Incoming Amulet Reform Discussion

[Pollen_Golem]

1) Adds a lot of complexity. There's different removal penalties for each amulet? That's a lot for new players to pick up.

I think there's more to it than different removal penalties. The penalties are arbitrary. I don't know why Dismissal should give you contam or even teleportitis, nor Regeneration rot. You want to disincentive swapping only if the player is really tempted by the benefit swapping gives you. So the penalty should be such that it neutralizes the benefit gained by swapping, and I don't think that's been true of the penalties suggested here.

[lethediver]

1) Adds a lot of complexity. There's different removal penalties for each amulet? That's a lot for new players to pick up.

I think there's more to it than different removal penalties. The penalties are arbitrary. I don't know why Dismissal should give you contam or even teleportitis, nor Regeneration rot. You want to disincentive swapping only if the player is really tempted by the benefit swapping gives you. So the penalty should be such that it neutralizes the benefit gained by swapping, and I don't think that's been true of the penalties suggested here.

Yeah, I agree. The penalties feel very arbitrary and contrived. I think the two issues are related -- the REASON the individual penalties feel unnatural and illogical is because having the penalties makes no sense in the first place.

And, even if the penalties weren't so arbitrary ... even if they could be tied in better with the function of each amulet... there'd still be like 8 different penalties for newbs to learn about. And each one is pretty significant, meaning you HAVE to know about them in advance in order to mitigate the risk of them getting you killed.

[dpeg]

Lots of negativity in this thread (but not only!), which is of course no reason in itself to react. However, this is a list of arguments, so I'll say something about it (I have nothing to do with amulet changes themselves):

Hi, I just wanted to say I don't really like the direction of the amulet changes.

1) Adds a lot of complexity. There's different removal penalties for each amulet? That's a lot for new players to pick up.

New players have to pick up much, much more than this. The learning curve of Crawl (or any similarly sized roguelike, I guess) is very steep. Amulet effects do not have a noticeable impact on this. Also don't neglect that getting into the game has been made easier in many other ways, over many versions.

2) Not thematic / not intuitive.

You say this, casually, so let's remind what amulet effects we had before everyone started screaming:
* Faith having a piety toll when removed
* Gourmand having a warmup period
* Spirit zeroing MP when put on
In all of these cases, I hope it's clear that some effect is needed. I can vouch for Gourmand, because that's the very first thing I proposed as a developer. People, and that includes me, actually swapped in Gourmand after a kill, ate as many chunks as possible, and swapped in a more useful amulet right away. It was tedious, it was possible, so we did it. (Now you can say that the proper solution would have been something about food itself instead, but: one step after the other, better a quick solution right away than the perfect solution never etc.)

These effects are not hard to learn, they are thematic and I'd say they're appropriately intuitive.

There's a point to be made that up-front effects are superior to post-removal effects. Cool ideas are always appreciated!

You can discuss whether the new effects are as thematic, but that's a discussion to be actually had. (Hint: if you dislike them, it's very useful to combine "I don't like this!" with proposals.)

There is "cursed" gear in a lot of RPGs, but not a lot of neutral, unintelligent gear which would inflict harm on you for the crime of taking it off. It kind of just doesn't even really make sense, there's no tradition of amulets doing stuff like this in any game or setting.

That's a non-argument, as far as I am concerned. (But I'm also the one who happily moved away from tradition by supporting MD removal and coming up with DD. So for me it's even an anti-argument: I support avoiding tropes.) What about "making sense" in a fantasy setting? The rules are ours, and if we think the game becomes better for it, that's good enough.

3) Malmutate was already tedious and unreliable to deal with while having rMut. Without rMut, the late game just got even more annoying. Please at least have more cure mutation potions or something if you're going to remove rMut. I don't want to have to treat every neqoxec like a boss fight.

It has been said often enough by now, including by orange people, that malmutation will need at least a lookover and possibly changes.

That is a general effect, and it'd help if players would get more used to it: a massive change will imply follow-up changes. It is likely (though I'm not sure it is strictly necessary) that rMut removal forces changes to malmutations and/or malmutators. So we'll see that by playing trunk and react. More cure mutation potions is one way, malmutations being temporary first and getting permanent upon second hit is another one, simply fewer but more relevant malmutations still another etc.

I just hope that permanent, bad mutations stay. I think they add a lot to the game.

[lethediver]

I guess I do sound pretty negative. I love the job you guys are doing and have done, generally. And I'm willing to roll with whatever changes you put in 1.7. I just feel that with this new set of changes, you're creating more rules and annoyances to deal with than there needs to be.

I don't have a suggestion to make. I don't have the time in my life right now to dig in and really understand crawl from a dev perspective. All I can do is whine on the forums and hope you guys don't leave me to the ravages of nexoqecs and cacodemons. =p

I am glad that the mutation balance is being looked at because that was the issue that really panicked me into posting.

I also hope that if amulets are going to be harder to juggle, they get at least a slight buff.

[MrPlanck]

I just hope that permanent, bad mutations stay. I think they add a lot to the game.

Such as, getting berserkitis while fighting an orb of fire and going berserk soon afterward. With the awful to-hit mechanics in place (maybe you will miss or do no damage 10-12 attempts in a row), and an inability to do much but continue attacking when it looks like death is imminent, this is a subtraction in my view. Happened to me on an evoker. Could not summon help. Could not quaff potion. Could not use wand...etc.

But I am in favor of testing it all. That said, my favored approach to Z5 currently in trunk is random teleport and steal the orb. Forget engaging OOF.

