Good wands being taken out?

[lazorexplosion]

Remove various wands

Remove various wands

Cold, fire, frost, magic darts, and invisibility. Wands
of lightning, draining, fireball, and flame are
now more common. Random Effects still chooses from the old wand
effects, primarily because I'd be sad if it could no longer turn
enemies invisible; that means it's now open to being changed
further, of course.

The primary reasoning here is that, as we've added new evocables
and other items, we haven't made any compensating removals; this
means that players inventories are more cluttered (which presents
annoying UI issues) and have an excess of tactical options. The
current set of wands is at least a decade old (!), which makes it
low-hanging fruit for pruning.

Darts, frost, fire & cold are all quite bland; flame covers the
former two just fine, and draining, lightning & fireball, while
not quite as strong as fire/cold, make a more distinctive trio.
(If the latter two get used a little more, that'd be a bonus.)
Invisibility is still available on potions, randarts, and as a
spell; it also doesn't have the ally synergy that the other buff
wands have.

Wat.

I don't even understand. Tell me I'm making a mistake and I'm not reading what I think I'm reading. Fire, cold and invisibility wands are useless garbage being chucked out of the game?

If you want to reduce the number of wands, why not pick the most useless or redundant ones? How many MR-checking monster disables do we need? Who uses wands of random effects? Who even bothers with flame? Yeah, instead lets take out the useful ones? Hey, you know what? I'd prefer to have my inventory get cluttered up with useful things than have the useful things taken out of the game.

I literally don't understand what is going on and why these days. I don't think I want versions beyond 0.17 if the philosophy is going to be 'delete out all the useful things you like'.

[neil]

The weight formerly given to cold and fire has been given to lightning, draining, and fireball. The chance of a randomly-generated wand being a high-tier attack wand (fire, cold, lightning, draining, or fireball) is slightly higher than before, 26/80 instead of 23/80.

If we only removed the bad and redundant items (which we also do), that would be a significant player buff over time as the average quality of loot increases.

[lazorexplosion]

The weight formerly given to cold and fire has been given to lightning, draining, and fireball. The chance of a randomly-generated wand being a high-tier attack wand (fire, cold, lightning, draining, or fireball) is slightly higher than before, 26/80 instead of 23/80.

If we only removed the bad and redundant items (which we also do), that would be a significant player buff over time as the average quality of loot increases.

This is totally non responsive to the point that fire cold and invisibility are the useful and well used wands but are being taken out while the many redundant, useless, pure clutter ones are being left in. You could just as easily keep the good wands in and take the most useless out and adjust their weights accordingly for less wand clutter and similar availability of the powerful wands. Making the argument that, hey, sure we took good ones out but we fiddled with some weights don't you feel better is like, no, because you took the good wands out. And I notice you didn't even begin to defend taking out wands of invisibility.

[Hurkyl]

And I notice you didn't even begin to defend taking out wands of invisibility.

That was already in the opening quote.

[lazorexplosion]

And I notice you didn't even begin to defend taking out wands of invisibility.

That was already in the opening quote.

As a nonsense argument. It's like saying we can take out wands of healing because potions of healing are a thing that exists. The usage profile of a wand of invisibility is different from the use you get out of a potion of invisibility.

Actually forget I just said that, it might cause someone to decide to take out wands of healing too.

[njvack]

Dude, blame duvessa

Anyhow, the commit message makes it really clear why this is being done. I tend to agree that Heal Wounds maybe doesn't need to exist in both potion and wand format. If wands were only for attacking, that would make mechanical sense to me, if nothing else.

[lazorexplosion]

The weight formerly given to cold and fire has been given to lightning, draining, and fireball. The chance of a randomly-generated wand being a high-tier attack wand (fire, cold, lightning, draining, or fireball) is slightly higher than before, 26/80 instead of 23/80.

If we only removed the bad and redundant items (which we also do), that would be a significant player buff over time as the average quality of loot increases.

Let me explain more.

I mean if you have good items and mediocre redundant items removing the mediocre redundant items doesn't magically mean the good items have to drop more. If I have a wand of lighting and a wand of cold and a wand of flame in my inventory, and you remove the wand of flame and the wand of lighting you both removed the mediocre wands and removed my inventory clutter and made me weaker, you didn't buff me. If you remove the wand of cold, yeah, sure, less inventory clutter but holy shit there goes my best method of dealing with hydras for a lot of characters but whoop-dee-doo I get to keep the mediocre wands? Why would I want that?

[njvack]

You wouldn't! Why would you want a nerf? And "an excess of tactical options" implies that this is intended as a nerf. But there have been a lot of player buffs over the years (new evokers are the ones mentioned here, but there are more) so nerfing is OK sometimes too -- and is needed if you want to avoid power creep.

There are still a lot of ways to deal with hydras.

[lazorexplosion]

Dude, blame duvessa

Anyhow, the commit message makes it really clear why this is being done. I tend to agree that Heal Wounds maybe doesn't need to exist in both potion and wand format. If wands were only for attacking, that would make mechanical sense to me, if nothing else.

Let me explain why a wand of invisibility is not like potions of invisibility.

A wand of invisibility gives highly reusable low skill investment invisibility use out of a single drop. It's a binary outcome that significantly changes the flavor of a run that will be present in some runs and absent in others. This is good; roguelike runs should have different flavors from each other due to drops, it adds replayability.

Potions of invisibility are single use items you tend to find several times, which means pretty much every run gets a pretty much average amount of them. Which is nice in a different way.

Having both potions and invisibility add to different aspects of how runs play out.

Same with potions/wands of healing and haste.

