PSA: Amulet of Clarity => Amulet of Harm

[Amnesiac]

Why would you use cboe anyway, when you have at least staff of energy, which does only good things and works from 0 evo? But tarantellas will be scary for my mus.

[dynast]

invocations and evocations both exist

many characters will train one or both of those

A level 27 player with 27 evo would have around 40 MP, thats a ok amount.
Players who train invo use it for god abilities that costs magic, and most gods only require the player to train invo to around 10, which leads a end game player with around 30 MP.
Training both doesnt stack MP gain, AFAIK.

[Ceann]

I don't really get the complaints so much about this...
Its called trunk for a reason, so people can test it. What you should be doing is playing with it and saying...

"this is my experience with this amulet"
"these are the things that have happened when I don't have access to clarity and it is game ruining"

It was said in the notes that Mummy would be addressed individually so that they have some sort of ability to deal with confusion as they don't have potion access.
As for the actual Amulet of Harm I have not really tested it yet, does anyone know if this is an increase to spell damage or is it physical damage only?
Is the damage added on after your spell power check or does it just raise your current spell power by 25% while not surpassing the cap?

[majesstic]

Why would you use cboe anyway, when you have at least staff of energy, which does only good things and works from 0 evo? But tarantellas will be scary for my mus.

Because evoking a staff of energy over and over is worse than watching paint dry.

[Lasty]

As for the actual Amulet of Harm I have not really tested it yet, does anyone know if this is an increase to spell damage or is it physical damage only?
Is the damage added on after your spell power check or does it just raise your current spell power by 25% while not surpassing the cap?

The damage increase is to damage of every sort with the following qualifications:
* Damage must not be from torment or poison's damage-over-time.
* Either the damage's owner or the entity taking the damage must be wearing an amulet of harm.
* Damage is multiplied after AC, resistances, and almost every other calculation is considered, but before damage shaving from being a deep dwarf/fortitude status.

So yes, this affects melee, ranged, spells, god abilities, clouds, and even falling down stairs.

[byrel]

Quite honestly I don't think this amulet is very good outside of improbably optimal play. The way I look at it is simply as a maxHP modifier; this isn't quite true when you take into account regen sources, but close enough.
25% damage boost = 20% less max HP.

That's a lot; that will drop a human to deep elf levels of HP, or a troll to nearly human (+4%) levels of effective HP. And I really don't think a 25% damage boost post-AC is good enough for what you're giving up. If it was a pre-AC buff, maybe I could see it in some cases... but not now.

Consider the deep elf - human comparison. I think they're close to the same power level of races, when playing reasonably good combos on each. (NOT discussing rolling a DEBe here). A deep elf's advantages over a human in aptitudes and MP is dramatically higher than a flat 25% damage buff IMHO.

[Lasty]

For those who feel the amulet is too weak, how would it have to be changed before you would consider wearing it on at least 1/4th of your characters?

[ydeve]

If instead of hurting you it had *Corr, I'd consider using it.

eta: But I'd probably still use a different amulet instead.

[amaril]

Will we be warned if an enemy is wearing an amulet of harm? Or is there now a tiny chance that any given enemy could be 25% more dangerous?

[tasonir]

For those who feel the amulet is too weak, how would it have to be changed before you would consider wearing it on at least 1/4th of your characters?

I haven't actually played a game with one yet, but if you're just looking to keep the mechanics and change the power level, it should be fairly easy to just modify the percentages? Say it gave you +25% damage but you only took +10% damage, that would be powerful, right?

[dynast]

If i want my combo to be a reckless damage dealer, i can build it accordingly, instead of hoping for a specific amulet to show up.
Does this amulet increases the damage done by your summons?

[archaeo]

I've gone ahead and moved this to GDD, since this has turned into a fairly substantial discussion about the amulet's design.