[dpeg]

MrPlanck: Yes, including that.

I've watched a player who contracted berserkitis, and did Zot:5 on a fighter build. It was a very interesting experience, and I'd like to keep that.

[MrPlanck]

MrPlanck: Yes, including that.

I've watched a player who contracted berserkitis, and did Zot:5 on a fighter build. It was a very interesting experience, and I'd like to keep that.

I see. You know the best way to deal with OOF then will be to minimize turns in line of sight. Which essentially means haste + random teleports around Z5 until you get the orb. Never will make sense to actually try to kill one (in melee anyway). That seems broken to me.

[duvessa]

ninjaing the orb is the default zot:5 strategy without mutations too

[Lasty]

I just pushed changes to the amulet penalties.

[Pollen_Golem]

"The old penalties..."
heh, so old
You're quick to find ways to get these mechanics to work!

[WalkerBoh]

The new penalties are spot on. The dismissal penalty is maybe a little weird, but I think it serves its purpose a lot better than *Contam did. And I approve that both are purely on-equip penalties now, which is the best way to handle it, in my opinion.

[lazorexplosion]

OK, now the penalty at least isn't horrible, but now for example, optimal play for dismissal is to wear it but take it off whenever you're going to use combat consumables to fight a strong enemy, and then put it back on when the fight is done and you're alone again, which moves it straight to at or near the top of 'amulets you should micromanage tactically', which is completely contrary to the stated goal of reducing tactical amulet micromanagement. If anything, that change just increased the amount of tactical amulet swapping in the trunk compared to 0.17.

I beg you, please, consider this through before you put a bunch of work into it. I don't feel like these changes are going in a well thought out direction. You don't need to throw changes out there for the sake of making changes, it'll waste your valuable time and quite possibly break things that never needed fixing in the first place. Don't rush this, pause and take stock of whether you're truly addressing a worthy goal here.

I feel like the goal here is so hazy and not thought out that you're already losing sight of it and making changes contradictory to it.

[Kolbur]

Discouraging players from switching amulets so they don't have to deal with the annoying micromanaging might seem like a noble mission but it completely misses that jewellery switching is an important part of DCSS (at least if you play to win). Mild deterrents won't change a single thing when players have to switch for resistances or other reasons and stronger deterrents or just plain removals (rN+ amulet gone anyone?) just make the resistance game worse/more annoying for no reason. If amulets are made useless when you need them like regeneration they simply become useless trash unless you have nothing else to wear whereas before they were very important to have as switches in certain areas (Abyss for example).
I'm actually all for making the game harder but not by taking away tools from the players (aka dumbing down the game)!

[Kaelii]

Discouraging players from switching amulets so they don't have to deal with the annoying micromanaging might seem like a noble mission but it completely misses that jewellery switching is an important part of DCSS (at least if you play to win). Mild deterrents won't change a single thing when players have to switch for resistances or other reasons and stronger deterrents or just plain removals (rN+ amulet gone anyone?) just make the resistance game worse/more annoying for no reason. If amulets are made useless when you need them like regeneration they simply become useless trash unless you have nothing else to wear whereas before they were very important to have as switches in certain areas (Abyss for example).
I'm actually all for making the game harder but not by taking away tools from the players (aka dumbing down the game)!

Regeneration is still great to have for the Abyss. However now the player must decide ahead of time if they want regeneration in the abyss or some other effect. A player expecting a trip to the abyss, has ample time to put on an enter the abyss with regeneration already equipped. On the other hand, a player tossed into the abyss by an enemy may not wish to switch to regeneration unless they're already at maximum health.
If resists are so important to slots that they overwhelm most other considerations for that slot, then maybe THAT is a problem which should be addressed rather than justification for keeping rings and amulets similar in form and function.
Randart amulet reform. Remove resists found on other equipment from amulet randart generation pool. Lets build a list of unique effects that only appear on amulets, and randart amulets only draw from those. Maybe we keep +str, +int, +dex, but most effects found on rings only appear on fixedart amulets. Enhances the specialness of fixedarts, differentiates rings and amulet itemslots.

I would not mind amulets being a soft fixedartefact item slot. Each type of amulet offers a fairly consistent way you can change your character, but in ways not as powerful as genuine fixedart effects, but consistently useful and reliably found.

[Kolbur]

Discouraging players from switching amulets so they don't have to deal with the annoying micromanaging might seem like a noble mission but it completely misses that jewellery switching is an important part of DCSS (at least if you play to win). Mild deterrents won't change a single thing when players have to switch for resistances or other reasons and stronger deterrents or just plain removals (rN+ amulet gone anyone?) just make the resistance game worse/more annoying for no reason. If amulets are made useless when you need them like regeneration they simply become useless trash unless you have nothing else to wear whereas before they were very important to have as switches in certain areas (Abyss for example).
I'm actually all for making the game harder but not by taking away tools from the players (aka dumbing down the game)!

Regeneration is still great to have for the Abyss. However now the player must decide ahead of time if they want regeneration in the abyss or some other effect. A player expecting a trip to the abyss, has ample time to put on an enter the abyss with regeneration already equipped. On the other hand, a player tossed into the abyss by an enemy may not wish to switch to regeneration unless they're already at maximum health.
If resists are so important to slots that they overwhelm most other considerations for that slot, then maybe THAT is a problem which should be addressed rather than justification for keeping rings and amulets similar in form and function.
Randart amulet reform. Remove resists found on other equipment from amulet randart generation pool. Lets build a list of unique effects that only appear on amulets, and randart amulets only draw from those. Maybe we keep +str, +int, +dex, but most effects found on rings only appear on fixedart amulets. Enhances the specialness of fixedarts, differentiates rings and amulet itemslots.

