Portal Storm / Vortices - Translocations:9

[mumra]

This idea has been kicking around in my head for a few days so I thought I'd share. I felt sure this would've been thought of already but I couldn't find anything similar here or on the dev wiki.]

Portal Storm was the first name I thought of but obviously it sounds too similar to Fire/Ice Storm and is "borrowed" from HL2 ...So I just thought of Vortices and I think that's much nice.

The idea is that it creates a number (depending on skill/power) of 4-tile "vortices" - basically they're localised distortions in the space/time continuum - that will move around on their own, kind of like ball lighting or similar, causing a variety of effects.

This is a draft list of their properties:

- Cloud-like behaviour - they will tend to elongate in corridors like poisonous cloud; however they have a certain probability of moving over wall tiles, with a much lower probability (even 0) for tougher types of wall
- Each turn there is a chance that an effect will happen to some or all the things on an affected tile. Different possible effects are as follows...
* Swap. 2, 3, or 4 of the tiles in a vortex will be randomly exchanged. This can include walls, water/lava, and other scenery. Very occasionally tiles could be exchanged between separate vortices, but in general it should be localised to the 4 tiles.
* Banishment and other Distortion effects (obviously)
* Partial Displacement. Sometimes known as "the shredder". This is a serious damage-dealing ability as it displaces part of the target to a different tile; could be cutting them in half, decapitating them, shredding them into little strips, just losing the tip of their nose! Quite often produces chunks, sometimes even from enemies that are still otherwise alive.
* Unequip (also a partial displacement). The target is displaced right out of their armour and/or to a different tile than their weapon.
* Time distortions. Since to me Translocations involve manipulation of space, and time being firmly linked to our understanding of space, I see time manipulation as being a subject that could creep in on the edge of the Translocations schools. So perhaps some time-based effects of the Vortex could be temporarily speeding or slowing a monster, and also aging/youthing targets. Youthing might involve: Restoring a corpse to life, HP restoration, Str loss, Exp loss, mutation loss. Aging might involve the opposites of those. However a *serious* aging or youthing might have drastically harsher effects: making something so old and frail they lose Str/Dex/MaxHP, or making something so young it no longer fits its armour.
- Caster must be extremely careful as the vortices are not "friendly" and will affect all targets alike
- An amulet of stasis is a very good (but not 100% reliable) defence
- Conservation/Preservation might help avoid disarmament
- The Swap effect is a handy but extremely random form of digging. Could be used (or maybe abused) on levels with no cTele.
- Intended as a level 9 pure Translocation spell. Currently there's nothing worth maxing out this school for - this could change that. But I still feel it's way more balanced than, say, Fire/Ice Storm for a high-level spell because it is potentially dangerous to the caster and extremely unpredictable.
- If further balancing is needed, two things spring to mind. The vortices could move very quickly to make avoiding them harder, and they could even home in the caster on a random chance. Additionally you could make Controlled Blink / Tele very unreliable anywhere in the vicinity of a vortex, since the whole local space/time continuum is in a kind of chaotic flux.


Separate spell idea:

As I was writing this I had one other idea for maybe a level 8 translocation. It's called something like "Time Bubble" and creates an area-based time distortion effect (lower towards the edges).

There are several ways this could work:
1. A targetted slowing field, so the monster at the center would move much more slowly but speed up as they moved out of the bubble
2. A self-targetted quickening field, so monsters right next to you would relatively be barely affected, but you'd all be moving much faster than monsters outside or towards the edges of the bubble.
3. A self-targetted slowing field that like Tornado doesn't affect your own tile, but perhaps still stays in place instead of moving with you. So monsters are moving pretty slow if they're right next to your, and missiles are easier to dodge.

Ok I don't think it's such a good idea as the first one, it's basically just a more tactical Haste for Translocations; but perhaps a more interesting idea than a straightforward speed boost.

[asdu]

Looks cool, but I'd never use it if it was a level 9 spell. Why would I want to invest a huge chunk of my XP in something that's extremely unpredictable and potentially very dangerous to me? I don't think that's a tradeoff that makes it "balanced".
IMO it would work better as an evocable item effect, a high piety Lugonu power, or even as a monster spell (for some powerful abyssal monstrosity).