Lasty, I think I might be with ydeve, insofar as I think most players are going to be too worried about damage spikes to wear the amulet as is, whereas another mechanic might seem like a reasonable tradeoff. I don't know about *corr, but maybe occasional degeneration? Hard to say, especially if the goal is to make it competitive with faith, regen, or rage.

[dpeg]

I am not sure if a purely numerical amulet is a good concept, but then again, we have Slaying, so why not.

As tasonir points out, if we look purely at the numbers, there must be some sweet spot, continuity. Perhaps 25% : 25% (outgoing damage : incoming damage) is not good enough, but 25% : 0% certainly is. If the basic idea is supposed to stay, there are a number of variants:
* the harm factor can be smaller than the damage factor
* restrict the negative effect to something happening only when put on and/or removed
* the harm part could be something else than additional damage (e.g. stat rot etc.)

[Siegurt]

Confusion melee (IE Tarantella) doesn't check MR either.

But it does check AC/EV/SH.

I would disagree that ac forms real mitigation of confusion melee, since ac mitigates damage, but confusion can't be mitigated (it is wholly binary, either you took damage and might be confused or you did not) and ac will very rarely reduce your damage to 0 (certainly not often enough to prevent being confuse locked, no matter what your ac is, some damage will usually get through)

If the chance of melee confusion was tied to the amount of damage done, then ac would help, which is a possible solution, but presently it does not.

Ev and sh can be effective ways to mitigate confusion, but sh is reduced to 0 while confused, so if you are relying on sh to avoid the confusion, when one gets through, you are more likely to be re confused.

[ion_frigate]

* the harm part could be something else than additional damage (e.g. stat rot etc.)

I'd suggest occasional brief and incurable tactical effects on receiving damage, as opposed to strategic ones like stat rot. The vertigo status introduced for the amulet of dismissal sounds like a good possibility, as would things like mini-stuns, brief confusion, etc. In exchange for extra damage, you make combats a lot more unpredictable.

[bcadren]

Confusion melee (IE Tarantella) doesn't check MR either.

But it does check AC/EV/SH.

I would disagree that ac forms real mitigation of confusion melee, since ac mitigates damage, but confusion can't be mitigated (it is wholly binary, either you took damage and might be confused or you did not) and ac will very rarely reduce your damage to 0 (certainly not often enough to prevent being confuse locked, no matter what your ac is, some damage will usually get through)

If the chance of melee confusion was tied to the amount of damage done, then ac would help, which is a possible solution, but presently it does not.

Ev and sh can be effective ways to mitigate confusion, but sh is reduced to 0 while confused, so if you are relying on sh to avoid the confusion, when one gets through, you are more likely to be re confused.

Yea. Confusion also makes wands and scrolls pretty useless. Just because most normal games have enough !curing to deal with this doesn't magically make it not an issue. Maybe melee-caused confusion (Tarantella, Wandering Mushroom) could be briefer? or have a tiny period of immunity in between procs (like 1 turn like paralysis).

[duvessa]

I mean, now that players aren't allowed to attack, use evocables, or otherwise do anything remotely useful while confused, confusion basically is old paralysis. It just either lasts 1 action (you have curing or obsidian axe) or lasts an extremely long time (you don't have curing or obsidian axe).

[ydeve]

It seems like confusion itself is the problem, not clarity. And most of the issue seems to come from it's binary nature: either you're completely helpless, or you're not. There has to be some sort of middle ground. What if confusion wasn't binary, but interrupted a (changing) percentage of your actions: you would have confused(x%) status, where when you take an action that is currently blocked by confusion, there is a x% chance of blundering around instead. This percentage would start small when you're first confused, and further sources of confusion (which are usually abundant if you got confused in the first place) would increase it, like poison damage stacking. This way you can actually do something about the confused status when you first get it, other than quaffing !curing and immediately getting confused again.

[ydeve]

Sorry for the double post, I just thought of an analogy for why a lot of people don't like this amulet. Many players say that cleaving is bad, even though you are able to deal more damage with it. Because in order to use it, you need to expose yourself to more enemies and therefore take more damage. "harm is similar, but it makes the problem more pronounced, because you aren't even killing as many enemies as quickly as if you were using axes.

