The Tavern

Summoning lesser/greater demons using Makhleb's invocations has a separate failure chance and chance for a hostile summon. In order to know the chance of summoning a hostile demon, you need to know this formula: (4/(20 + 3*Invocations), whereas the failure chance is displayed right there in the ability menu.

I suggest that the ability always summon something, with "failure" resulting in a hostile summon (the chance of failure could be adjusted for balance of course). That way everything is transparent and you don't need to know a formula.

Sounds good. I expect a patch to be welcome.

here we go: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/pull/106

Well this went perfectly! Suggestion -> dev approval -> patch, in three posts. GDD: sometimes, it works!

After this change, I'd like to see the ability success formula for these to be adjusted such that fail chance never reaches 0%.

Yeah the success chance definitely also needs adjusted in some fashion.

I think failure chance for the new version should be better than old failure+old chance of hostile, but worse than old failure.

...except at exactly 27 invocation

Not exactly what was asked for, but I increased the fail chance and made fail% more dependant on piety. You would probably aim for ~15 invo now instead of 10.

New numbers (piety,invo,fail%):
120,0 = 82%
120,10 = 41%
120,20 = 8%

200,0 = 50%
200,10 = 12%
200,20 = 1%

180,27 = 0%
200,25 = 0%
(200,27 = 0%)

I would suggest making the fail rate lower. Many people don't use Makh summons at all, and basically just use it for healing. Having to train invo to 15 would make it even more of a disincentive.

This was mentioned in ##crawl-dev logs and I agree with it:

Making the definition of "fail" different from ever other a ability in the game is kind of bad.

I would definitely support showing the chance of a hostile demon appearing being shown in the ability description, or perhaps spell out "foo% hostile" in the ability line.

Just a note that both my commits are in trunk without any special callout for the miscast behaviour -- anyone who claims I'm on the side of the players will henceforce be referred to this thread.