Rods (split from GDD Pakellas thread)

[dynast]

I hope Pakellas raise up the question "why do rods need to be wielded to evoke?"

[partial]

I hope Pakellas raise up the question "why do rods need to be wielded to evoke?"

I assume to differentiate them from wands.

Not saying that's good design but it's the only reason I can fathom

[ydeve]

my guess is they used to be staves and got split off, but I could be completely wrong.

[archaeo]

I hope Pakellas raise up the question "why do rods need to be wielded to evoke?"

At some point, it starts to feel a little strange that there are so many different mechanisms for evocations. Why does Disc of Storms allow for infinite spamming, but not Lamp of Fire? Why do I need to wield a Rod of Ignition but not my Wand of Fireball? Why does Sack of Spiders have charges and Fan of Gales have an XP-recharger? Why is Stone of Tremors still so effing useless?

I'm not sure that the answer is to simplify and flatten all of these. Part of me kind of thinks that every rod would be better as a wand (ignition) or an evoker (shadows), and that elemental evokers should work more like disc of storms or vice versa. Alternately, just make all wands work like rods, and then make rods evocable from the inventory??

[bcadren]

I hope Pakellas raise up the question "why do rods need to be wielded to evoke?"

Obviously it's so cursing your weapon (Ashenzari) actually makes you sacrifice something...

[Sprucery]

my guess is they used to be staves and got split off, but I could be completely wrong.

Rods were always called rods but rods and staves shared the item class until 0.11, (but rods used the M&F skill from 0.6 on).

[dynast]

I hope Pakellas raise up the question "why do rods need to be wielded to evoke?"

Obviously it's so cursing your weapon (Ashenzari) actually makes you sacrifice something...

Except you dont have to actually curse your weapon. Or in the case of a transmuter you can carry a cursed rod and get the evo bonus while hitting with your fists. The main thing is that rods are not used as melee weapons, so having to wield one in order to evoke it is just lame, the same way you used to require to wield decks to draw cards.

[prozacelf]

It makes it a very difficult choice to use the Plutonium Sword or not as a HEAr, if nothing else. I actually had it come up and I wound up getting killed because I probably should have just eaten the contam and swapped to a rod instead of thinking I could take out whatever it was in shoals that killed me by charging in.

[Aethrus]

I don't think that rods have to be wielded makes sense as a trade-off or balance feature. Wielding them in this case isn't something to be excited about, its a chore, a tedious inconvenience, which isn't what I'd consider great design.

I'm not saying that rods shouldn't need to be wielded even though. Just that I'd like there to be a good reason for me to wield it rather than 'its a hassle'. Part of the problem is that its in the weapon slot, but you never want to bash people's faces in with it because it's a bad weapon. If rods had special attack features (though lets not bring back rod of striking) in addition, then players would have a reason to keep it out once they've emptied its charges. Whether it's a passive effect, an attack flavor, or even just charging significantly faster when wielded, it wouldn't be annoying if it wasn't dead weight once you've unloaded your rod all over the monsters.

No one finds that satisfying.

[Bart]

Having to wield a rod isn't even a big disadvantage; it's really mostly tedious. Assuming I have one rod I'm willing to spam (which is quite good assumption considering low drop rate of rods), I will most likely explore the map wielding it, spam until charges are out and then swap to a weapon. This takes exactly 5AUT in combat, which usually means a very small portion of combat length. It is also likely that I'll swap to a weapon even before I was engaged in melee combat, so for many characters there's no time loss at all. After everyone died, I will just swap back, but this time additional 5AUT is completely irrelevant.

(Ashenzari shouldn't be even seriously mentioned in this topic, as removing the need to wield a rod wouldn't grant Ashenzarites access to something that other characters didn't have already.)

[adozu]

you can have duplicate rods right?

ill go on a completely wild speculation and guess that you could do sheanigans with having 2 lightning rods in your inventory if you didnt need to wield it.