[duvessa]

harm lets you trade hp for damage without compromising your positioning
cleave doesn't

i think harm is an awful design but i don't think it's weak (think about how often you kill monsters before they damage you significantly at all, MP, etc)
i think cleaving would be a good design if it didn't have certain rules* but i also think it's weak

I consider harm an awful design because the only way it makes sense is if the default damage values in crawl are too low. Think of an amulet that does the opposite: all incoming and outgoing damage is reduced by 20%. Is this something that would belong in the game? I really hope your answer is no. But it's the item that you effectively put on when you take off an amulet of harm. See the problem?
Also, even if you like the design of harm, not applying it to torment, hp costs, etc. is just plain stupid. How would anyone guess that? If the item is supposed to increase damage then it should increase damage, not increase all damage except for a few exceptions. So what if that allows torment to kill you at 1 hp, that's still exactly the behaviour you would expect and it won't ever make a difference in practice anyway. Sure it won't work on slow poison damage because of rounding, but that's no reason not to apply it to fast poison damage.

*specifically: reduced damage on secondary targets, unusable while confused



also this "ripping a way a piece of their spirit or animating force" line is incredibly forced and makes the amulet sound like more than it is, it should really just say "draining them" yw

[Lasty]

I consider harm an awful design because the only way it makes sense is if the default damage values in crawl are too low. Think of an amulet that does the opposite: all incoming and outgoing damage is reduced by 20%. Is this something that would belong in the game? I really hope your answer is no. But it's the item that you effectively put on when you take off an amulet of harm. See the problem?

I agree that I would not think an amulet that reduced all damage by 20% is a good idea, but I don't agree with the rest of the premise. The reason that 20% damage reduction across the board would be bad is that it overall lowers risk of damage while making fights take longer -- the game gets safer and slower, two aspects that make it more boring. It's also boring because the promise it offers to the player is "you'll survive longer", which is very strong but not exciting.

The amulet of harm does the opposite -- it makes the game less safe and faster, and it promises that, if you can leverage it, you get a big damage bonus. It's not as strong, because it increases risk, but it's sexier, because it increases reward.

Also, even if you like the design of harm, not applying it to torment, hp costs, etc. is just plain stupid. How would anyone guess that? If the item is supposed to increase damage then it should increase damage, not increase all damage except for a few exceptions. So what if that allows torment to kill you at 1 hp, that's still exactly the behaviour you would expect and it won't ever make a difference in practice anyway. Sure it won't work on slow poison damage because of rounding, but that's no reason not to apply it to fast poison damage.

This is a good point. The main reason it exempts torment is because I had the impression that other people on the devteam wouldn't like having it increase torment damage. It wouldn't actually make torment at 1hp fatal -- it would still round down to 1. I'd be happy to remove that qualification if it works for the team.

As for poison, the initial plan was for it to apply there too, but there were some concerns that this would effectively double-dip on damage increases to poison magic; given the implementation, that might not even be a factor, in which case the restriction could be removed entirely.

also this "ripping a way a piece of their spirit or animating force" line is incredibly forced and makes the amulet sound like more than it is, it should really just say "draining them" yw

It is forced. I was thinking that saying it would drain you might make undead players think they were immune to the draining, and that awkward line was a compromise I made. In retrospect, I probably should have just said "drain you, even if you're undead" or something. I'll revisit it.

[byrel]

While it would certainly be possible to tweak the values to something useful (25/10 seems like a reasonable starting point) I think that's going to end up somewhat boring, as it's equally effective for everyone and either OP or UP depending on how good other amulets are on your character. My suggestion would be:

• Make it affect all damage. Torment is already not fixed to 50% HP due to rN. No reason to special case poison either I don't think...
• Make it apply pre-AC.
• Keep it 25/25 to start with, and tweak as needed for power level.

