Amulet balancing

[byrel]

Currently, Faith is clearly one of the best amulets in the game. It's both high-power and non-swappable, so you should have a meaningful choice as to whether to wear it. Except that the choice is not very meaningful, because it's power-level is so far above most other amulets. There was a discussion on ##crawl-dev about redoing the other amulets such that they roughly match the power level of Faith, with some mechanic to prevent easy swapping. My suggestions:

Modifications:
Amulet of Regeneration

Power Level: Increase regen rate to 150-200 instead of 100, or add mana regen.
Anti-swapping: Cause drain on removal

Amulet of Rage

Power Level: I think it's fine. This amulet is absurd in the early game.
Anti-swapping: XP-gated slow.

Amulet of Clarity

Power Level: Add MR++
Anti-swapping: XP-gated *Confuse

Amulet of Warding

Power Level: Gives a chance for any monster that damages you to be teleported away. Resisted by HD.
Anti-swapping: Random translocations miscast

Amulet of Voraciousness

Power Level: Add an aux bite (level 2) attack, add a permanent song of slaying buff and provide satiation on kill.
Anti-swapping: Strength drain and set satiation to Starving.

Keep without change:
Amulet of Faith
Amulet of Guardian Spirit

Remove:
Amulet of Resist Corrosion

Reason: A single rarely relevant resistance isn't great design, and can't be made to match Faith's power. Make it into a ring.

Amulet of Stasis

Reason: This effect only really works swappably. Make it into a ring.

Amulet of Resist Mutation

Reason: Switch to a ring, and make all blocked mutations still occur as temporary, wretched-star-esque mutations. Keep the block percentages the same.

Amulet of Inaccuracy

Reason: We don't need a 100% bad amulet to make it worth IDing amulets when swapping has a cost associated with it. Furthermore, purely negative options are generally less interesting than generally negative, but useful options like lignification.

Introduce:
Amulet of Invisibility

Power Level: Drop the Evo required to use this at decent fail rate, and make fully toggleable. Still Contam limited. Remove ring of invis. Prevent auto-explore while toggled on.
Anti-swapping: Cause XP-gated self-corona and random Hexes miscast

Edits:

Spoiler: show

• Changed reasoning on rCorr to accurately reflect it's reasonable values.
• Increase severity of Invis anti-swap
• Make amulet of invis toggleable (ontoclasm)
• Add making rCorr a ring (Sprucery)
• Rework warding to be more generally useful (##crawl-dev)
• Rework warding into amulet of golubria (Lasty)
• Added alternative anti-swapping mechanism (Dpeg)
• Added inaccuracy to the remove list.
• Combined Stasis and Clarity (Laraso)
• Removed Stasis (reverted clarity) and added as a ring.(amythest)
• Added Amulet of Voraciousness to replace gourmand.(archaeo)
• Rework resist mutation into a ring. (infinitevox)
• Removed alternative anti-swapping mechanism. Noone here has seemed a big fan, and I don't think it would work out well.
• Added stopping auto-explore when invis is toggled on and contaminating you.

[Jeremiah]

Replace amulet of rCorr with amulet of resistance - gives 1 pip of resistance to all resistible damage effects, removal gives XP-gated negative resistance to all resistible damage.

[Sprucery]

rCorr should be a ring.

[byrel]

Swapped amulet of warding around again. Now essentially an amulet of disjunction (Lasty's idea)

[byrel]

Added an alternative anti-swapping mechanism that dpeg suggested: make amulets simply be one-time use.

Personally I don't care for it, because it removes a lot of granularity and design space. Faith is a really well-designed amulet now; you do want to remove it somehow, but it penalizes you an appropriate amount in an appropriate way; it's very easy to tweak the swapping balance independently of the power of the amulet. Guardian spirit, on the other hand, can afford to be rather strategically swappable (though you gain no benefit tactically). Swapping it isn't really scummable in any way, and the power of the amulet is very smooth throughout time, ramping up toward the middle-end game so it makes sense that you can swap it with minimal penalty. As the rest of these amulets are buffed, different penalties will also make sense based on the swapping-scumminess and overall power curve.