[Bim]

I really like the idea of that as a spell, a cloud translocation spell would be awesome, but as asdu said, I wouldn't waste xp on getting translocations so high just for that (unless smite targeted?)
I think the problem with translocation is that as soon as you have teleport and blink, you don't really need it for much else, and they're both powerful as it is. Seeing some offensive translocation spells could be nice though, even if it was just a single smite targeted distortion effect.

Also, I do think translocations need a bit of work, as both blink and teleport are more or less readily available in other ways, and the other spells aren't that great. Definitely an interesting idea!

[galehar]

There's some interesting ideas in there, but there's too many of them. The number of effects will make it hard to implement and balance, and also to use it effectively. Try to tone it down to 2 or 3 effects.

[mumra]

I really like the idea of that as a spell, a cloud translocation spell would be awesome, but as asdu said, I wouldn't waste xp on getting translocations so high just for that (unless smite targeted?)
I think the problem with translocation is that as soon as you have teleport and blink, you don't really need it for much else, and they're both powerful as it is. Seeing some offensive translocation spells could be nice though, even if it was just a single smite targeted distortion effect.

Also, I do think translocations need a bit of work, as both blink and teleport are more or less readily available in other ways, and the other spells aren't that great. Definitely an interesting idea!

That was my main thinking - giving Translocations a high-level damage spell so you don't have to choose another school, and so it's worth persevering with.

Clearly if it's not desirable with the drawbacks as I outlined they can be toned down. And absolutely smite targetted - it's a space/time effect that transcends solid matter

Perhaps in addition to partial resistance with Stasis, you could get full resistance with cTele (possibly just resulting in a Controlled Blink instead, or Uncontrolled on a no-cTele level). Maybe a higher skill level would also just allow the caster to "understand and control the vortices well enough to not be affected". Maybe they could even be directed in a limited fashion using the ally commands menu.

Anyway, thanks for the positive feedback. Although I'd certainly be pretty scared if a monster started casting this at me

[Bim]

I think the problem with this could be (similar to banishment) that you won't get any xp for anything, so perhaps if it just did random damage and movement effects? I like the idea of jostling the tiles around, perhaps if a monster got swapped for a tile it would do a certain amount of damage, and if it didn't it would have a random chance to blink/other effect. I really do like the sound of it though, perhaps think up a few alternative ways in which it could work and see if a dev posts? I can't see anything wrong with it, or any way it would be overpowered though.

[mumra]

There's some interesting ideas in there, but there's too many of them. The number of effects will make it hard to implement and balance, and also to use it effectively. Try to tone it down to 2 or 3 effects.

It certainly needs refinement, I was just getting all my ideas down The obvious effects to drop first are the Time effects, they were last-minute additions and reading it again I think they somewhat confuse the theme of the spell rather than adding anything.

What remains there is pretty much just three effects depending on how you list them:

a. Swap - switching tiles around is a must-have, it would make the spell seem brilliantly chaotic and powerful as it rearranged the level for you, and I think it's a strong theme to give the spell a unique identity.
b. Partial Displacement - implemented as a mostly unresistable smite-style damage effect. I think this is key to making a Lvl 9 Transloc spell "worth it"
a/b. Unequip/Disarm - I can't decide whether this is actually just a weak form of Swap or Partial Displacement. If anything, Swap - it's just that instead of the whole tile getting swapped, only some things on it have. Anyway it's not essential but it would definitely add to the chaos and produce some amusing incidents. I think Xom particularly approves of this spell.
c. Distortion - well it includes a lot of different effects but it's a single and easily reusable chunk of existing code, I guess? On the other hand this can easily be dropped to avoid overlap with existing themes and reinforce the identity of the spell.

I'm guessing the most complicated thing implementation-wise would be its actual behaviour as a cloud; there I felt it needed something a bit unique to distinguish it from all the other cloud spells, or things like ball lightning. Of course I'm not at this point familiar with Crawl's source code, but I am a coder and on first glance the rest seems relatively easy compared to getting the behaviour and movement just right.

Bim: I already included the "Partial Displacement" effect for exactly that - it can literally tear someone in half or shred them to pieces and hence can do a LOT of damage. That is its main purpose (and should the more common effect); the tile swapping and other kinds of distortion are just side effects that could occasionally be useful, but will in general just add flavour / amusement / cool factor!