This makes the amulet actually be an interesting strategic decision, rather than simply a numbers min-max. It's a good amulet on low-damage fast-weapon archetypes. It's a bad amulet on anyone using dark maul. (Assuming reasonably tweaked numbers.) For spellcasters it will boil down to a lot of tactical considerations.

Buffing damage pre-AC will also tend to reduce rolling 0s on damage which ranges from fairly unsatisfying to annoying, especially when dealing with a creature that's already low HP.

The biggest problem with this change is clarity (he he). You need to communicate the effect without making players feel like they need to whip out a calculator. You could leave it as is (pre-AC was my initial assumption from the description) or specify like

  Code:

amulet of harm

This unholy amulet contains a vicious spirit that increases damage dealt
to and by its wearer by one fourth (before reductions). The spirit wants only to spread harm, and
will punish anyone who removes it by ripping away a piece of their spirit or
animating force, draining them.

[WalkerBoh]

For those who feel the amulet is too weak, how would it have to be changed before you would consider wearing it on at least 1/4th of your characters?

Honestly, even just changing it to -HP instead of taking 25% more damage would help a lot (like frail 1 or reverse vitality). That would solve the damage spike problems that I have with the amulet currently.

Of course, that's relatively boring and not particularly deserving of an amulet type. I agree with dpeg that straight number increases aren't desirable. But I'm personally having trouble coming up with ideas that don't step on yred's toes (a pain mirror amulet would be pretty sweet, for example, and fits the hp for slaying theme).

[byrel]

Changing it to -HP is completely identical to amplifying damage by %, except that it will slightly strengthen some sources of regen (and effectively amplify poison, etc. currently unaffected by the amulet).

It doesn't really matter whether you have 200 HP and get hit for 1.25*100 (ending at 37.5%, or 75 HP) or 0.8*200=160HP and get hit for 100 (ending at 37.5% or 60HP) if all damage respects it.

Either way, the amulet is scaling the threat from an unlucky 50% HP blow to an unlucky 62.5% HP blow. Same effect on spikyness.

[WingedEspeon]

Changing it to -HP is completely identical to amplifying damage by %, except that it will slightly strengthen some sources of regen (and effectively amplify poison, etc. currently unaffected by the amulet).

It doesn't really matter whether you have 200 HP and get hit for 1.25*100 (ending at 37.5%, or 75 HP) or 0.8*200=160HP and get hit for 100 (ending at 37.5% or 60HP) if all damage respects it.

Either way, the amulet is scaling the threat from an unlucky 50% HP blow to an unlucky 62.5% HP blow. Same effect on spikyness.

It would amp regen and also amp HW. It would also make calculating when a max hit could kill you easier.

EDIT:spirit shield.

[WalkerBoh]

I disagree, byrel. You're right that it's functionally the same, but calculation of damage you expect to take in the next few turns is easier with reduced hp. Ditto for max dam hits. The spike might have the same effect either way, but in one case the player is more aware of the danger and able to react.

[duvessa]

I consider harm an awful design because the only way it makes sense is if the default damage values in crawl are too low. Think of an amulet that does the opposite: all incoming and outgoing damage is reduced by 20%. Is this something that would belong in the game? I really hope your answer is no. But it's the item that you effectively put on when you take off an amulet of harm. See the problem?

I agree that I would not think an amulet that reduced all damage by 20% is a good idea, but I don't agree with the rest of the premise. The reason that 20% damage reduction across the board would be bad is that it overall lowers risk of damage while making fights take longer -- the game gets safer and slower, two aspects that make it more boring. It's also boring because the promise it offers to the player is "you'll survive longer", which is very strong but not exciting.

The amulet of harm does the opposite -- it makes the game less safe and faster, and it promises that, if you can leverage it, you get a big damage bonus. It's not as strong, because it increases risk, but it's sexier, because it increases reward.

But taking off the amulet makes the game safer and slower like you described. That's my point.