[Velikolepni]

I hope Pakellas raise up the question "why do rods need to be wielded to evoke?"

Obviously it's so cursing your weapon (Ashenzari) actually makes you sacrifice something...

Except you dont have to actually curse your weapon. Or in the case of a transmuter you can carry a cursed rod and get the evo bonus while hitting with your fists. The main thing is that rods are not used as melee weapons, so having to wield one in order to evoke it is just lame, the same way you used to require to wield decks to draw cards.

A crazy thought: why not remove rods altogether and make their properties be weapon brands instead? So you would have a long sword of ignition, a glaive of lightning, a quick blade of shadows, etc. On would still need to evoke them to use them of course, but if the base weapon is good, it would be more useful to wield them.

[dynast]

A crazy thought: why not remove rods altogether and make their properties be weapon brands instead? So you would have a long sword of ignition, a glaive of lightning, a quick blade of shadows, etc. On would still need to evoke them to use them of course, but if the base weapon is good, it would be more useful to wield them.

You would still want to have as many evocables as possible and i doubt you would always find a weapon with a evocable brand that you are currently training for and even if you did you would end up swapping between those.

you can have duplicate rods right?

ill go on a completely wild speculation and guess that you could do sheanigans with having 2 lightning rods in your inventory if you didnt need to wield it.

The effects of discharging 2 lightning rods are not all that greater than discharging one then swapping to another. Also, all assuming that you would find 2 lightning rods in the first place.

[Siegurt]

A crazy thought: why not remove rods altogether and make their properties be weapon brands instead? So you would have a long sword of ignition, a glaive of lightning, a quick blade of shadows, etc. On would still need to evoke them to use them of course, but if the base weapon is good, it would be more useful to wield them.

You would still want to have as many evocables as possible and i doubt you would always find a weapon with a evocable brand that you are currently training for and even if you did you would end up swapping between those.

you can have duplicate rods right?

ill go on a completely wild speculation and guess that you could do sheanigans with having 2 lightning rods in your inventory if you didnt need to wield it.

The effects of discharging 2 lightning rods are not all that greater than discharging one then swapping to another. Also, all assuming that you would find 2 lightning rods in the first place.

The second and subsequent zaps from a lightning rod have different targeting and damage, provided zapping it again is your immediately following action. I suspect adozu is alluding to the fact that you would be effectively chaining the end of one rod effect into the beginning of the second (thereby gaining additional power) presuming the thunderbolt effect wasn't adjusted to restart if you used a different rod.

[Jeremiah]

Give rods significantly better melee damage (make them slightly worse than a morningstar for, example.) Then have an evocations-dependent chance of triggering the rod effect (without expending charges) whenever you hit an opponent.

[milski]

Give rods significantly better melee damage (make them slightly worse than a morningstar for, example.) Then have an evocations-dependent chance of triggering the rod effect (without expending charges) whenever you hit an opponent.

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Magical_staff

[ion_frigate]

Give rods significantly better melee damage (make them slightly worse than a morningstar for, example.) Then have an evocations-dependent chance of triggering the rod effect (without expending charges) whenever you hit an opponent.

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Magical_staff

Doesn't have to be redundant. Given how powerful rod effects are, it would probably be very occasional that they'd trigger like that, as opposed to staves which trigger every time with enough skill. Moreover, effects from staves are just more powerful versions of standard melee brands, whereas rods all have their own unique spells.

I would say that rods which require targeting should just auto-target the creature you just hit in melee, in order to avoid creating an interface burden.

[ydeve]

Wielding them in this case isn't something to be excited about, its a chore, a tedious inconvenience, which isn't what I'd consider great design.
... players would have a reason to keep it out once they've emptied its charges.

Do you really want the devs to discourage tactical swapping of weapons and rods? ...

[duvessa]

Yes.