I would not mind amulets being a soft fixedartefact item slot. Each type of amulet offers a fairly consistent way you can change your character, but in ways not as powerful as genuine fixedart effects, but consistently useful and reliably found.

Which has exactly the effect I mentioned: making the game harder by taking away tools from the player (no more rmut or resists from amulet in Abyss for example if I want regen). As I said I am for making the game harder but not by this way. Instead monsters should be made more threatening by making them smarter.

If you think resists are overwhelming other considerations for slots, the solution for that would be to make them MORE common on other slots and not less. You NEED overlap of items slots or you will end up in a lot of games where you simply don't get essential to survive properties like resists.

[Dingo]

I think the amulet discussion is fine- I personally don't feel one way or another about making amulets less like rings. Due to their very difficult to attain attributes, I found myself swapping amulets very often in 0.17 and 0.18, so I'd hope there would be some alternative way of dealing with things (lack of clarity, stasis, rmut, etc) offered up as options are stripped away, ESPECIALLY because mutations often go directly against amulet slots (stasis - teleportitis, clarity - zerk).

Really, though, I feel that this is creating, or at least forcing attention to, a separate topic- ~an overhaul of the mutation system ~

Personally, I have always loved playing roulette with mutations. An early potion of cMut might let me (somewhat) safely try for some early clarity or repulsion from a sky beast corpse. Later, as mutations stack up, you have to make the call whether to try to cure, possibly wiping away the good with the bad. Both are fun and very DCSS-like decisions to make.

That said, bad, permanent mutations were/are a very serious threat- usually forcing you to make equip slot sacrifices to deal with zerk, teleportitis, or lower AC / abilities, but often just flatly lowering your hp/mp cap. This has been the main deterrent to overcasting contaminating effects, so, yeah, they should be serious. Now that holding a sword made out of plutonium is okay, there had better be a penalty to dropping it.

Here's my take on the current mutation system and our options-

I just updated my trunk run, which has everything but demonic rune. In the 16 or so floors (still no rune!!) I got:

• Frailty 2
• Deformation
• Deterioration 2
• Dopey 1
• No device heal 1
• Low MP 3
• Subdued Magic 3

That's way too darn much. I don't want to have to play Zin for extended every game, or fog at the sight of every neqoxec while I can steamroll every other enemy in Pan.

If we're going to keep the enemy malmutation rates as they are, I'd suggest some of the following changes-

1. Non-permanent mutations have already been brought up. Personally, I'm not a big fan of this option. The whole point of mutations should be their semi-permanence; currently, if you're in the abyss and a star gives you screaming, you just whack a few mobs until it goes away. Kinda ruins the point.
2. Tiered mutations - Has also been brought up. It makes sense if we're going to allow Neqoxecs and Cacodemons to mutate as quickly and aggressively as they do now. See next two points
3. More creative / forgiving malmutations - Screaming is funny. Blurry vision is bad, but can often be ignored. Frailty is just mean and frustrating- scrap it or save it for bursts of contamination.
4. More ambiguous mutations - Old metabolism modifiers (increased hunger, but faster regen), subdued/wild magic. Again, makes for more changes in gameplay, not flat-out frustration.
5. Lower the success rate for rMut - A temporary patch. Lower the rMut protection, maybe increase cMut spawn rates.

Other options:

1. Slower casting time for malmutations- no stepping around a corner and taking three cacodemon mutations in one turn.
2. Switch malmutate to contaminate- I kind of like the "radiation" penalty system. It's very DCSS to allow you to make choices that could save your butt now but have permanent repercussions. Limited availability of cancellation makes this one a toughie. You can still take neqoxecs head on, but you wanna chug some vodka before heading back into mutagenic battle.

TLDR: leave rMut amulet in for now; create separate mutation topic

[svendre]

Ironically, I never had any amulet swapping problems if I had an rMut.. because I would just leave that one on for the rest of the game. I mostly only have any interest in 15 rune games, and getting permanent bad mutations.. while not an automatic death sentence, over the course of a long game add up to the most annoying thing that can happen to you besides death. You can receive bad mutations simply by walking into LOS of something.

In my case removing the rMut amulet, has created an amulet swapping problem for me, where there was none before because I will be swapping between different amulets when I did not swap before.

Now God swapping is another matter. Not much looks as attractive now as only using Zin, so you might have "solved" that - except that will also mean feeling compelled to no longer play evil races, etc.

TLDR: I would have rather seen the perma malmutations revamped before removing rMut amulet (or not have seen it removed..)

[byrel]

Several people in this thread seem to think these changes have removed tools from the player. I don't think that's a fair assessment. Some amulets were removed, and some were added.

Swapping amulets is also still possible, but now it's interesting. There's a drawback or precondition for the swap which moves it from "pure interface tedium" to "tactically-impactful choices". That's a step up in my book.

Think about this theoretically: if amulets weren't given anti-swap features, how would you fix the interface tedium they represent? It's not really fun or interesting to swap to rCorr->rMut->Clarity in slime depending on which type you're fighting; it's just a bunch of keypresses that are 100% determined the moment an enemy of a certain type walks into sight. Surely crawl should automate that for the player? If you aren't going to impose swap penalties, you might as well let the character wear as many non-artifact amulets as they want at once. It won't significantly change their power level (since generally only one was relevant at a time) and would eliminate the interface problem.