[mumra]

I absolutely agree the initial proposal had way too much going on. On the other hand, really high-level spells need a certain amount of depth to justify the investment in getting them. I haven't seen the original proposal for "Malign Gateway" but I'm wondering how simple that could have been?

Then, perhaps the problem with Fire Storm and why it's considered so overpowered is that it's just too simple and reliable. If I were to write a proposal for that, it'd be: "Huge area. Boom." Maybe some tweaks like it starting on a single tile and growing every turn to full size; or making the shape slightly less geometrical and tiles randomly spreading/contracting on occasional turns. Actually I'm not saying fire storm should be changed just that it's not actually all that interesting compared to other high-level spells like Tornado or even Shatter.

Your ideas certainly sound similar; initially I was just thinking an area spell with a few whirling time vortices, but then the idea of making them the main feature and dropping any area effect just seemed to give it a totally unique character.

So anyway, for a streamlined version of a Vortices proposal I'd say the following:

- Between 1 and 4 Vortices are generated, depending upon spell power.
- A Vortex consists of 4 cloud tiles which can be in any configuration as long as they remain on adjacent/diagonal squares to each other. They have a bit less tendency to move onto wall tiles than floor tiles.
- Each cloud has a certain chance each (x) turns to perform any of: Swap, Partial Displace, or nothing.
- If more than one cloud rolled Swap in the same vortex, then they exchange tiles.
- Amulet of Stasis has a reasonable chance to resist, something like 90-95%.
- For Partial Displace make a fairly hefty damage roll.
- Any form of cTele gives you a Controlled Blink instead of causing an effect, or Uncontrolled on no-cTele levels.

[mageykun]

Personally, I always liked the flavor of giving translations an attack spell- obviously spacial distortions can be a bad and painful thing. It would allow playing a 'pure' warper- both protecting yourself and defeating your enemies with your mastery of the fabric of space itself.

That said, the problem with it, game wise, is that translocations is already home to a plethora of useful utility spells. This means most casters of any kind at least dabble in the school, and a good many do more (controlled blink is definitely worth training for). Adding damage spells (especially a ridiculously powerful one as here described) gives people something for nothing, and cuts down on the interesting choices of where to spend xp and train spell schools. That's not so desirable.

[mumra]

Getting a level 9 spell castable is a very different matter to level 7; and consider that up until then the player will need a decent mid-level damage spell from another school if they want to even earn the XP to get transloc that high. Even once they've got it, it doesn't reliably obliterate everything in sight like Fire Storm - they still need something else decent to mop up afterwards.

Actually, my one and only win was a DSWz who only ever got skill 2 in translocations. I had Blink and a ring of cTele for emergencies, but with Haste/Swiftness/Flight they were rarely needed. So I think it'd be far from being free or a no brainer in a lot of cases. Instead there's an interesting decision for a lot of spellcaster backgrounds over whether they put everything they can into getting it, or go one of the more normal elemental routes. The only class for whom the decision is obvious would be Warper, and they still need to choose their secondary school, but have a new reward for their devotion to mastery of time and space

[Galefury]

I like it. It moves stuff around and kills it, sounds cool. Probably a little annoying to use with the wall rearrangement, but cool. Also definitely not overpowered even with fairly high damage, especially if enemy AI gets improved regarding clouds. Some notes:

I think it should be level 8, because it is unpredictable and quite dangerous. Level 9 investment is huge, and I think this just wouldn't be worth it. It could still be uptiered to 9 like Tornado was if it proves to be way too powerful. Tornado is overpowered by design though, while this is underpowered by design (compared to other level 9 spells). So I don't think it's going to be a huge issue.

I think displacement and swapping between different vortices should not be rarer than within the same vortex. Moving stuff around is one of the major effects, and it's just not very noticeable within a size 4 cloud.

Producing chunks verywhere would get really annoying, so I don't think that's a good idea. Very flavorful, but too annoying.

Stasis and -TELE should be full immunity, not 95%. If you cant be teleported you cant be teleported. This is not a plane shift. Also by wearing stasis on a tloc specialist you are seriously gimping yourself, so full immunity is only fair.