[ydeve]

As in, in light of recent amulet changes. What if wielding a rod gave you -evoke for a few turns? Or wielding a new weapon gave you a slaying malus for a bit? Could be interesting, I guess..., but it would be really annoying for those using elemental staves.

[Sprucery]

Imho rods don't need any other fix but just make them usable from inventory.

Two things might be done to compensate (if any compensation is needed):
1) make ?RC very slightly less common.
2) Add a 0.5 aut delay to the first use of a rod. Consecutive uses would have no extra delay. Of course, what actually should be compensated for is not having to wield a weapon after using the rod, so a 0.5 aut delay should be added to the next use of a weapon, if done immediately after evoking a rod. But this is a bit complicated.

[Arrhythmia]

Wielding them in this case isn't something to be excited about, its a chore, a tedious inconvenience, which isn't what I'd consider great design.
... players would have a reason to keep it out once they've emptied its charges.

Do you really want the devs to discourage tactical swapping of weapons and rods? ...

Absolutely.

[Siegurt]

I really really want tactical swapping of rods (and weapons generally) to stay, so there you go, we have different preferences.

[archaeo]

It's just unclear to me, Siegurt, what benefit there is to making rods only evocable when wielded. We already have a functional (if totally inconsistent w/r/t other evocables) limit on their activity, not to mention the unavoidable hunger costs of evoking a rod (something else that could be removed with 0 impact, #removefood2016). The only reason to require wielding a rod is to provide a generally unimportant aut penalty and to prevent rod usage by a very small subset of characters. I don't think those reasons justify the interface annoyance.

For the record, though, I'd probably just remove rods, and replace them as follows:

• Clouds: no replacement, or replace Wands of Flame and Frost with Wand of Clouds
• Destruction: no replacement; alternately, replace Wand of Fire, Cold, and Draining with Destruction
• Lightning: no replacement, give Wand of Lightning the targeter and remove the whole "evoke more than once for more damage" thing
• Ignition: replace Wand of Fireball with Wand of Ignition
• Inaccuracy: no replacement; alternately, make into +Innac into a weapon artefact property
• Shadows: no replacement, spider bag and beast box are sufficient
• Swarm: no replacement, as with shadows
• Iron: either a) make Iron Shot work this way and remove without replacement, or b) add Wand of Iron.

[tedric]

Counter-proposal:

• Remove wands of magic darts, flame, frost, fire, cold, draining, lightning, and fireball (which are completely redundant with spells AND are essentially shittier versions of existing rods; other wands are redundant with spells or consumables, but I think one level of redundancy is OK. Hasting & Invisibility are redundant with both spells and consumables, and those wands should be removed too.)
• Make rods slightly more common.

This reduces redundancy and inventory clutter, and makes a clearer separation of rods (powerful, semi-unique offensive effects that auto-recharge but have limited uses in a single engagement) from wands (hexes, defensive and miscellaneous support effects that can be spammed but must be manually recharged).

[archaeo]

Why bother having wands at all, then? Remove them all and add Rod of Hexes and Rod of Digging, along with some kind of polymorph evoker (Xom's Mutagenic Perfume). Or, alternately, screw having hexes on rods and put them all on needles. You'd also probably want a low-end rod to make up for all the early game offensive wands removed, so now we have Rod of Magic Missile. And DD can start with Rod of Heal Wounds, but all characters now have to spend Max MP to recharge them. Rods lose their +whatever and everything gets keyed off of evo skill. Remove ?recharging.

(We might also want to add a juggling skill, which makes it so that if you swap your weapon too often, you have a chance to throw it in a random direction without sufficient juggling skill. Think about it.)

Keep in mind that the status quo is that evo skill governs a good dozen evocable items, all of which have their own set of mechanics. Most of them have different mechanics for basically no reason; why is disc infinite, sack of spiders limited, lamp of fire xp-gated, and rods time gated? I don't really see the balance implications? And that's without even getting into CBoE, |energy, xom's chesspiece, evocable artefact properties, etc.