Basically, from a design perspective, the interface swapping cost ('Pq') needs to be negligible compared to the other costs of swapping (cognitive, mechanical), or the system feels bad and tedious. As it was there was no real cognitive effort in determining what you should wear (outside of preexisting swap penalties) and almost no mechanical cost (0.5 auts). One or both of those needed buffed, or the interface needed removed.

(I am intentionally neglecting the case where you have an acid blob, a golden eye and a shining eye come into sight at once, because the decision there isn't 'which amulet should I wear?' but rather 'how fast can I break LOS with all of them?'.)

[Kolbur]

Several people in this thread seem to think these changes have removed tools from the player. I don't think that's a fair assessment. Some amulets were removed, and some were added.

Swapping amulets is also still possible, but now it's interesting. There's a drawback or precondition for the swap which moves it from "pure interface tedium" to "tactically-impactful choices". That's a step up in my book.

Think about this theoretically: if amulets weren't given anti-swap features, how would you fix the interface tedium they represent? It's not really fun or interesting to swap to rCorr->rMut->Clarity in slime depending on which type you're fighting; ...

But... it's necessary!! Maybe not for rmut, but clarity is a must have if the game didn't give you enough MR or you end up in confusion lock forever and i guess i don't have to explain rcorr, also you forgot regen amulet. Or rather it was necessary since it will be impossible soon. Playing without these swapping possibilites is even more tedious (because you have to wear down your "5" key). You can't just completely remove necessary things only because gameplay choices are obvious.

If you really want to reduce the "tedium" of swapping, why not just make resists more common (because let's be honest, 95% of swapping is for resists) in general on all item types?

[tabstorm]

So let's review the amulet changes so far:

1. Amulet of Resist Mutation -> Amulet of Nothing
Idea:
Prevent tactical swapping between rMut and other amulets.
Actual play:
Human players won't do a whole lot of amulet swapping with rMut outside of Slime because there are so many abilities used there that check resists used only in the amulet slot. There's not much of a motivation to take rMut off in Pan since regen is not that useful except to reduce the amount of 5-ing you have to do to get on with playing the game. Now, you need to treat most mutators like boss fights and carefully prepare summons beforehand for monsters that are extremely weak (except OOFs and Cacodemons if encountered early enough) and have no purpose other than casting Malmutate. This gets irritating after awhile because of how weak and common e.g. Neqoxecs are.

2. Amulet of Warding -> Amulet of Dismissal
Idea: The amulet of warding was kind of bad, tactial swapping is undesirable
Actual play: The amulet of dismissal mostly serves to teleport away weak monsters, which is kind of annoying. In the event you want to fight a strong monster using a consumable, you should take it off and then fight the enemy, then put it back on and wait off the Vertigo status, which is easy to do. I don't see how "reset fight, wait, and swap" is much of an improvement over tactical swapping - the same problem exists for amulet of the gourmand, which otherwise makes players' lives more pleasant by reducing game interruptions from the player's stomach.

3. Amulet of Stasis -> Amulet of Shielding
Idea: The amulet of stasis was often useless, and tactical swapping to prevent paralysis was considered undesirable.
Actual play: The amulet of shielding isn't terrible and dosen't appear to have a swap penalty, so it seems more like a ring of shielding that is worn in the amulet slot. Overall, not bad.

4. Amulet of Clarity -> Amulet of Pain
Idea: Swapping the amulet of clarity to prevent confusion made confusion users too weak and was considered undesirable.
Actual play: This will cause issues with mummies and characters trying to channel in lichform with CBoE, and was helpful with *Rage artifacts. Most swapping takes place in Slime. The replacement amulet is terrible since it makes a damage spike more likely to happen.

5. Amulet of Regen swap penality
Idea: The amulet of Regeneration could encourage a hypothetical optimal player to swap in regen to rest after a fight, making it nonfunctional until the player is at full HP will prevent this.
Actual play: The amulet of regeneration is a quality-of-life item. As we all know almost any fight can be made not-especially-dangerous by kiting enemies to safe areas and then killing them so that noise dosen't attract more enemies. Regen was a nice amulet to have because it made game flow better. Practically, the player could continue exploring and be close to full HP by the time they encountered the next group of enemies on the floor. It only makes a real difference in Hell, where there's not a whole lot of incentive to remove it for most characters.

Overall it seems like most of these changes are meant to make sure a hypothetical optimal player has fun by preventing them from swapping amulets (while totally ignoring ring swapping), even though most amulet swapping occurs in one branch of the game that's generally considered optional and has several enemies who cannot attack to deal damage and only cast malmutate or confusion. Some of the replacement amulets are bad, and some encourage annoying behavior like reset-swap-wait that can actually have an effect on the game.

[ydeve]

So let's review the amulet changes so far:

2. Amulet of Warding -> Amulet of Dismissal
Idea: The amulet of warding was kind of bad, tactial swapping is undesirable
Actual play: The amulet of dismissal mostly serves to teleport away weak monsters, which is kind of annoying. In the event you want to fight a strong monster using a consumable, you should take it off and then fight the enemy, then put it back on and wait off the Vertigo status, which is easy to do. I don't see how "reset fight, wait, and swap" is much of an improvement over tactical swapping - the same problem exists for amulet of the gourmand, which otherwise makes players' lives more pleasant by reducing game interruptions from the player's stomach.