As for poison, the initial plan was for it to apply there too, but there were some concerns that this would effectively double-dip on damage increases to poison magic; given the implementation, that might not even be a factor, in which case the restriction could be removed entirely.

It'll also double-dip on damage from Devastator and anything else that does damage based on damage, surely? Why should poison be the exception?

[Lasty]

Ah, I see where you're coming from now. I'll consider that. My initial response is that that argument not that the amulet is a bad thing for people to put on but that people just won't put it on, and I would bet that people will put it on. But I may need to think it through further.

Re: double-dipping, I accidentally left out some explanation: I was advised that the amount of poison dealt by (some sources?) is influenced by the amount of damage it deals, and thus you'd "double dip" by multiplying the amount of poison assigned and also how harmful that poison is. However, I think that the current implementation makes that a non-issue in any case.

[duvessa]

Re: double-dipping, I accidentally left out some explanation: I was advised that the amount of poison dealt by (some sources?) is influenced by the amount of damage it deals, and thus you'd "double dip" by multiplying the amount of poison assigned and also how harmful that poison is. However, I think that the current implementation makes that a non-issue in any case.

Um, yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Devastator explosions are influenced by the amount of damage your melee attack deals, so are a lot of other things. Maybe it makes sense for multiplicative weapon brands to be exempt from the damage increase, but if you're going to make an exception for poison too, then you should do it for every case where double-dipping occurs.

[Lasty]

Ah, I didn't know that. Thanks for letting me know. I'll keep that in mind in case I need to change the implementation. I believe the current implementation should avoid this sort of double-dipping for all damage sources including poison, so it's a moot point, so I should remove poison damage-over-time from the list of exempted damage. There's a CRD thread where I'm also polling the team's preferences about removing the torment exception.

[asdu]

The amulet of harm [...] makes the game less safe and faster

Unless it comes in a bundle with the obsidian axe or something, I'm pretty sure the amulet of harm will have the net effect of slowing the game down for most players who choose to wear it.
It will shorten the average lenght of the game for those players who won't slow down, but the cause will probably be more frequent deaths rather than faster wins.

[rchandra]

I consider harm an awful design because the only way it makes sense is if the default damage values in crawl are too low. Think of an amulet that does the opposite: all incoming and outgoing damage is reduced by 20%. Is this something that would belong in the game? I really hope your answer is no. But it's the item that you effectively put on when you take off an amulet of harm. See the problem?

Is this significantly different than using/not using a shield, training weapons vs armour, etc ?

[Baldu3]

In my current game I found an artefact of harm with lots of good stuff on it very early and I really wanted to like it and wear it forever since it makes some spells pretty silly (clouds are dumb without it and much dumber with it), but in the end I had to dump it because it's like playing with -25% hp mutation and that was just terrible for not dying.

[Hopeless]

For those who feel the amulet is too weak, how would it have to be changed before you would consider wearing it on at least 1/4th of your characters?

For me, it would have to be swappable with no detriment.

[byrel]

For those who feel the amulet is too weak, how would it have to be changed before you would consider wearing it on at least 1/4th of your characters?

For me, it would have to be swappable with no detriment.

That's really not a good idea. If this amulet was swappable, optimal use would be absurdly tedious.

Another thought: what if, instead of flatly amplifying damage done to you, it amplified smaller amounts of damage more. There are a lot of ways this could be done...

• Make all damage that would be completely negated by armour be directly inflicted instead.
  This has the counter-intuitive property that more armour makes you take more damage vs popcorn, which probably isn't optimal.
• Make all damage that would be completely blocked by armour reroll AC once.
• Make all damage use the maximum of two independent damage rolls before applying AC.

Basically, each of these suggestions avoids the increase in insta-kill possibilities that the current amulet has, in favor of an increase to average damage. I'd wear any of these 3 on 25% of characters. I'd favor the third one, since it treats EV and AC-based characters identically.