The Tavern

I think a "fun" feature to mix into artifacts would be Sentinel's Mark. You get a fancy sword but as long as you're wielding it you have the big red "Mark" attribute calling all the local wildlife. Or ring, amulet, whatever. There might also be a few cursed rings of Sentinel's Mark floating around just to keep trial and error identification interesting. It doesn't seem like it should be hard to code, except of course you have to decide whether you keep track of what happens if you are under the effect of Sentinel's Mark from some other source and unwield/unwear the item. (If it cleared the effect to put it on/take it off, I'm not sure that's really a bad feature)

Sometimes you're hungry, bored, or just feel all powerful and something like this would be really cool. But wielding the artifact in the middle of a new level and finding this out when it goes off would be more like "interesting".

Mark and noise are pretty different...

Mark: AWAKE enemies track you regardless of where they are and ignore stealth. (Sleeping enemies check stealth as normal).
Noise: Wakes up a lot of enemies and draws them to the source of the noise (though with good stealth they still might not notice you).

I've actually been thinking that evocable Mark could be helpful for certain builds. (Make a Fedhas garden then Evoke a ring of Noise for a loud Noise and Mark status...everything comes to you.) Be interesting still (fighting everything at once is harder than a few at a time); but could allow useage of killholes, etc. without need of more tedious luring (actually evocable Mark might be too powerful).

Well, if you want to make noise, there are lots of good spells for that. And really, you ought to be able to just yell out loud with some "t" option (actually I don't know you can't).

t t Yells

One of the design principles of the new negative artifact properties is that they are not supposed to encourage swapping. That's not to say the new artifact properties actually follow this principle or that any of them are better than a *Mark attribute would be. (Indeed, I wouldn't say either of those two things.) I would say, though, that you'd be crazy to walk around with Mark everywhere you go and you'd be crazy not you use a *Mark weapon very carefully and only as an alt (or a very situational tactical item, e.g. to draw monsters out of end branch vaults or something). In other words, it would only be useful as something you swap to occasionally. Therefore, I think there's about zero chance of such a property getting any traction.

I think adding "Mark" to the scroll of noise would be a good idea. Right now, the scroll of noise is just a reason to maybe read-identify scrolls on an explored level. With mark, it would be more useful for bringing fights to chosen terrain, or at least for clearing away uniques and ghosts after you've cleared the rest of a level.

FR: Even non-adjacent monsters follow you up stairs when you're marked

Whoa there, Satan.

I forgot where it was discussed originally, but being able to mark yourself at will is incredibly powerful. Adding a patch that adds mark to scroll of noise would be an interesting experiment, but I suspect all it would do is trivialize a lot of branch ends and other tough levels by forcing everything into convenient locations (killholes or some other chokepoint).

For example, I could just make a killhole in Zot:5, mark myself, and just go on a rampage as everyone exits out of the orb chamber and walks into the killhole one by one and never have to worry about fighting a nasty group of enemies.

It could have some fun uses though. In a Crawl without ctele, you could try marking yourself to drag everyone out of a rune vault, shaking them off by getting rid of the mark and then teleport and/or invis, snatching the rune, marking yourself again at the rune vault and finally teleporting again.

I have to admit, I'm rarely in Zot with a character that can kill 5 OoF sequentially without healing and recharging. If I had such a character, I can't imagine Zot being that trivialized by calling everything into your killhole. It's not that hard to kite them in. It's more of a convenience on such a character than any sort of actual power boost.

Kiting itself can be dangerous and is ressource-intensive in zot. You need haste, maybe you are only at rF+ without !resistance.

In a killhole esp with tons of regen, you sit nice and buffed up with might, haste, agility, resistance; I certainly would like to try it once.

Uh what? Maybe it's just because I've been working towards great(er)player lately, but this seems to me like ... not a thing that's going to work out very well in the vast majority of cases?

Any powerful melee race/background combo shouldn't have a problem doing this unless your equipment is awful for Zot. But yes, I wouldn't do this on a Felid or MuFi.

There's certainly something to be said of a skill that potentially forces everything in the map to fight you in melee range, one at a time. That said, you should have the means to bail out of it (remove the equipment that marks you, dig out of killhole, teleport, banish yourself, make the killhole near stairs and dig out, etc.). If you refuse to move out of the killhole or remove your mark, then obviously you're going to be fighting until there's nothing left, but there's nothing forcing you to stay. It sounds more dangerous than it actually is, IMO.

You know, if shield of the gong dropped in every game, I'd rarely use it. But possibly that's because I rarely play pure melee characters... I usually need evocations or spells for Z:5.

I "marked" myself on Zot 5 with a very weak character, not with a very powerful one. I intentionally entered an alarm trap near entrance to Zot 5 vault and immediately ran to stairs, then reentered the level via another stairs. The idea was to fight dangerous monsters one on one near stairs instead of all of them in orb chambers. Perhaps it was a Fo, I don't remember now.

I think marking yourself as a finite resource would make the most sense, something like an added effect to scrolls of noise or some sort of rechargeable artifact like phial of floods. Maybe when evoked you can mark anything, including an arbitrary tile?