Ideally, imo, we move to about three evocations types. One set of rods OR wands, one set of XP-gated evokers, and one set of evocable equipment properties.

• xom's chesspiece becomes an amulet (Amulet of Shuffling, *confusion on removal), or just fold the effect into Dismissal
• remove CBoE and decks of cards with no replacement.
• turn Lantern into an amulet (Amulet of Shadows, evoke for shadow friends, permanent darkness, *Mark on removal *mark on equip (e: and/or blindness on unequip?).)
• make Disc, Sack, and Box work like the other elemental evokers, or else turn them into rods/wands.

[all before]

I don't understand why rods should be turned into wands or vice versa. They're pretty different: wands have a strategic limitation, rods a tactical one. Wands are much closer to potions or scrolls than to rods. Maybe that changes at some point late in the game when you have enough ?recharging, but that point in the game is less interesting.

As a side note: crawl as a whole seems to be moving away from strategic effects and developing instead a range of "quasi-strategic" effects: effects or restrictions that last longer than a single encounter but significantly shorter than the remainder of the game. Draining is maybe the oldest version of this (or god wrath), while xp-gated evocables, the new amulet restrictions, and the proposals for making mutations wear off are newer versions. I'm still undecided how I feel about these. I think my hesitation is this: do these effects significantly increase the risk of your character dying? If not, then what effect are they meant to have? Do they just encourage farming xp until the effect goes away?

[archaeo]

honestly, all before, I just find rods kind of dumb. They're exactly like spells, except instead of memorizing it you put it in your inventory, casting with one is significantly more cumbersome, and they have their own separate time-gated MP meter. They're also keyed off a single skill, which also happens to govern a bunch of other spell-like effects, many of which work in completely arbitrary (and largely invisible, as opposed to spellpower) ways. eta: of course, spell school have many of the same issues, esp. w/r/t how much skill impacts spellpower beyond the success rate, but I don't find it as egregious as evo is right now.

Maybe I'm biased though, since I seem to constantly carry around rods I never bother switching to because I find weapon slot juggling to be pretty tedious when I have to do it before any significant fight.

IMO, a proposal somewhere in between mine and tedric's might involve collapsing all offensive evocable objects into XP-gated evokers, putting hex-like effects in needles, and removing the remaining wands. The current OOD spawner makes farming xp non-trivial until late in the game, and Abyss and Pan have more problems than the fact that they're sources of infinite and relatively safe xp for lategame characters.

[WingedEspeon]

I think that making rods evokable from the inventory is a nice way to reduce tedium without adding weird spoilery effect to the game.

[tabstorm]

How about removing rod hunger too?

[lethediver]

Solution: make Rods only charge when wielding them. Make all charges disappear when you unwield. Make them charge somewhat faster (so players have a reason to permanently use them and not just use as an opening salvo)

[Siegurt]

So having more than one rod is completely pointless?

[onmach]

I view rods as more like weapons than wands. If you make them evokable from the inventory, people will stock like 5 rods and evoke them in series until everything is dead, a behavior of which is only staved off by the necessity and cost in terms of auts from wielding and unwielding them. That doesn't sound like much fun at all.

I would rather they just make them more weapon-like, designed to fill an evocable weapons role for people who like to keep their distance, by making them only recharge while wielded.

[ydeve]

That only forces the player into the tedium of constantly swapping rods while exploring to keep them fully charged. Unless the uncharged when you unwield them.

[Rast]

Wielding them in this case isn't something to be excited about, its a chore, a tedious inconvenience, which isn't what I'd consider great design.
... players would have a reason to keep it out once they've emptied its charges.

Do you really want the devs to discourage tactical swapping of weapons and rods? ...

Except that "use up my first rod, switch to my second rod, use that up, switch to my third rod, use that up, then switch to my real weapon" in every serious fight isn't tactical, it's just tedious.

Actual tactical swapping would be when you carry around weapons with different brands and swap between them depending on enemy resistances.