About ctele: I think ctele should only upgrade effects to semicontrolled blinks. After all it only upgrades blink to semicontrolled, and being partially displaced or swapped is probably worse base material than a proper blink. Also I think fully controlled blinks might be a little too powerful. Permanent ctele from ring is getting changed to evocable though (this is happening, right?), so upgrading to controlled blink may not be too strong after all with ctele being harder to get.

[galehar]

The problem with creating 1 to 4 vortices with a size of 2x2 is: how do you target it? If you just choose 1 point and they are randomly created nearby, then you'll randomly hit a few monsters, miss many and hit yourself. This isn't good for a high level spell. It's not only about the strategical skill point investment, but also about the tactical investment of 9 MP. It has to be effective or else everyone will continue to use storms and tornado and ignore it.

I like minmay's idea a lot. A big translocating cloud which hits everything with distortion sounds fun. Maybe it can randomly shuffle some cells inside. Partial displace isn't necessary, because distortion already has "high damage" as one of its possible effects. Stasis doesn't protect from distortion. Nothing does.

[Galefury]

About targeting: this could create one big cloud (fire storm style) that splits into multiple ones in the following turns and dissipates after a while.

Distortion cloud sounds cool too, but banish and long range teleport are not really desirable on a damage spell. Exp loss from banishment is annoying, tracking down teleported enemies is annoying, and self banishment is silly (and extremely annoying). Besides, giving the player access to irresistible large scale banishment doesn't sound like a good idea. At least with distortion weapons you only get one attempt per attack, with distortion clouds you can turn the whole area into a banishing teleport death trap.

[galehar]

As minmay said, when you're casting L9 spells, XP loss shouldn't really be a concern. This would be a "move out of my way" spell instead of "kill kill kill". This would be different and different is interesting. Not sure we need a fourth high damage L9 spell.

[KoboldLord]

If it's only intended to move things out of your way, what makes it preferable to Controlled Blink, which instantly and reliably removes everything on the board from your LOS? Without any direct risk to the caster, I might add.

[Galefury]

No ctele levels are one difference. Also getting the enemy out of the way is not the same as getting yourself out of the way if you are actually trying to get somewhere (like to a rune or the orb). Still, a high level distortion cloud in tloc would probably not see that much use for exactly that reason, cblink and ctele already deal with many situations where it would be useful.

[mumra]

Great feedback - I'll just get down my thoughts about all that:

Probably a little annoying to use with the wall rearrangement, but cool.

This is why I wanted it to a) prefer moving over floor tiles to walls, so walls don't get rearranged *too* much, but still enough to occasionally open rooms up or block corridors off unexpectedly (of course statues, stairs and other floor features might get moved around more); and b) prefer swapping tiles within the vortex so the walls are mostly only moved a maximum of 3 tiles away.

I think it should be level 8, because it is unpredictable and quite dangerous. Level 9 investment is huge, and I think this just wouldn't be worth it. It could still be uptiered to 9 like Tornado was if it proves to be way too powerful. Tornado is overpowered by design though, while this is underpowered by design (compared to other level 9 spells). So I don't think it's going to be a huge issue.

This sounds reasonable; altho with some of the other changes suggested here it could end up being just as damaging as tornado, fire storm etc.

I think displacement and swapping between different vortices should not be rarer than within the same vortex. Moving stuff around is one of the major effects, and it's just not very noticeable within a size 4 cloud.

If a tile is getting swapped say every 1-3 turns then it'd be noticable even just within a four-tile cloud; things kind of just getting jumbled up as the clouds move over them. Having stuff jump from one vortex to another could get confusing if it happens too much and would start seriously messing levels up. In my mind there's an "effect power scale" for this, and maybe this could be what the roll is based on: 1-4 = Very small displacements which cause damage to items and monsters by only moving part of them; 5-8 = Larger displacements which move whole tiles around short distances; 9-10 = Huge displacements which swap several tiles from one vortex to another. Effect Power = Mass * Distance^2 as an approximate equation! The high-powered effects can still cause damage while moving the tiles around, because there are still smaller distortions happening within those tiles.

Producing chunks verywhere would get really annoying, so I don't think that's a good idea. Very flavorful, but too annoying.