Consider that if you make amulets one-time use, Faith is a no-brainer on all characters who find it pre-6*. You don't actually lose anything by wearing till you hit 6*s. The one-size-fits-all mechanism just doesn't fit some cases IMO.

[archaeo]

Sorry, but is the idea here "Remove rCorr and rMut with no corresponding changes to corrosion and malmut"?

The logical end-point of that kind of design, imo, is a game where there aren't any resistances, since most of it is just "A single rarely relevant but nearly absolute resistance" in effect. If people don't have a problem with rC/F/N/Pois, I'm not sure why there's a corresponding problem with rCorr and rMut, honestly.

That said, if mutations and corrosion are actually interestingly rebalanced, I'm not going to complain. I just don't quite get the logic underlying the difference between "good resistances" and "bad resistances," I guess.

[Laraso]

Am I the only one who actually likes the amulet of gourmand? I find it pretty useful for characters who use hunger as a resource, such as characters worshipping Sif Muna or any character casting lots of big spells who can't afford to level up spellcasting to reduce the hunger cost. As an irrelevant but added QOL bonus, it makes the hunger system far less annoying.

To buff it and also make hunger somewhat more relevant, you could make the amulet offer minor but meaningful bonuses depending on your satiation level. For example, if you're engorged you could get +2 slaying or something. Taking that further, you could use that idea to revamp hunger and inflict penalties depending on how close you are to starving, such as maybe .1 delay to all actions when in "near starving" state. Obviously you would probably want to include numerous small buffs/debuffs depending on the hunger state, not just a single one. That would easily make the amulet more meaningful and powerful, IMO. We could also let it give players a ghoul's appetite, letting them eat ordinarily inedible corpses. Following your idea of having penalties for unequipping amulets, you could make it greatly increase your hunger rate for X amount of turns on de-equip, which would actually be relevant if coupled with the aforementioned hunger penalties.

I might the only one to think this way, but I'd be really sad to see amulets of gourmand removed.

EDIT:

Also, instead of removing amulets of warding, I think you could probably give the MR++ to the warding amulet instead, and then just merge clarity + stasis together into an amulet of prevention or something. That would make more sense to me, MR seems like it would belong on an amulet of "warding".

[tasonir]

I realize it's not optimal, but I tend to value being able to swap amulets easily, and don't often use faith. Also just the low chances of finding it as you pick a god and have low piety - it isn't quite as good once you're already at 6*, although it's still strong. But generally speaking I prefer being able to swap amulets, and making them all have penalties for removing them seems harsh to me. I don't mind guardian spirit's removal penalty, as you just press 5 to restore it. But with the current Corrosion/mutation mechanics not being able to swap them in easily will hurt a lot. Turning them into rings probably works, but generally speaking giving up a ring slot for rMut will cost more than giving up an amulet slot, as (currently) amulets are weaker than rings imho.

I'm all for amulet rebalancing and like most of the ideas, it's just the across the board anti-swapping part I don't like.

[byrel]

Sorry, but is the idea here "Remove rCorr and rMut with no corresponding changes to corrosion and malmut"?

The logical end-point of that kind of design, imo, is a game where there aren't any resistances, since most of it is just "A single rarely relevant but nearly absolute resistance" in effect. If people don't have a problem with rC/F/N/Pois, I'm not sure why there's a corresponding problem with rCorr and rMut, honestly.

That said, if mutations and corrosion are actually interestingly rebalanced, I'm not going to complain. I just don't quite get the logic underlying the difference between "good resistances" and "bad resistances," I guess.

Resist corrosion is a good resistance, it's just that resistances mostly don't belong on the amulet slot with this rework. So there should be a ring of rCorr.

Resist mutation is bad because it's 90% effective, which makes the mutation system way too much of a gear check. That should be reworked as well to balance with this, but that's a separate topic.

[tabstorm]

Why not get rid of stasis, add the amulet of golubria in place of it, and then make warding prevent the use of summoning by you and enemies as suggested in the other thread? The suggestion in the OP basically makes stasis an amulet of resist paralysis/resist slowing. I imagine the whole point of changing resist slowing to stasis in the first place was to make it more "interesting". Maybe I would consider using it if it blocked banishment, but the new amulet of clarity mostly has you covered in that regard. The penalties you added to some of the amulets are pretty harsh compared to going from 6 to the low end of 5 stars of piety for removing faith, especially since it is easy to use little to no god powers whatsoever in the mid to late game and still have an easy time.

