The Tavern

After finding home in cocytus, shard shrikes also started to appear in depths. I think they are a threat inadequate to this place. Let me explain in few points:
- Shrikes are capable of delivering huge damage per attack and they might attack more than once per turn. I will not do maths here, but I think something around 150 is completely within their range (with no rC). I doubt anything can top that without buffs.
- Player cannot reliably escape shard shrikes even with blink/teleport scrolls because of speed 30.
- A single source of rC is mandatory, but even with it throw icicle isn't something to sneeze at.
- Shrikes tend to park themselves at a distance. They cannot be killed with weak auxiliary ranged weapon; they have too high HPs for that.
- Player does not have a guaranteed access to rC in depths. Even if rC can be attained by e.g. ring swapping, accidental stumbling upon shard shrike can lead to instant death. One entering cocytus knows that rC is mandatory and can prepare beforehand; one entering depths cannot prepare for every type of attack (fire/cold/elec/more).

I do not think that any other monster shares such properties at this point of game. Fast monsters have mediocre attack strength; strong monsters are relatively slow. Here we have a case of a strong, extremely fast monster, tricky to fight in a melee and with ranged attack that requires a specific resistance.

Can we consider removing shard shrikes from depths? I believe they are more suited to Zot, if you really want them in non-extended game.

Are you sure they're allowed to spawn in depths? I only found one alone once, and it was probably due to some weird vault

As far as I can tell they only appear in profane_halls (since November), and now they don't appear there either, good catch.

http://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/co ... 204155.txt
grunt_profane_halls was it indeed. Thank you!

Yup I'm pretty sure I got it in profane halls too.
And I had found a rc+++ ring like a floor earlier, and it was still scary as hell (I had to teleport one or two time before managing to kill it!)

Throw Icicle uses beam_ice which is 65% irresistible so yeah, rC+++ doesn't do as much as one would expect.

Edit: 60%, actually. Still a lot!

I had one in Zot:1 recently, though it's conceivable I pulled it down stairs (it doesn't have a log entry and pf_coc_iceberg on Depths:5 looks suspicious). On Zot:1 the only vault I see is hangedman_zot_spectrum. Even in Zot, I'd suggest that a shard shrike is a bit much. full morgue with vault names here.

pf_coc_iceberg has no monsters; hangedman_zot_spectrum is in fact the culprit. It also places various other nasty things, e.g. electric golems, acid blobs, and Tiamat.

I just ran into a shard shrike on Vaults:1 in trunk. The only thing that saved me was having rC+++ (made the damage merely horrific rather than immediately lethal) and getting a lucky amulet of dismissal proc. I'm thinking I'll clear Vaults later than usual...

That was most likely a shapeshifter. By the time you go back, it'll be something else.

That's a really nasty shape for a shifter; those icicles are no joke and it's really hard to run away from a shrike.

Shapeshifters should absolutely turn into awful things sometimes; that's their whole point. Maybe glowing shifters should be reserved for really nasty things.

Anyhow, IIRC /Poly forces them to change shapes, though this might be signposted a little more clearly. And it might be good to hint at their underlying nature, so you don't need to wonder "hey is this a crazy thing from a vault or a shifter, let's try polying it to see."

This isn't exactly on topic, but I do find considerable overlap between regular shifters and glowing shifters. I'll routinely see mind-bogglingly low level monsters in depths (iguana, worker ant, etc.) and kill them then see a glowing shifter corpse. On the other end of the spectrum, I ran into a regular shifter on D:2 a couple weeks ago that started as an eye of draining and turned into a black mamba (leaving aside how OOD that is for D:2, that feels like roughly the space of threat level a normal shapeshifter should be at). On D:10 yesterday, I had one that started as a hornet, then after teleporting and coming back it was a death drake. I fled and came back again later, and presumably I killed it when it was something more "normal" for that area and it didn't leave a corpse. I would think it was a glowing shifter, but I really have no idea.

Anyway, I do agree that shapeshifters should have the ability to turn into pretty nasty things, otherwise they're no threat at all, but I think there should be a bit more delineation between what each type of shifter can turn into.

Okay, yeah, it was a shapeshifter. Went back down to V:1 and it was a golden dragon this time. Thankfully much easier to deal with than a shard shrike.

Guys, shapeshifters and glowing shapeshifters don't polymorph into different things. Both of them always polymorph randomly. The difference is that the chance of a regular shapeshifter polymorphing decreases as its current HD increases, whereas glowing shapeshifters polymorph at the same rate regardless of their current form (faster than the regular shapeshifter rate unless the regular shapeshifter has 1 HD).

I had no idea there was any difference at all. Why is there any difference at all?

Wait, doesn't that make glowing shifters less dangerous than regular ones, at least in theory?

except they heal upon shifting so glowing ones are more of a dps check