Again only something to happen occasionally, if at all. I just love how Orb of Destruction sometimes chunks things, and actually I found it to be a useful tactic when I was with Ash and wanted to curse my staff Perhaps chunks would have a chance to be produced on a power 4 roll based on the above scale, and even then usually not many. Producing chunks in the middle of a fight can also be really useful with Sublimation when you don't have time to butcher. It perhaps gives the spell a situational utility purpose to make up for the randomness of damage. On the other hand it's certainly not a necessary effect so if it's too much work for not a very perceivable gain then it's clearly not necessary.

Stasis and -TELE should be full immunity, not 95%. If you cant be teleported you cant be teleported. This is not a plane shift. Also by wearing stasis on a tloc specialist you are seriously gimping yourself, so full immunity is only fair.

Hmm, it totally should have occurred to me that a warper is basically never going to wear stasis! That actually makes stasis pretty much relevant only to monsters for this spell. For that reason I'd stick with a 95% resistance so even a monster with -TELE can't always resist, or perhaps at high effect levels there's some risk. A high-level Tloc character will almost certainly have cTele in some form and therefore 100% resistance anyway. My thinking is that Stasis protects against normal orderly teleports; but this spell is a highly chaotic and powerful disruption of localised space and not remotely as predictable as a normal teleport, hence not as easy to resist. Whereas cTele trumps stasis in that it grants complete control over spacial distortions and therefore allows full resistance.

About ctele: I think ctele should only upgrade effects to semicontrolled blinks. After all it only upgrades blink to semicontrolled, and being partially displaced or swapped is probably worse base material than a proper blink. Also I think fully controlled blinks might be a little too powerful. Permanent ctele from ring is getting changed to evocable though (this is happening, right?), so upgrading to controlled blink may not be too strong after all with ctele being harder to get.

That was a mistake; I meant to say just semi-controlled!

The problem with creating 1 to 4 vortices with a size of 2x2 is: how do you target it? If you just choose 1 point and they are randomly created nearby, then you'll randomly hit a few monsters, miss many and hit yourself. This isn't good for a high level spell. It's not only about the strategical skill point investment, but also about the tactical investment of 9 MP. It has to be effective or else everyone will continue to use storms and tornado and ignore it.

My idea about this was to have an area targetting that looks like Fire Storm targetting. So the vortices will all start within that area and you can be pretty sure most stuff there will get splatted, as well as making sure they won't spawn on top of you! Perhaps the radius could be 1 less than Fire Storm so it's more focused and decently reliable; this really depends on the maximum number of vortices generated, which could be upped to make the spell more decent. Maybe target radius could increase as the spell power increases and more vortices can be generated, so you're always able to reasonably land one on the specific target you want to take out, and there's a good chance to hit other stuff as well.

Also, you could always spam the spell a couple of times if you need to take out a lot of targets quickly. That'd be pretty much guaranteed to hit everything in the area in a short time. I also thought about something where the vortices can sometimes merge to form a super-vortex but that could get silly

Thinking more about the cloud movement; I'm imagining something that might look a little bit like Conway's Life. So every turn or few, a vortex cell has a chance to move to any other cell adjacent or diagonal to the rest of the vortex. The clouds will creep around enough to hit a few targets, but not so wildly that the player can't avoid it themselves just by staying at least a couple of tiles away. It also occurred to me that the tile swapping could be part of this movement mechanic; every time a cloud moves it has a chance of exchanging the target tile with its current one. This might make the implementation somewhat similar but I don't know if the effect would be as good.

By the way; I'm not sure if you meant this, but they're not just 2x2 squares, they can be in any configuration so long as the squares are touching (like Tetris, but diagonals allowed as well).

I like minmay's idea a lot. A big translocating cloud which hits everything with distortion sounds fun. Maybe it can randomly shuffle some cells inside. Partial displace isn't necessary, because distortion already has "high damage" as one of its possible effects. Stasis doesn't protect from distortion. Nothing does.

What I wanted to somewhat sidestep was "yet another Storm spell". Translocations is a very different spell school to the more conjurations-focused Fire and Ice; it has a lot of interesting and situational spells which provide very different mechanics and themes to any other school. So I think a high-level Tloc spell should feel fundamentally different to other high-levels, even if the "area damage" requirement is essentially the same.

About targeting: this could create one big cloud (fire storm style) that splits into multiple ones in the following turns and dissipates after a while.