[Rast]

Remove amulet of faith, entirely.

Balance other amulets around being swappable.

[phloomp]

The logical end-point of that kind of design, imo, is a game where there aren't any resistances, since most of it is just "A single rarely relevant but nearly absolute resistance" in effect. If people don't have a problem with rC/F/N/Pois, I'm not sure why there's a corresponding problem with rCorr and rMut, honestly.

That said, if mutations and corrosion are actually interestingly rebalanced, I'm not going to complain. I just don't quite get the logic underlying the difference between "good resistances" and "bad resistances," I guess.

For me the distinction is that corrosion and mutation introduce interesting gameplay, and making them resistable just feels like skipping part of the game.

On the other hand, logical endpoint is logical. Elemental resistances do introduce some nice strategy - in particular it's good that they force you to shake up your branch order sometimes - but I'd support at least removing elemental resistances from all easy-to-swap equipment (aka jewelry).

[milski]

Why not make Gourmand useful by simply preventing your hunger clock from ticking down by any means, and immediately setting you to Starving when you remove it?

As an additional benefit, it would provide a test run for just removing hunger!

[Sprucery]

Remove amulet of faith, entirely.

...and add potions of piety!

[kroki]

Remove amulet of faith, entirely.

...and add potions of piety!

Spoiler: show

[Sprucery]

Crawl development could probably have a use for some sponsor money...

[adozu]

it's already annoying enough to wear-ID faith at the wrong time, should all amulets really punish wear-ID? it's not like you always get a huge pile of id scrolls, actually i often don't have enough for potions until quite late in the game.

[byrel]

I'm thinking about a lot of the concrete suggestions made in this thread, but figured I'd address a few common thoughts:

Gourmand removal...
Hunger is currently a very broken system in crawl. It's essentially a combination of two entirely separate resource mechanisms with a big dose of simulationism and tradition thrown on top. It does need a massive revamp, and I doubt anyone would disagree with that. However, this isn't the thread for discussing that.

Wearing gourmand is usually (not always) just sacrificing power for convenience. Even if you are on a caster that has to burn through food beyond the chunk drop rate without it, it's very unlikely that you'll run out of permafood too. That makes it nearly impossible to buff gourmand to an appropriate power level. It could conceivably be reintroduced in a healthy form when hunger becomes more relevant in some way.

Unswappable...
From a design perspective, we don't need two mutually exclusive categories of rings. If a mechanic or concept makes sense as a swappable slot, just put it on a ring. Making amulets more potent than most rings and unswappable increases the design space we can explore. It really makes amulets like a god minor-mode in a way; you have minor wrath and minor abilities, with limited dropped choices. God choices tend to be a lot more interesting than the average ring choice so I'm optimistic that this system will feel interesting.

ID game...
There could be an increase in ID scrolls dropped to compensate for more ID-worthy targets. Or not; I wouldn't mind it being optimal to quaff ID that 'probably curing' stack. Potions of poison should probably be modified to be non-directly lethal in that case though.

Edit: I did add removing Inaccuracy; it's entirely unnecessary if there's actually something at stake when you put an amulet on.

[archaeo]

There could be an increase in ID scrolls dropped to compensate for more ID-worthy targets. Or not; I wouldn't mind it being optimal to quaff ID that 'probably curing' stack. Potions of poison should probably be modified to be non-directly lethal in that case though.

Alternately, as long as we're calling for sweeping changes to the jewelry system and associated monsters, we could just dispense with the ID minigame altogether while we're at it. It's an uninteresting algorithm the player has to run through at the beginning of every game, and it serves no purpose that couldn't be more easily served by just not generating items in the first place.

[johlstei]

If amulets are made so that they all aren't effectively swappable, the number of auts it takes to change them should increase and they should go in the (W)ear menu instead of the (P)ut on one. I think the Put on menu should only have things designed to be quickly swapped.

[byrel]

Why should the number of auts to swap change? IDC about which menu it goes in.

[johlstei]

Why should the number of auts to swap change? IDC about which menu it goes in.