I disagree with your assessment of dismissal. While everything you wrote is true, you neglected its use in places where passively teleporting monsters away is actually beneficial, for example the orb run, Zot 5, the Abyss, Hell, Pan, V5 (entry), as well as early game where bumping into a group of monsters can be deadly. Clearly it's not meant to be used all the time, but rather in places where it's particularly useful to straight up reduce the number of monsters you have to deal with at once.

4. Amulet of Clarity -> Amulet of Pain
Idea: Swapping the amulet of clarity to prevent confusion made confusion users too weak and was considered undesirable.
Actual play: This will cause issues with mummies and characters trying to channel in lichform with CBoE, and was helpful with *Rage artifacts. Most swapping takes place in Slime. The replacement amulet is terrible since it makes a damage spike more likely to happen.

Thank you for this. Clarity wasn't overpowered, and it was situationally useful (much like dismissal, actually). Please fix the lichform CBoE problem. Or bring clarity back (one unrand and one mutation are very rare; you've only increased the swinginess of whether or not you get the resist). If you don't want people swapping it, there are many solutions to be found.

Overall it seems like most of these changes are meant to make sure a hypothetical optimal player has fun by preventing them from swapping amulets (while totally ignoring ring swapping), even though most amulet swapping occurs in one branch of the game that's generally considered optional and has several enemies who cannot attack to deal damage and only cast malmutate or confusion. Some of the replacement amulets are bad, and some encourage annoying behavior like reset-swap-wait that can actually have an effect on the game.

Next up: malmutate and general status reform. It's the binary nature of status that makes it frustrating to deal with. Either you are paralyzed and helpless or you're not, confused and helpless or not, got a bad mutation or not.

A possible solution to the malmutation problem is to make it cause contamination (or some other mutation counter if you really want it to be separate). Now you have a chance to react to the mutator as mutation happens in increments instead of all at once.

[tabstorm]

I'd usually prefer to not teleport enemies away on Z:5 or V:5 only because areas that were previously safe might now be unsafe with higher probability than otherwise. I guess in Hell or Abyss it's OK but I would rather use regen there.

[archaeo]

while totally ignoring ring swapping

Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the idea is that eliminating all swapping is undesirable, and if it has to live somewhere, it should live in an equipment slot designed for it. Rings fill that role pretty nicely.

Personally, I tend to think that eliminating all swapping is undesirable; part of the fun of any RPG is managing equipment. Bit of a hard middle ground to occupy, though, and I don't know that I could do the position justice in an argument.

Clarity wasn't overpowered, and it was situationally useful (much like dismissal, actually). Please fix the lichform CBoE problem. Or bring clarity back (one unrand and one mutation are very rare; you've only increased the swinginess of whether or not you get the resist). If you don't want people swapping it, there are many solutions to be found.

Clarity wasn't situationally useful like dismissal is. Dismissal, sure, you probably want to throw it on when you're going to be wading through enemies you'd rather not fight, which might include very different situations depending on your character. Clarity is completely and totally useless except for the dozen or so corner cases where it trivializes some danger or downside.

Most of those corner cases ought to go; there's no reason, for example, that CBoE should cause confusion (there's also no reason for the game to have CBoE, but whatever), or that mummies shouldn't just have innate clarity. Other cases might need some reduced efficacy, or whatever. But instead of keeping an item around just to protect those cases, fixing the cases themselves and losing a boring item seems like a good thing to me.

[all before]

After having played a ranged character with dismissal, I think it makes the game feel easier, but doesn't actually make it so. Yes, it helps to disperse packs and so makes many encounters easier. But for most encounters in the game, this doesn't matter as you could defeat the pack anyway. In any situation where you are actually at risk, you can't rely on dismissal kicking in, and so you use a different buff/escape mechanisms. So, if you are trying to play well, I don't think you should use dismissal, but if you want to have an already decent ranged character roll through the game more easily/enjoyably, it's fine for that.

[byrel]

But... it's necessary!! Maybe not for rmut, but clarity is a must have if the game didn't give you enough MR or you end up in confusion lock forever and i guess i don't have to explain rcorr, also you forgot regen amulet. Or rather it was necessary since it will be impossible soon. Playing without these swapping possibilites is even more tedious (because you have to wear down your "5" key). You can't just completely remove necessary things only because gameplay choices are obvious.

From my perspective it doesn't look necessary. I've gotten to Zot without finding an amulet before. They're nice, and can keep you from dying, but usually you wouldn't have been at risk of dying if you'd been playing safer. I can't think of any time outside Abyss and Hell that regen is particularly important even. rCorr should be a ring and compete with your other resistances for a slot there. Corrosion is common enough that a resistance to it is reasonably well-designed. I almost never wear clarity; it doesn't protect against the scariest MR things (mark, paralysis) and confusion can generally be handled with aggressive LOS management and resource use (barring mummies, which should have something else done about them.)

Basically, of the amulets they've replaced I think clarity, rMut and stasis were all pretty bad design, and needed removed. (Naturally, you need to rebalance the rest of the game when you remove something. But those amulets were a negative impact on the game IMHO.) Warding was an OK design, but exceedingly weak and largely useless, so I don't mind it being replaced with an interesting amulet.

If you really want to reduce the "tedium" of swapping, why not just make resists more common (because let's be honest, 95% of swapping is for resists) in general on all item types?

