that you can transfer knowledge later if you are unlucky to never find Bolt of Fire/Poison Arrow. Also it allows to use any great artefact which was generated in your game.

Well - maybe I could reword it. I wanted the wording to exclude cases where you just use transfer knowledge to try it out, or to max out a skill to get a title. If you do find yourself reskilling because you didn't find bolt of fire then yeah you're depending on Transfer Knowledge.

(edit: it appears a mod has removed the poll)

[Kate]

Polls generally don't really achieve anything useful in GDD, if you think that Transfer Knowledge is particularly useful/useless then using words to explain why is much more likely to be productive.

[Turukano]

As I've heard, it's unusual for players to use Ash's transfer knowledge ability much.

That's right. Transfer knowledge eats quite a lot of piety and is not too useful. Without looking at my statistics I suppose I use it once or twice in a 15-runer.

It's a shame for the top ability of a god to be underused.

I consider divinations and skill boost to be the top abilities of Ash.

Why isn't it used more?
One factor might be because characters just don't need to switch skills.

I think so.

But I think the main factor is just that the transfer knowledge ability is weak.

I wouldn't use it much more often anyway.

[Wahaha]

I used it in every game I played with Ash. Wasn't aware it's not used much. Because of a small sample size it might've been that all my characters needed to transfer skills by chance.
If you want to buff it then just buff the exp transferred ratio and maybe the speed. Much simpler.

[bel]

I use transfer knowledge frequently with Ash. Can't use it too often, since it uses a lot of piety. A typical use is: I start as an elementalist, but find a book with monstrous menagerie. I transfer and become a summoner after the mid-game.

[bcadren]

I agree that most uses of Transfer Knowledge would rather go all the way to Zero than partially transfer. I'd say the best changes for Transfer Knowledge are:

• Speed it up, a little. (Instantaneous is insane even with high Piety cost).
• Make it set to transfer ALL the knowledge (end at 0 in the Source Skill). [But keep the cancel button so the player can stop the transfer at any point.]
• Decrease the lossiness of the transfer. (10% Skill XP lost is a little high).

As for my own usage. I've abused it; used it to get benefit from manuals I otherwise would have tossed out, used it to juggle weapon types to use multiple high end artifacts and high tier weapons; used it to lose access to a side magic skill I had no use for anymore. There are a lot of uses, you could even use it when you -don't want- to stop using the source skill; just to accelerate getting skill for a new resource online faster. (IE transfer out of my melee weapon, because I want to start switching to a bow occasionally, since my melee skill is high enough I don't need it bound. Transfer some out of Melee, but resume training it again when it drops back to the minimum delay value, etc.)

[dpeg]

I wouldn't mind a change to the mechanic of Ashenzari reskilling, but I am not sure it is urgently needed. For one, a lot of players not using it (and some of them complaining about that fact) is not compelling evidence. As rightly observed upthread, this ability is not a life saving power: it is there to provide strategic flexibility (to complement that god's focus on item inflexibility). The uses have been mentioned already. If you never use it, perhaps you got lucky: no reskilling necessary? Perhaps you like to play with a fixed plan, so that reskilling is less natural to you than to others? (This is not meant derogatory, hopefully it doesn't come across as such.)

It's good to hear from some reskilling users! Myself, I like to play Venom Mages of Ashenzari, because I can then build up poison without regrets, and I will skill the first weapon type I find, ready to reskill later on if useful. These are the standard applications, of course, nothing fancy.

Going all the way to 0 skill seems like a sensible suggestion. That reskilling it takes some time is intentional: first, it feels more like a process (feeling of growth etc.) and secondly, it encourages you to go out and collect some xp, which should be fun.

[duvessa]

i have a choice between losing xp, or getting a bunch more uses of scrying
hmm, which one do i pick????

[bcadren]

i have a choice between losing xp, or getting a bunch more uses of scrying
hmm, which one do i pick????

People actually use scrying? I always thought Passive Mapping gave more than enough info to the point there was no feasible use for Scrying, unless you really NEED to know whether that Nasty creature on the other side of the wall is a Brimstone Fiend or an Ice Fiend. I mean you already know where it is and how dangerous it is, what more do you want?