To me the amount of turns it takes to swap something is a hint to whether I should or shouldn't be swapping it in combat. I guess I treat the two menus as "fast to swap" and "slow to swap" partitions of one's equipment. I think it sends mixed messages if amulets are in the "fast to swap" partition while having mechanics discouraging you from swapping them. It's not a huge deal either way, just a thought, thanks for the idea/write-up - I like it.

[byrel]

Removed Stasis, and made it a ring instead, since it only really works swappably...

Warding is actually good where it is. Teleporting a summon away is effectively the same as abjuring it, and this way the amulet is useful in a much larger swath of the game.

[partial]

Making more "unswappable" items is the wrong design direction imo.

It's already frustrating to (p)ut on an unID amulet and get stuck with unwanted Faith (e.g. on a blastycasty^Vehumet, where Faith can make you miss spell gifts).

Seems like a punishment for characters who are low on ID scrolls.

[byrel]

Your example is bad, because removing the amulet will freeze your current spell gift for a while. Which is super useful; Veh gets a lot of mileage from removing amulets of Faith. I also rarely feel frustrated about wearing Faith, because for most gods it's the best amulet choice anyhow. This would change under my proposal.

In any event, I already addressed the ID minigame; you can add more ID scrolls or make people start quaff-IDing some potions. I'm OK with that either way.

[partial]

Your example is bad, because removing the amulet will freeze your current spell gift for a while. Which is super useful; Veh gets a lot of mileage from removing amulets of Faith.

True story I forgot about this quirk, but I still don't consider it good design. It's a little spoilery and is really a meta-mechanic.

I also rarely feel frustrated about wearing Faith, because for most gods it's the best amulet choice anyhow.

I have a personal dislike for items that prevent swapping (even vamp is annoying imo), so there's probably nothing that will ease my frustration with it. I dunno if anyone else feels the same way about this.

[Lasty]

Re: amulet of mutation, imagine if it gave 50% mutation resistance. Would you still use it? Once it works on the level of other resists, it's no longer particularly useful even in the situations where it used to be somewhat useful because you still need to use line of fire management to handle the malmutator you're fighting, and the line of fire management is overall much more effective. Like the crown of torment, this amulet really only works as an item if it is very reliable, and like crown of torment its essential purpose is to turn a certain type of danger into a pure gearcheck, which I'm generally against.

Moreover, the heart of this proposal is to make all amulets be on the same power tier as "faith and to make them less not easily swappable. The design of mutation resistance doesn't fit into that plan, since it's a rarely-tested resistance, and resisting it isn't all that strong.

Similarly, I don't like the idea of making "warding block all summons because it means that 1) summoners just don't use it and most other chars don't really feel the downside, and 2) there are a few summon-heavy areas of the game while most of the rest of the game is pretty light on summons, so you'd wear this to go into Elf and Tartarus and maybe Depths/Zot and pretty much never anywhere else. I'd like to have the new amulets be things you'd be reasonably happy to have on constantly, and have switching amulets be something you do when you want to change your strategic choices rather than when you want to visit a place that has <foo> type of danger.

In terms of new proposals, a coworker suggested that some of the spirit of Gourmand could be preserved by having it give hp/mp in proportion to nutrition gained, allowing you to turn food into recovery and thereby need less downtime, as well as opening up some situations where you might want to eat in combat. I'm not sure how well that works since it could encourage you to deliberately lower your satiation so you can eat chunks (or even permafood) in combat.

Another half-baked thought: stasis and clarity could be combined into an amulet of purity that prevents all status effects and enchantments (including charms and Tele), with the cost of removal being Drain or a temporary MR- mutation or something.

[byrel]

Thing is, the amulet of purity just doesn't have enough power level to be worth wearing. Clarity and stasis are both extremely strong occasionally, and otherwise stasis is a huge disadvantage. I can't think of a way to buff stasis (including adding it to clarity and tacking on MR) that would make it anything but a noob trap. Even if you make it situationally worth it (say, {Stasis, +20%HP, +6 slaying}) it ends up being more about the additions than the stasis, which puts it solidly in unrand territory.

[Rast]

Unswappable...
From a design perspective, we don't need two mutually exclusive categories of rings.