Swapping is generally for resists, and I think the non-degenerate resists from amulets should be moved to rings for swapping. There were really only two non-degenerate resistance amulets though: corrosion and warding. Warding already was effectively a ring (I'd be OK with upping the drop chance of rings of positive energy to compensate for the amulet's removal, but it's not a big deal.) Corrosion is actually in a solid place now I think for a ring.

[Malignant Manor]

Instant removal penalties for equip identifying items should not exist. The game already has the cursed property. It would be nice if all equipped unidentified items that have removal penalties would have a small warm up/grace period where they could be removed without penalty. Faith's should be long enough to use a remove curse or enchant scroll. Weapons could have the removal penalty only after they attack with it.

Edit:spirit could also have a small warm up.

[zxc23]

Edit: Oops, looks like there was another page to the discussion.

[ydeve]

spirit could also have a small warm up.

"spirit already has a warm up - it drains all your mp and doesn't do anything until you regen some of it back.

[Hurricos]

IMO the cleanest and most lateral fix would just put the lost properties (Stasis, Clar, Warding, rMut) onto 'trinkets' or 'charms' that always keep their effect whenever carried.

[infinitevox]

At it's heart, DCSS is about reacting to what the game throws at you, good or bad.
Punishing people for reacting is counterproductive to this goal. (This is different from punishing people from how they react, obviously.)
"On-Equip" penalties for amulets feels like a band-aid approach to fixing it, and it honestly seems like a "DO SOMETHING EVEN IF IT'S WRONG" approach.

I made a comment or two in that thread back in October, but usually Dev for Crawl moves at a ... crawl.
The big thing I think it's important to keep in mind, is why things do what they do.
For example:

Amulet of Faith - The reason this has such a large penalty for removing it is because of the large effect Gods have on the game.
Were it not for the penalty, there is nothing to prevent you from essentially power-leveling a God and then dropping it for something more useful. (OR from spamming God-powers a LOT more often)
The actual trade-off for the amulet is not the loss of faith, but you're trading anything else you could equip in the amulet slot for More Frequent/Better God Powers.

Stasis, Clarity, rMut, Regen, and Warding - All of these are situational in the same way as rF, rC, rN, etc...
Do we punish someone for swapping a ring of Resist Fire for Resist Cold when they enter the Ice Caves or encounter an Ice Dragon? No.
So why are we going to punish someone for swapping out Regen when they're at full health?

As for what to do with rMut, Stasis, Clarity:
I personally think, and have said similar in the previous discussion, that these should all be normalized with other resistances.
Treat all "resist XXX" the same.
They get 3 pips, and increase your protection against that thing accordingly. (Change the names to fit, that way we can still keep things like Stasis on Formids where its a key feature of the species)
You then resist confusion instead of being immune to it, you resist going berserk instead of being immune to it... etc (This also makes god abilities like Ash's Clarity more unique)

As for rMut,
I think this could have a discussion all on its own, but I have a couple suggestions, and this is coming from someone who likes mutations: (Once again, the base for this is that rMut gets 3 pips)
1. Each + in rMut allows you to resist being mutated, up to 90% mutation resistance
2. Each + in rMut gives a chance for the mutation to be temporary, up to 90% chance to be temp
3. Each + in rMut reduces the amount of time you're mutated (Mutations are either all temporary with clock, or become temporary upon gaining the first rMut+)

It would be easiest if all of those things were moved from Amulets --> Rings.
But why do we need a distinction? Why not treat Amulets as a 3rd ring, and allow them to also have rF+/-, rC+/-, etc...?
This makes further sense if all resists were to be normalized to +++, as there are now more things you have to worry about stacking? (And thus increasing tactical decisions instead of reducing them)

I think this also goes further to solving the perceived Swap problem and here is how:
Since you now have resists on 2 ring slots and 1 ammy slot, when you round the corner and there are multiple threats, you cant just swap 1 amulet and be "Good to go". You have to weigh the pros and cons of reducing your resist to confusion to gain more resistance to fire, instead of a boolean on/off.

[Sprucery]

All resistances could go to rings, that would be consistent (artifact amulets could still have resistances though). But I don't think all resistances should necessarily have 3 pips.

Do we punish someone for swapping a ring of Resist Fire for Resist Cold when they enter the Ice Caves or encounter an Ice Dragon? No.
So why are we going to punish someone for swapping out Regen when they're at full health?

I think regen is different, because you lose HP all the time and it would be optimal to switch to and from regen very often (after every fight where you lose HP). This is much more tedious than switching to +rF or +rC as per needed.

[Kaelii]

It would be easiest if all of those things were moved from Amulets --> Rings.
But why do we need a distinction? Why not treat Amulets as a 3rd ring, and allow them to also have rF+/-, rC+/-, etc...?
This makes further sense if all resists were to be normalized to +++, as there are now more things you have to worry about stacking? (And thus increasing tactical decisions instead of reducing them)

I think this also goes further to solving the perceived Swap problem and here is how:
Since you now have resists on 2 ring slots and 1 ammy slot, when you round the corner and there are multiple threats, you cant just swap 1 amulet and be "Good to go". You have to weigh the pros and cons of reducing your resist to confusion to gain more resistance to fire, instead of a boolean on/off.

At that point, we go into "Why call it an amulet at all"? Why not just three ring slots, instead of 2 rings and 1 "totally not a ring, but a ring"?
In which case the obvious response for me is: "Because we want amulets to do something different from rings"
Randart amulet reform: Remove resists, create tiers of amulet egos to generate on amulets instead. Faith+++ gspirit-- amulet here we come.