I really love the mental picture I get of this! Actually I think with the area targetting mechanism I've described, you would get this kind of effect anyway. The vortices would all start right next to each other effectively forming one big cloud with only a gap here or there, and then spread apart as they moved independently. They could even have a certain tendency to move away from the epicenter, so you get that spreading out effect fairly predictably (and can actually use that tactically). I also thought once each vortex itself starts dissipating, the four clouds can start losing their attachment to each other and drift off a little before they fizzle out.

Distortion cloud sounds cool too, but banish and long range teleport are not really desirable on a damage spell. Exp loss from banishment is annoying, tracking down teleported enemies is annoying, and self banishment is silly (and extremely annoying). Besides, giving the player access to irresistible large scale banishment doesn't sound like a good idea. At least with distortion weapons you only get one attempt per attack, with distortion clouds you can turn the whole area into a banishing teleport death trap.

As minmay said, when you're casting L9 spells, XP loss shouldn't really be a concern. This would be a "move out of my way" spell instead of "kill kill kill". This would be different and different is interesting. Not sure we need a fourth high damage L9 spell.

No ctele levels are one difference. Also getting the enemy out of the way is not the same as getting yourself out of the way if you are actually trying to get somewhere (like to a rune or the orb). Still, a high level distortion cloud in tloc would probably not see that much use for exactly that reason, cblink and ctele already deal with many situations where it would be useful.

The main intent of this is to give high-level Translocations skill a purpose. Personally I think Galefury could be right that distortion would just make this too undesirable a spell for that! But yes, I totally agree that a new level 9 shouldn't be just about damage; however, I think the ability to deal a decent amount of damage, even indirectly, is essential to make investing in that top bracket genuinely worth it. Escape and avoidance are all more than covered already by lower-level spells.

Let me just check something: am I right in thinking that because this spell is single school, that makes it quite a bit easier to get castable since you only have to raise one school to the same level you would otherwise have to raise two schools to?

...On which basis it clearly shouldn't have the sheer damage of foo storm or even tornado, but still have other tactical and situational benefits that can be exploited, in keeping with the rest of Tloc; and I think the possibilities here for blinking, chunking, digging / level rearrangement, and disarmament are all viable to make it much more interesting than a pure damage spell. So it's an option for a Tloc caster who might dabble in one or two element schools for some mid-level firepower, could perhaps want half-decent Tmut/Necro for Lich Form, but also wants something high-end that's still in keeping with their character and is a viable alternative to the other level 9 spells.

I'm thinking that the damage wants to be decent enough to kill some enemies, whilst softening others up to then finish them off with lower level weaponry. That's kind of why I originally included the unequip/disarm effect - not killing things outright but presenting you with a serious tactical edge. You could even have confusion/disorientation as a side effect (although as has been pointed out already, having too many different effects is just creating one big mess!) But a high-level spell has to give you some major damage potential, even indirectly, to be genuinely worth the investment.

Hmm... although I'm quite surprised to hear that once you have a level 9 spell castable you wouldn't want to accrue any more Exp to train your other skills, or even train that skill to get the spell more powerful/reliable. I'd have thought that having a level 9 merely castable doesn't even necessarily make you ready for the end game? (Although I realise in a lot of cases it will) But what about an extended jaunt through Pan or a Zig - neither of which I felt ready for even with Fire Storm in my arsenal at decent power. On that game, once I'd learnt Fire Storm and cleared Zot, I had 150k Exp in the bank which I sank into Necro/Tmut to get Necromutation castable; if I'd just banished everything from Zot with no Exp gain the game would have ended there for me!

I realise here that I'm talking to people who've won the game many, many more times than me and my measly single time ...so I might not know what I'm talking about when it comes to the end game... and perhaps it could be seen as more fitting for a Translocations character to win by disappearing everything rather than direct destruction...

Anyway, I really appreciate everyone's criticisms so far; it's nice to explore the idea and see what people think!

[galehar]

I'm not saying that XP becomes useless when you can cast L9 spell, just that it's not a big deal to lose some of it. Basically, there's 2 ways to tackle the endgame. Either you pull big guns and storm everyone's face, pile up on XP and raid Zigs, or you sneak in and steal the runes. I think this spell would be more appropriate for the second playstyle. And it would still kill some monsters, distortion deals plenty of damage. We can lower its level too. I don't think it would be balance to have a high irresistible damage AoE spell in a school which has already a lot of utility spells.