We have four categories of gloves.

[byrel]

Unswappable...
From a design perspective, we don't need two mutually exclusive categories of rings.

We have four categories of gloves.

No we don't. We have one gloves slot, and you can wear any ego of glove in it. By contrast, I can't wear a jewelry of the gourmand in a ring slot. We have two categories of jewelry with no meaningful difference at the moment except a mutually exclusive set of properties. Making amulets somewhat more powerful and unswappable makes them fill a different design niche, giving more flexibility and depth to the game.

[Pollen_Golem]

Rast means we have four aux armor slots: gloves, boots, cloaks, and headwear. You've made your point, though.

[byrel]

Ahhh! I missed his point entirely. It's a fair point, but we do actually have somewhat meaningful differences due to aux attack mutations, and all the species differentiation.

[archaeo]

In terms of new proposals, a coworker suggested that some of the spirit of Gourmand could be preserved by having it give hp/mp in proportion to nutrition gained, allowing you to turn food into recovery and thereby need less downtime, as well as opening up some situations where you might want to eat in combat. I'm not sure how well that works since it could encourage you to deliberately lower your satiation so you can eat chunks (or even permafood) in combat.

I don't think Amulet of Being a Better Ghoul would be super popular, honestly, especially when there's a real good chance chunks won't even be a thing by 0.18.

How about instead, an Amulet of Voraciousness, which gives you an aux bite and a song-of-slaying style might bonus, whereby you gain Str/slaying the more enemies you kill within a given window of time. Str drain on removal. As long as we have food, it might as well also give satiation on hits.

[byrel]

Great idea! I added that. I didn't really think amulet of ghoulhood would even be preferable to rage, but voraciousness is perfect as a straight combat buff for extended combats.

[Dharmy]

How about creating a belt slot, and changing some of the amulets to belts? Swapping amulets could have bad effects, and belts could have minor ones. Plus, that opens up a new avenue of artifact belts. Belt of strength, belt of ammunition, black belt (bonus to UC apt?), etc.

To wear a belt, your species must have some sort of waist, so no octopodes or nagas, maybe felids, vine stalkers, spriggans, merfolk in water.

[Pollen_Golem]

Mod request: find-and-replace all instances of "amulet" on this page with "belt", for the giggles, pretty please.

belt of ammunition

We can still have an ammy of ammy!

[Kaelii]

An amulet purely dedicated to a resistance would be hard pressed to match up to faith or guardian spirit in strength seems to be the primary complaint about rCorrosion and rMutation.
However Mutation and Corrosion are still components of the game that we can examine as aspects relating to amulets.

Instead of "Amulet of Resist Mutation" which focuses on removing the interesting aspects of mutations, choosing to mutate yourself and the threat of bad mutations from enemies, I would be interested if an Amulet of Evolution might work. The Evolution mutation is the icon of a mutation-roulette playstyle, but it ranges through overwhelmingly unimpressive, game losing, and nice. An amulet which grants semi-reliable access to good mutations over the course of a game, as well as some protection from enemies who are able to negatively mutate the player strikes me as an interesting choice. Mutations offer access to lots of durability options which can significantly help some slot limited races, or can help round out poor item drops in a game with lucky mutations.
The most major overlap in current design would be Jivya and Demonspawn. I am not sure if this would prohibit the idea, as both have access to unique mutations.
The amulet could offer access to the full regular pool of mutations or a reduced pool of mutations.
Instead of 90% mutation resistance, a lesser negative mutation resistance, no impact on beneficial mutations (so the player does not have to remove to quaff potion of beneficial mutation), and occasional mutation as XP is gained.
Removal of the amulet could cause an XP gated negative evolution, purging some positive mutations, or other effects depending on the strength of the amulet.
Implementation might require modification to the existing mutation system

Corrosion is less extensive of a design space than mutations, but the primary effect of corrosion is enemies which temporarily reduce the combat capability of the player. Specifically the player's damage reduction, the player's damage, and the player's accuracy. Acid as a damage source
An amulet that reduces the effects of corrosion, either through reducing the strength of corrosion, or the frequency at which it happens is a reactive effect.
Granting an inverse effect already exists in the game through two spells (song of slaying, and Cigotuvi's Embrace), and an amulet that grants both spell effects would probably be horribly overpowered in an always on state. However granting a similar effect to each spell for a number of turns after killing a monster of relevant difficulty might be fitting, although this is already significantly departed from a resistance amulet. Offering a lesser protection from corrosion (or simply acid damage damage shaving or something), with AC boosting slightly in extended combat and a very minor slaying gain could make for an Amulet of the Forge. Removal of the amulet could cause an XP gated corrosion effect "Your armour and weapon visibly deteriorate from wear as the protective magic of the amulet fades" -- Right now it might not fit in with Amulet of Voraciousness existing.

