Proposal: Remove Clearly Bad Floor Items

[bcadren]

My personal challenge (winning a Monk of every race and every god) has lead me to starting a number of characters with no starting weapon. (-2 UC means monk starts with ~3.0 UC skill and has a hard time raising it; crap weapon even in early game). Starting this kind of character generally means picking up the first floor weapon is a good move; but then "It sticks to your hand! A cursed -2 Short Sword." is essentially a near NetHackish "You die." message from how miserably hard it is to survive that if you haven't found any ?Remove Curse yet. Not to mention you end up without any escape items for awhile because of blind reading your first ?Blink and ?Tele, etc. hoping for a ?Remove Curse. Personally given how annoying it is and it's primary effect being lack of decent escape options in the early game; I'm for removing the identification game completely; BUT can we at least make "A short sword." found on the ground, as opposed to "A runed short sword." always an uncursed unbranded +0 Short Sword? For the sanity of bad start combos and combos that start without a weapon?

[partial]

I'm pretty sure non-glowing/runed weapons are always completely mundane (+0 uncursed)

[greedo]

Well, they actually can have +/- value I'm pretty sure, don't think they can be cursed, though. Either way, while of course auto-id should be a thing, I don't think making balance decisions on intentionally gimped players is a good idea.

[partial]

don't wield strange weapons unless you're feeling brave

[Hurkyl]

I'm pretty sure non-glowing/runed weapons are always completely mundane (+0 uncursed)

That's incorrect.

I just downloaded the latest trunk to be sure, and used wizard mode to make 20 short swords. It turns out they were all mundane, one was cursed +0, and two were cursed -2.

I did the experiment a second time too; this time one was glowing (+2 freezing). One of the mundane ones was cursed +0.

[partial]

I stand corrected; thanks for looking into that!

[Sphara]

Apparently also glowing/runed items can be mundane +0. At least my bug report about the subject remains unanswered.

https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=9860

[neil]

Apparently also glowing/runed items can be mundane +0. At least my bug report about the subject remains unanswered.

https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=9860

Fixed now. We were generating +0 bracers of archery, then stripping off the archery ego without resetting the cosmetic ("runed") flag.

[bcadren]

Still think non-runed should always be +0 Uncursed. Runed being a chance of -2, cursed is one thing, but a plain spear should be a plain spear.

[nago]

Well I had some funny times in early floors due to plain weapons being cursed and lack of ?rc and that's probably the only case where curses are relevant, so removing them would be a good move if removing curses as well

[tabstorm]

The whole point is to make you fear your inventory.

[Bart]

Getting a cursed weapon on d:1 has a good chance of becoming a death sentence. Occasional "funny times" when character can survive with cursed -2 weapon do not justify killing the rest.

[Siegurt]

Getting a cursed weapon on d:1 has a good chance of becoming a death sentence. Occasional "funny times" when character can survive with cursed -2 weapon do not justify killing the rest.

I survive about 80-90% of my d1 cursed weapon pickups to uncursing. It isn't funny though, it is mostly just sort of tedious.

(Yay, everything takes lots and lots of attacks to kill now! I imagine this would be what it would be like to play Sandman's increased hps mod)

[Bart]

Well, then I am either a very bad player or very unlucky player, because usually I have to fight an adder which I cannot even hit before I find my first remove curse scroll. So much fun, so little annoying randomness.

The fact that current design basically punishes only monks (as elementalists/wizards can still cast their spells at full power) is very surprising. I didn't know we consider monks overpowered...

[partial]

Still think non-runed should always be +0 Uncursed. Runed being a chance of -2, cursed is one thing, but a plain spear should be a plain spear.

Yes I also agree with this.

I honestly thought this was already the case.

[Dharmy]

A cursed early sling doesn't seem so bad if you have bullets.

[infinitevox]

This seems like a common-sense idea.
Plain items are plain items.
I know whenever I start off as a Venom-mage, I always pick up the first dagger I see, just in case I come around a corner and have a Stab opportunity or something. (I also train stealth in robes so thats at thing...)
Or if I know from the start I wanna go hybrid, I'll swap out my chainmail for leather armor. In that event all I'm looking for is the mundane armor to change my starting kit.
Now...
You wanna play the risk/reward game? That's when you pick up and equip that Runed item and pray for +x item of xxx, instead of Cursed -x item

[Pollen_Golem]

At least in previous versions, non-blue light-gray items could have at least small positive enchantments, making it ideal to wield both if you found e.g. two plain lajatangs. Would you support removing positive enchantments from plain items, too?

PS It's also weird that if you can see a non-wight's weapon's brand, it's not cursed. These weapons should display "an uncursed" in front.

[Sprucery]

At least in previous versions, non-blue light-gray items could have at least small positive enchantments, making it ideal to wield both if you found e.g. two plain lajatangs. Would you support removing positive enchantments from plain items, too?

This is already the case, if I understand correctly. Plain items can be cursed but they won't have a positive enchantment. This way you don't have to wield or wear every item to see if it's better than your current one.

[bcadren]

At least in previous versions, non-blue light-gray items could have at least small positive enchantments, making it ideal to wield both if you found e.g. two plain lajatangs. Would you support removing positive enchantments from plain items, too?

This is already the case, if I understand correctly. Plain items can be cursed but they won't have a positive enchantment. This way you don't have to wield or wear every item to see if it's better than your current one.

Yea; but a plain item really should just be a plain item. Early QStaff should always be a blessing, not a -3 QStaff (Curse) that will drain your scrolls to remove it if you don't have any IDed yet.