[Sandman25]

i have a choice between losing xp, or getting a bunch more uses of scrying
hmm, which one do i pick????

It gives XP, not loses. It is often optimal to train some skill early even if the skill is not that useful later. Ash is supposed to return some of that wasted XP.

[Berder]

Going all the way to 0 skill seems like a sensible suggestion. That reskilling it takes some time is intentional: first, it feels more like a process (feeling of growth etc.) and secondly, it encourages you to go out and collect some xp, which should be fun.

Yeah, i think the ability would be a lot more useful if it transfers all the way to 0 skill. That's really more important than having it be instant.

[Turukano]

People actually use scrying?

I use it a lot in my games!

[bel]

i have a choice between losing xp, or getting a bunch more uses of scrying
hmm, which one do i pick????

I pick both. Btw, scrying is available at very low piety now.

[le_nerd]

I am using skill transfer a lot in my games. Especially for the move away from short blades [10] for dagger to whatever one-hander Hall of Blades dropped, or whatever nice Vampiric weapon dropped.

I have mostly stopped using it for manuals in three-rune games. For a single manual you need to use it 3(!) times which soaks up a lot of XP and is too bothersome for it to be really worth it.

Yes, I think an absolutely higher amount of transfered skill would be a great improvement. At least a single manual worth down to 1 or zero in one go would be awesome.

[KoboldLord]

Transfer Knowledge was written in an era where characters trained skills by 'Victory Dancing'. This was awful. It was very useful as a way to avoid having to manually press . while a rat attacked you for hundreds or thousands of turns in order to train dodging, and even then a ton of that xp would leak into other skills. In those days, training defensive skills was so abusively awful that being able to pump overtrained skills into your EV or AC was very appealing. Nowadays, though, that bad stuff has gone away, meaning the ability that lets you skip the bad stuff is now obsolete.

I don't think Transfer Knowledge is worth fixing, though. Its remaining uses are either undesirable (farming manuals) or irrelevant (switching weapon skills or untraining poison), so if it is a problem it might as well just be removed. Ashenzari's got the massive skill bonuses to everything, Scrying, passive detection in a huge area, plus a couple other minor bonuses. That's plenty.

[archaeo]

I feel like if you were to remove Transfer Knowledge, it would be nice to replace it with another capstone ability. Here are a couple of ideas off the top of my head:

1) Perfect Understanding: One time at 6*, you may choose a skill to understand perfectly. You are given the effects of a manual on your selected skill.

2) Chains of Ashenzari: For a piety cost equivalent to Time Stop, you are temporarily bound completely. The god's chains wrapped around you become fearsome attackers, and for the duration of the effect, they fight the enemy in a similar fashion to a kraken's tentacles, perhaps with a vampiric effect. e: probably after the binding ends, you get hit with a heavy enough drain that it wipes away your usual stat boosts e2: also this probably is too offensive for such a passive god

I'm not sure that either of these would really work, though, and tbh I imagine that people still make productive use of Transfer Knowledge. If you buffed it a bit, it'd still be very useful, and Ash acting as the god of late-game skill flexibility is ok.

[bel]

Its remaining uses are either undesirable (farming manuals) or irrelevant (switching weapon skills or untraining poison).

I do not agree with this. I gave an example: getting a favourable book drop (like Monstrous Menagerie) and switching. Also, it is useful for enchanters to switch from early game. They can move XP from Hexes to something else if they find suitable stuff (like Necro or Summoning)

[KoboldLord]

Its remaining uses are either undesirable (farming manuals) or irrelevant (switching weapon skills or untraining poison).

I do not agree with this. I gave an example: getting a favourable book drop (like Monstrous Menagerie) and switching. Also, it is useful for enchanters to switch from early game. They can move XP from Hexes to something else if they find suitable stuff (like Necro or Summoning)

Have you looked at the actual numbers involved? When I look into un-training a skill I don't use any more with this ability, I am usually disappointed to find out that doing so would only boost the skill I do want to train by something pathetic, like 0.2 skill levels. Even though raising poison magic to 10 took my venom mage until Lair to earn, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to what I'm getting from clearing one level of Depths. Just killing a bunch of new monsters is much more effective at bootstrapping a new skill than trying to transfer from old skills. Transfer Knowledge is both tedious and ineffective at this task.