[infinitevox]

"Amulet of Resist Mutation"
Instead of only having 1 pip, and being 90% resist - What if you treated it similarly to other resistances.
Probably have to change it to a ring too, but give it 3 pips, then change rMut so that:
+ = %chance to negate, if not negated %chance to make malmut temporary
++ = Same but higher %s
+++ = Same but very high %s

Make this apply to all non Jivya/Ds muts, that way it doesn't change the mutation roulette mini-game that some of us like to play.
You wanna roll the dice for a perm good mut? Take off that ring!

[jason0320]

Form my experience amulets are boring and too situational. Mostly I found myself stick to gourmand for the endless feast of chunks, only switch to amulet of rC for Slime and amulet of rM when I'm in the Abyss and a wretched star is in my sight. I don't even found any of the unrand amulets appealing but the Macabre finger necklace and the additional ring of rN had helped a lot in Crypt and Tomb.

For the other, amulet of faith is meaningless once you meet max piety, amulet of guardian spirit is counter productive and amulet of warding is even too weak to be situational on summon heavy branches like Elf.

[CanOfWorms]

Amulets of faith are only meaningless at max piety if you can't lose piety quickly, e.g. Veh. Gods with gifts (Oka, Trog, Sif) or gods with good piety intensive abilities (Qaz, Trog, Zin) still benefit since it means you can use their abilities more often.

Guardian Spirit is good for any build that doesn't require draining all their MP, e.g. Berserkers or hybrids that use buff spells. There's even a species whose entire strength comes from the fact that they have innate Guardian Spirit (although admittedly it's much stronger with an antimagic bite...)

[jason0320]

Guardian Spirit is good for any build that doesn't require draining all their MP, e.g. Berserkers or hybrids that use buff spells. There's even a species whose entire strength comes from the fact that they have innate Guardian Spirit (although admittedly it's much stronger with an antimagic bite...)

Yeah I'm a little biased because I usually run spellcasters and sacrificing Gourmand for Guardian Spirit is usually not worthy. But having Guardian Spirit on armour like Moon Troll Leather Armour is a different story.

[byrel]

Reworked rMut into a ring similar to infinitevox's suggestion, but kept the resistance rate as is, and made all blocked mutations be temporary. I think this pretty much solves the problems with mutation resistance.

[byrel]

Note that we're now down to only removing inaccuracy, and all other amulet effects are either reworked or ringified. Good work guys!

[archaeo]

From the Remove rMut thread:

I think a more strategic role for amulets of resist mutation would be amulets of suppress mutation, so instead of preventing mutations from occuring, it just cancels all (non-species) mutations while it's worn. Temporary mutations from wretched stars should remain unsuppressed since those don't have significant strategic impact on a character. An obvious swapping penalty is to give a player a bad mutation.

The only thing I would add is making the suppression require ramp-up turns. I certainly prefer that to the ring solution.

[Pollen_Golem]

With such a revamp, maybe we could get some form of cTele back in amulet-only form.

[archaeo]

Unfortunately, the problem with cTele was only partially due to how easy it was to access a fairly broken power; the other big problem is that it requires making some levels -cTele to preserve any challenge, which the devs really loathed for creating obnoxious special cases. I can't really imagine putting cTele back into the game without -cTele levels without making the item so dangerous that it'd just be a Crown-of-Torment-style player trap.

[Pollen_Golem]

could just give you semi-controlled blinks, I don't know

P.S. for convenience XP-gated = temporary mutation

[milski]

Just out of curiosity, why did amulets of inaccuracy ever exist? Cursed rings of slaying have always been a thing.