[Jarlyk]

I'll miss Fire/Cold (there are a decent number of enemies with either fire or cold weakness to exploit with the wands), but I do think Lightning is more fun to use, for multi-zap reasons.

[Sar]

Who uses wands of random effects?

Ar

[1010011010]

Wands of invisibility play like stacks of invisibility potions except you can use a scroll of recharge for more potions even if you used them all.

Wands of invisibility does have a notable difference to potions and that's being able to use them on others, but who ever does that?.

[nago]

I remember there wassome secret tech to abuse some mechanics giving invis to enemy but I don't remember what and how.

More on the topic: probably it need much more balance than invis, but isn't this a good moment to work around stick of haste, spell of haste and pots of haste?

[Lasty]

For what it's worth, I still have my eye on more wand reductions: merge digging/disint; remove one or both of slow and confuse. I'd love to remove wand of heal wounds, but sadly DD is a thing.

lazorexplosion, keep in mind that changes that make the game harder aren't something the dev team is trying to avoid, and so saying a change would make the game harder won't count as an argument against that change for us.

Edit: the number and accessibility of haste sources is something I'm somewhat concerned about, but IMO the wand is better for the game than the spell. I don't think anyone has any plans in progress to address this topic in the near future.

[Sphara]

The weight formerly given to cold and fire has been given to lightning, draining, and fireball. The chance of a randomly-generated wand being a high-tier attack wand (fire, cold, lightning, draining, or fireball) is slightly higher than before, 26/80 instead of 23/80.

If we only removed the bad and redundant items (which we also do), that would be a significant player buff over time as the average quality of loot increases.

Does this mean that early monsters have higher chance of getting such a wand?

[nago]

Don't fear Ijyb!

For what it's worth, I still have my eye on more wand reductions: merge digging/disint; remove one or both of slow and confuse. I'd love to remove wand of heal wounds, but sadly DD is a thing.

You could change their ability to just brew 1-n !HW, couldn't you?
Sure, it would be a nice nerf because they couldn't spam as much other wands, but they're probably would still be the strongest race around so...

[lazorexplosion]

For what it's worth, I still have my eye on more wand reductions: merge digging/disint; remove one or both of slow and confuse. I'd love to remove wand of heal wounds, but sadly DD is a thing.

lazorexplosion, keep in mind that changes that make the game harder aren't something the dev team is trying to avoid, and so saying a change would make the game harder won't count as an argument against that change for us.

Edit: the number and accessibility of haste sources is something I'm somewhat concerned about, but IMO the wand is better for the game than the spell. I don't think anyone has any plans in progress to address this topic in the near future.

Neil made the fallacious argument that remove the mediocre redundant wands would constitute some sort of power creep because all wands would be good wands. This is wrong because taking out mediocre wands doesn't mean generating more good wands; having the same amount of good wands as before but no mediocre wands is in fact not power creep. This is the only reason I ever posted anything about nerfs. I am not against making the game easier or harder or anything.

I am against the fact that the supposed wand decluttering leaves a whole bunch of the wands that are pure clutter in the game and takes out a bunch of wands that have very positive uses.

You're doing a wand decluttering that fails to identify which wands are actually clutter.

[dpeg]

Edit: the number and accessibility of haste sources is something I'm somewhat concerned about, but IMO the wand is better for the game than the spell. I don't think anyone has any plans in progress to address this topic in the near future.

Not sure about near future, but I have a c-r-d proposal dealing with that. Stay tuned

re: main thread: I find it hilarious how some players want to protect Crawl from its developers. And in this case a page long explanation message came with the commit.

[lazorexplosion]

Edit: the number and accessibility of haste sources is something I'm somewhat concerned about, but IMO the wand is better for the game than the spell. I don't think anyone has any plans in progress to address this topic in the near future.

Not sure about near future, but I have a c-r-d proposal dealing with that. Stay tuned

re: main thread: I find it hilarious how some players want to protect Crawl from its developers. And in this case a page long explanation message came with the commit.

Yeah, well, I'm fucking sad it's got to this point. I'm glad I said my piece against this tide of deleting items that have strong specific uses, and leaving mediocrity behind, but I guess I can't do anything. The new amulets are pure mediocrity. Less mutators and more cure mutation potions so instead of having extreme runs with no mutations or terrible mutations or even good mutations you just end up chugging a potion or two whenever your mutations change from mediocrity and reliably they'll be mediocre instead of interesting. When even the good and well used wands aren't safer than the mediocre ones, I just have to throw up my hands. You go in whatever direction you want, It's abundantly clear I should be getting off the train here.

[neil]

Neil made the fallacious argument that remove the mediocre redundant wands would constitute some sort of power creep because all wands would be good wands. This is wrong because taking out mediocre wands doesn't mean generating more good wands; having the same amount of good wands as before but no mediocre wands is in fact not power creep.

Have you looked at how item generation in crawl works? Removing mediocre wands, without also changing the weights of the good wands, would result in more good wands being generated. Reducing the weight of wands in general to compensate would result in more non-wand items. If we wanted to have the effect of generating fewer mediocre wands and the same number of non-mediocre ones without changing other things, we would have to: adjust the weights of different wands, adjust the weights of different item classes, reduce overall item spawn rate, and edit vaults to reduce the amount of loot they place.

Not that it's impossible, and I think item class weighting and overall spawn rates will probably be revisited at some point, but it is not as simple as you make it sound.

[Tiktacy]

I completely agree with this change, more more will i have to spend extra time turning off auto-loot on useless wands.

Only thing I disagree with is the removal of invisiblity. I liked that wand, but I suppose its alright if it increases the chance of getting the other high tier wands.

[Kate]

Closing this, see the GDD readme thread for guidelines on posting productively.