[dpeg]

KL: Some of us _are_ using Transfer Sure, you cannot expect much from moving 10 Poison into your 15 Dodging. But you can open a new spell school easily. Also, you can push Poison further than you'd do otherwise (and which can be useful), and then transfer it all after Elf, say.

I'll try to ask people to have transfer zero the giving skill, that seems like an immediate improvement. (Here, the question is what's more convenient: (1) transferring in small doses, (2) transferring all the way unless the player manually stops the transfer. Back when we made Ashenzari, we went with (1) but I agree that (2) is much more useful in practice.)

[Sandman25]

Transferring in small doses is better. I mean it should not take only 30 piety to convert 27 Summoning into 27 Translocations.

[KoboldLord]

KL: Some of us _are_ using Transfer Sure, you cannot expect much from moving 10 Poison into your 15 Dodging.

I am not convinced that using it does anything particularly useful. It feels like it should be doing something, but killing stuff is faster and more effective and involves actual gameplay.

But you can open a new spell school easily.

Or you could open that new spell school by killing one single lousy deep troll pack. If it feels like Transfer Knowledge is doing something for you, I would say it is more likely that most of your xp improvement in the target skill is actually from new monster xp. In this case, Transfer Knowledge is mostly a magic feather because it is actually really easy to start training a new skill.

[dpeg]

Sandman: could be continuous piety cost instead of the current fixed amount. Or scrap the piety cost and only pay with xp from the donating skill.

[bel]

Have you looked at the actual numbers involved? When I look into un-training a skill I don't use any more with this ability, I am usually disappointed to find out that doing so would only boost the skill I do want to train by something pathetic, like 0.2 skill levels. Even though raising poison magic to 10 took my venom mage until Lair to earn, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to what I'm getting from clearing one level of Depths. Just killing a bunch of new monsters is much more effective at bootstrapping a new skill than trying to transfer from old skills. Transfer Knowledge is both tedious and ineffective at this task.

No I haven't looked at the numbers exactly. I am not sure how you calculate this 0.2. From my understanding, the 90% of the XP is transferred from one school to another. So I can transfer say 10 from Hexes to 10 summoning (it will be a bit less than 10 summoning, because 90%). Since skills cost goes up very fast, going from 10->11 takes about as much XP as going from 0->10. So basically I save roughly half the XP (if my aim was to get 11 summoning).

[Sandman25]

Also let's not forget that the more skill points you have the more expensive they become.

I've just checked Hu in wizard mode. Ash lowers Poison magic from 10 (2800 skill points) to 7 (1400 skill points) and increases Dodging from 10 (2800 skill points) to 11.8 (4051 skill points). Please don't tell me it is irrelevant or useless.

[KoboldLord]

No I haven't looked at the numbers exactly. I am not sure how you calculate this 0.2.

I got that example number by attempting to use Transfer Knowledge in a game. That's what the display tells me the ability will do. It is possible that the display is in error, but if there's a bug there I don't know about it.

I've just checked Hu in wizard mode. Ash lowers Poison magic from 10 (2800 skill points) to 7 (1400 skill points) and increases Dodging from 10 (2800 skill points) to 11.8 (4051 skill points). Please don't tell me it is irrelevant or useless.

Why do you have 10 dodging at the point in the game where you might intentionally choose to dump poison magic?

[Berder]

I've just checked Hu in wizard mode. Ash lowers Poison magic from 10 (2800 skill points) to 7 (1400 skill points) and increases Dodging from 10 (2800 skill points) to 11.8 (4051 skill points). Please don't tell me it is irrelevant or useless.

It's kind of annoying that halving the xp only brings it from 10 to 7. While that's indeed 50% of the xp, it gives the subjective impression that it's not doing very much and it remains annoying to have 7 in a skill you don't use for the rest of the game. Then you're tempted to just keep halving and transferring... and even if you only have 3 left in the skill after a couple more transfers you still see it as wasted.

It would be better just for peace of mind if it transferred 100%.

[Sandman25]

Why do you have 10 dodging at the point in the game where you might intentionally choose to dump poison magic?

Because this is what I used in my test. You know Hu aptitudes, right? Replace it with Necromancy or whatever.