I don't really see the advantage of vertices instead of normal clouds. I don't think we have any multi-cell entity in the code right now, so implementing them will be a lot of work. If they all start clustered together and then spread, the effect would be almost the same if we use clouds and individually spread and dissipate them by cell.

[Galefury]

Having some coherent vortices would be new and interesting. There are already a lot of regular cloud spells in the game.

It could work a bit like herd AI, but would be more complicated due to the adjacency requirement. Each vortex part can be a leader or a follower who is assigned to a specific leader. The leaders move first, then when the other vortex parts move they have to move to a tile adjacent to another vortex tile with the same leader, biased to go towards their leader. If this is impossible the vortex part disappears. Also a base chance for a vortex part to disappear instead of move (leader can only disappear once the other parts are gone). It might be somewhat complicated to code, but this doesn't require a true multi-cell entity.

Another cool and unusual aoe shape for a distortion cloud would be breath weapon shaped. Line of single cell clouds, plus a big cloud at the impact point. With distortion being as dangerous as it is I think this could be cool, creating lines of clouds that you cant easily move through, reducing tactical options if you cast too many. Cblink mitigates this a bit, but casting it has a cost.

[RFHolloway]

Some quick thoughts for highish level Tloc skills

an area affect teleport other - would be good for clearing paths to staris if they have got swarmed, or to some other object. Would also scatter enemies so that they could be picked off one by one.

Create rift - single square effect with a duration (long but probably not perminant) that would function like a teleport trap. - could seal yourself up in a dead end, or block off persuit.

[mumra]

I'm not saying that XP becomes useless when you can cast L9 spell, just that it's not a big deal to lose some of it. Basically, there's 2 ways to tackle the endgame. Either you pull big guns and storm everyone's face, pile up on XP and raid Zigs, or you sneak in and steal the runes. I think this spell would be more appropriate for the second playstyle. And it would still kill some monsters, distortion deals plenty of damage. We can lower its level too. I don't think it would be balance to have a high irresistible damage AoE spell in a school which has already a lot of utility spells.

The sneaky approach is definitely in keeping with the Translocations school. I think where it could be frustrating is if you'd blasted a tough unique down to nearly dead and suddenly they got banished so you get nothing, not even their kit. Also mass-banishment could perhaps make some situations too easy Lowering the level too much would also defeat the idea of giving Translocations something worth training for. I felt it fitted in the level 9 bracket primarily because it parallels with the other stormy high-level spells in terms of size and impressiveness; if this was even just level 8, what on earth would a level 9 Tloc look like?

I don't really see the advantage of vertices instead of normal clouds. I don't think we have any multi-cell entity in the code right now, so implementing them will be a lot of work. If they all start clustered together and then spread, the effect would be almost the same if we use clouds and individually spread and dissipate them by cell.

Having some coherent vortices would be new and interesting. There are already a lot of regular cloud spells in the game.

This was my thinking - something to give it a totally unique character, appropriate to the very different school of Tloc. And maybe the idea of "order within chaos" describes the behaviour as well. Also, from a gameplay perspective, I think the grouped clouds can have more tactical usage and be slightly more predictable / avoidable for the caster than single clouds.

It could work a bit like herd AI, but would be more complicated due to the adjacency requirement. Each vortex part can be a leader or a follower who is assigned to a specific leader. The leaders move first, then when the other vortex parts move they have to move to a tile adjacent to another vortex tile with the same leader, biased to go towards their leader. If this is impossible the vortex part disappears. Also a base chance for a vortex part to disappear instead of move (leader can only disappear once the other parts are gone). It might be somewhat complicated to code, but this doesn't require a true multi-cell entity.

I hadn't really thought of it like herds, but yes that's possibly the closest thing right now.