[duvessa]

while totally ignoring ring swapping

Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the idea is that eliminating all swapping is undesirable, and if it has to live somewhere, it should live in an equipment slot designed for it. Rings fill that role pretty nicely.

How the hell does the slowest equipment slot to swap "fill that role pretty nicely"? I would rather have literally any other equipment slot fill that design space. To swap in a ring, you need to look at which ring is left/right and make three keypresses (or more for octopodes because they don't all fit on one message page). To swap ANYTHING ELSE, you need two keypresses, and you don't need to remember whether you put your amulet on your left or right neck.

[archaeo]

Then worship Ru and cut off one of your hands, I guess?

Rings fill that role currently because they're already getting swapped constantly. If you've got a good idea for how to get people to swap rings less, I'm all ears, though we should probably take it to another thread.

[Lasty]

In the long term (and without fully thinking through how it would happen), I think it would be great to move all the high-swapping jewellery to amulets for precisely the reason specified. It would take a lot of effort, and I've got enough on my plate that I don't want to try tackling it now. It also would mean only being able to wear one piece of resistance jewellery at a time, which would be a notable change.

In the meantime, using the =R inscription for the better of your two rings does a fair job of making this less bad.

[sanka]

You probably know it but if you inscribe one of your rings with =R then the game does not ask for a finger.

It does not work if you want to change both of your rings occasionally tough.

[archaeo]

Lasty, wouldn't it be kind of hard to make amulets the home of swappable resists and non-swappable Faith-level bonuses?

[Lasty]

Yes, definitely. The two goals are at odds. The reason I don't mind changing amulets as I have while preferring that rings be the less-swappable slot is that I think the latter is much harder to change without fundamentally changing the game, and thus I don't expect it to happen soon (or, if I'm being honest, ever).

[prozacelf]

and you don't need to remember whether you put your amulet on your left or right neck.

...until my 2-necked detachable head race gets introduced.

On a slightly more serious note, are the "obsoleted" amulet types still going to be eligible for randarts/unrands? I've noticed that Amulet of the Four Winds still has clarity, but I've been told that the Macabre finger necklace lost its warding. Are some unrands just going to get grandfathered in while others change, or what?

[byrel]

Basically, for some unrands the amulet type is core to the fixedart's character; in those cases it should be grandfathered. For some others, they had a type simply because all amulets have to be of some type. Macabre finger was never about the warding, so it makes sense that it's swapped to nothing. That's really a judgement call though...

[Lasty]

The amulet types I removed genuinely do not exist in trunk, and so unique amulets cannot use them as a base type. In the case of Amulet of the Four Winds, I elected to leave it with Clarity as a randart property (like autumn katana) because 1) it might well have been an integral part of whatever the idea behind the amulet was, and 2) now that amulet actually does something that a randomly-regenerated amulet artefact can't do, making it slightly less silly to have it exist at all. I'd be fine w/ removing it, too.

In the case of the Macabre Finger Necklace, I felt it was more likely that Warding was chosen as a base type because it was the least intrusive of the old amulets rather than because it was a meaningful design consideration. The amulet is plenty interesting without tacked-on rN+.

[nago]

@lasty: the necklace generated in my current game, it hasn't warding anymore but still has rn+, so you probably left something.

[Lasty]

Ah, huh. I thought I removed that, but I guess not.

[duvessa]

It also would mean only being able to wear one piece of resistance jewellery at a time, which would be a notable change.

I don't think it would be a big change. In practice, the second and third pips of resistances don't matter a lot since there's very little reward for ending an encounter with excess hp - it just needs to be above 0. The relative reduction going from ++ to +++ is still high*, but the absolute change is small enough that I rarely care. I bother with ++/+++ for orbs of fire, refrigeration, and coc, but that's about it.
I guess you would want to change rings of fire/ice but you could just take the resistances off them and leave them as rings**.
I don't get the complaint about "fundamentally changing the game". Aren't you fundamentally changing an item slot by just as much right now? If you agree that ring swapping is a problem, surely the easiest time to address it is when you have the opportunity to change amulets. The number of swappable resistance item slots can't be THAT important, otherwise the game wouldn't have sacrifice hand, macabre finger necklace, or octopodes.
And of course if you want a swappable resistance slot it doesn't have to be amulets or rings. It could be helmets, cloaks, you could have one ring slot and one bracelet slot, etc...

*(For those who don't know, for players at the moment:
rF- -> rF. is -33% damage
rF. -> rF+ is -50% damage
rF+ -> rF++ is -33% damage
rF++ -> rF+++ is -40% damage

rN -> rN+ is -50% damage
rN+ -> rN++ is -50% damage
rN++ -> rN+++ is -100% damage)

**yeah, they'd become useless for characters without those spells, but currently they're functionally the same as ring of protection from cold/fire for those characters, so nothing is really lost

[Lasty]

I wasn't thinking as much about multiples of the same resistance as being able to cover two resistances, though you could make the argument that very few monsters can attack more than one resistance at a time and players shouldn't have more than one monster able to attack them at a time.

What I meant by fundamental change is that the game is designed around being able to wear multiple of the effects on rings and only one of the effects on amulets. Rings are generally more number-increasing / trivially swappable effects because they're generally designed around being things you could have two of. Octopodes and macabre finger amulet push that limit even further. Amulets have been traditionally more rule-setting and causing more fundamental change, even when that change is pretty meaningless (see Gourmand). I'm definitely pushing that further, trying to make fundamental changes more meaningful. But if we flipped all existing rings to amulets and vice versa, we'd have the strange situation of having two rule-setting objects and one that changes more basic stats, and octopodes would have eight rule-setting objects.

Sacrifice Hand isn't good evidence for the lack of importance of being able to have two ring slots because the whole point of Sacrifice Hand is to give up something of importance. The argument could be equally well used to indicate that two-handed weapons aren't important, or, if extended to other sacrifices, that Armour and Dodging skill aren't important, or that being able to drink or read while in danger isn't important.

[byrel]

FR: Replace Octopodes with eight-headed amphibious ogres.

While theoretically they could worship eight religions, in practice they immediately kill each other upon adding the second one.

[Shard1697]

I'm gonna wait until I've put more time into playing on trunk to totally pass judgement, but I have to say that I don't understand why tactical swapping of amulets should be discouraged in the first place. I don't think the advantages given by amulets being more gamechanging should mean that you're heavily disincentivized from swapping them, I think only being able to keep one on at a time is enough of a limitation.
I also don't agree with the idea that Faith is fundamentally the most powerful of the pre-trunk set of amulets, I think it's highly situational. The only god I'll usually use Faith on is Trog. Like, I play melee hybrids usually, and I usually go Oka or Ash. With Oka I don't understand why I'd need more piety at all, you already get more than enough to use heroism on any fight that's not chaff and finesse on anything actually scary. And his gifts are generally trash. So why would I wear faith? With Ash I could wear faith to hit the skill boosts faster, but not only is that not really that great of a use of my amulet slot when I could have regeneration or warding, the skill boosts I want the most are magic(so I gotta curse two jewelry), and I still want to be able to swap rings for resists, which means I'm gonna curse one ring and my amulet every time. And keeping a faith amulet cursed is a really dumb idea on Ash because once you're high on piety already it's not really doing much for you since you're not gonna be burning faith. So I'm gonna curse something which will stay useful instead, like regen or warding.

Oh, and also: gettin drained is a huge pain, usually much more annoying that it is meaningful in my opinion, and it's sort of annoying to not have a rN+ amulet anymore for that reason!

I just hope that permanent, bad mutations stay. I think they add a lot to the game.

I hope they stay too. However, I hope the malmutations stay only in the context of the player making the choice of drinking a mut potion or eating purple chunks, not tactical misplays. Strategic benefits/drawbacks should be tied to strategic choices, not tactical ones.

[duvessa]

I wasn't thinking as much about multiples of the same resistance as being able to cover two resistances, though you could make the argument that very few monsters can attack more than one resistance at a time and players shouldn't have more than one monster able to attack them at a time.

yes, that's the argument I'm making; times where I want to cover more than one resistance at a time are so vanishingly rare that I actually can't recall any time it's happened

What I meant by fundamental change is that the game is designed around being able to wear multiple of the effects on rings and only one of the effects on amulets. Rings are generally more number-increasing / trivially swappable effects because they're generally designed around being things you could have two of. Octopodes and macabre finger amulet push that limit even further. Amulets have been traditionally more rule-setting and causing more fundamental change, even when that change is pretty meaningless (see Gourmand). I'm definitely pushing that further, trying to make fundamental changes more meaningful. But if we flipped all existing rings to amulets and vice versa, we'd have the strange situation of having two rule-setting objects and one that changes more basic stats, and octopodes would have eight rule-setting objects.

When did I ever suggest that rings and amulets should switch places? That would be ridiculous. I suggested that rings be made unswappable, and if you want swappable resistances, move the resistance rings to a swappable single-item slot (which needn't be the amulet slot). There is no reason to change rings of dexterity, evasion, intelligence, invisibility, flight, loudness, magical power, protection, slaying, stealth, strength, teleportation, or wizardry, unless you also want those to be swappable for some reason.

I'm also not convinced that moving the resistance rings to the amulet slot and keeping the unswappable amulets would be at all bad. It just means one of the tradeoffs of faith/harm/whatever is not being able to freely swap resistances. That's the model faith was previously built on, and the one that things like distortion are currently built on, and there's nothing broken about it that I know of.

I'm aware this is unlikely to happen, but I'm not going to use GDD exclusively to suggest things that are already going to happen. That would make the subforum even more pointless than it already is.

Sacrifice Hand isn't good evidence for the lack of importance of being able to have two ring slots because the whole point of Sacrifice Hand is to give up something of importance. The argument could be equally well used to indicate that two-handed weapons aren't important, or, if extended to other sacrifices, that Armour and Dodging skill aren't important, or that being able to drink or read while in danger isn't important.

It's good evidence that losing those things isn't a fundamental change to the game, and that it doesn't make the game significantly less winnable. Of course removing ring swapping makes the game harder. So does removing amulet swapping.

[Shard1697]

I wasn't thinking as much about multiples of the same resistance as being able to cover two resistances, though you could make the argument that very few monsters can attack more than one resistance at a time and players shouldn't have more than one monster able to attack them at a time.

yes, that's the argument I'm making; times where I want to cover more than one resistance at a time are so vanishingly rare that I actually can't recall any time it's happened

You've never had both a frost giant and a fire giant in LoS in depths, where they're both common? You've never met a draconian pack?

[duvessa]

You've never had both a frost giant and a fire giant in LoS in depths, where they're both common?

I've never chosen to fight both a frost giant and a fire giant simultaneously when they were so dangerous I would need two resistances, no.

You've never met a draconian pack?

Never encountered a situation where resistances beyond rF+ were useful for those.