The algorithm I'd started to develop in my head goes something like this:

- A vortex consists of cloud tiles A,B,C,D
- Cloud A is about to move
- Get valid destinations; these are any tiles within a 1 tile distance of B,C or D, that do not already contain a vortex cloud
- For each destination, assign a weighting factor: e.g. 10 for a floor tile; 6 for a rock wall; 3 for a stone wall; 1 for a metal wall; 0 for unnaturally hard or otherwise unmovable.
- Weighting factors are then adjusted based on the direction the destination lies from Cloud A. When the vortex was created, the direction factor was assigned based on its location from the epicenter. So multiply each weight by: 1.5 for preferred direction; 1 for tangential direction; 0.66 for opposite direction.
- Now you can normalise the weights into an array and pick a random number from 0..1 to select the final destination. So there will be a tendency to move away from the epicentre and squish up against walls, but sometimes the clouds might move into walls, and the vortex will stick together at all times because those are the only valid destinations. When the vortex stars dissipating each cloud can start using its own adjacent tiles as valid targets, and maybe change the directional factor a little so the clouds will drift apart.

That's the idea anyway. It doesn't seem too complicated, but it's clearly all new code. I'm tempted to start digging through the source and have a bash myself; but I mostly program C# these days and it's a long time since I've taken a real look at any C++, so that idea is slightly intimidating

Another cool and unusual aoe shape for a distortion cloud would be breath weapon shaped. Line of single cell clouds, plus a big cloud at the impact point. With distortion being as dangerous as it is I think this could be cool, creating lines of clouds that you cant easily move through, reducing tactical options if you cast too many. Cblink mitigates this a bit, but casting it has a cost.

Could also be interesting and in my mind this might fit something more like a level 7/8 spell. I don't know if the tile swapping would be as fun with the cloud just staying in one place

an area affect teleport other - would be good for clearing paths to staris if they have got swarmed, or to some other object. Would also scatter enemies so that they could be picked off one by one.

Isn't that already called "Dispersal"?

Create rift - single square effect with a duration (long but probably not perminant) that would function like a teleport trap. - could seal yourself up in a dead end, or block off persuit.

There's a balancing problem with this in that it could be seriously abused with cTele. I've already seen discussions about teleport traps themselves being way too abusable in some situations

[galehar]

On second thought, clouds with distortion effect sounds a bit too good to get rid of Hell and Pan Lords with little risk. Let's keep the distortion effect to the weapon brand.

[XuaXua]

On second thought, clouds with distortion effect sounds a bit too good to get rid of Hell and Pan Lords with little risk. Let's keep the distortion effect to the weapon brand.

I wouldn't think such powerful demons to be affected by dimensional distortion.

[Bim]

Yeah I don't think it would be that much of a nerf to distortion if Hell/pan lords were immune to banishment/some distortion effects, in fact, I think it'd add quite a nice flavour to it!

[galehar]

The only reason to get rid of Pan and Hell lords is bragging rights, and you won't get those without actually killing them.

For now. What if they come after you during the orb run if you steal their rune?

[mumra]

I'd have thought that something high up in Pan or Hell isn't going to be the slightest bit worried about the Abyss.

How about if you try to banish them, they deflect that banishment back at you instead?

I did actually started looking at crawl source last night. Galehar was of course right that implementation would be a lot of work

The problem isn't that there aren't multi-cell entities already; in fact there are - Kraken and Eldritch Tentacle are both multi-cell, implemented as individual cell monsters that are aware of each other and move in coordination.

The difficulty is that it to implement as clouds it would require special-case coding in a most of clouds.cc and possibly elsewhere; and handling other issues like clouds overwriting each other. But implementing as monster tiles wouldn't work because two monsters can't be on the same tile. So it'd need either a whole new grid which would clearly not be acceptable just for one spell; or some rethinking it in general. Maybe a "leader" monster per Galefury's suggestion, which would spawn short-lived clouds around it. But it's certainly not pretty whatever way it could be done, and the implementation does makes me doubt whether this is a viable spell at all.

[KoboldLord]

The only reason to get rid of Pan and Hell lords is bragging rights, and you won't get those without actually killing them.

For now. What if they come after you during the orb run if you steal their rune?

Then you Controlled Blink past them, just like you did the first time you met them. Or Haste up and head for one of the other two stairwells on the level, an option you didn't have or need last time, given that you're doing the Orb Run now.

[galehar]

The only reason to get rid of Pan and Hell lords is bragging rights, and you won't get those without actually killing them.

For now. What if they come after you during the orb run if you steal their rune?

Then you Controlled Blink past them, just like you did the first time you met them. Or Haste up and head for one of the other two stairwells on the level, an option you didn't have or need last time, given that you're doing the Orb Run now.

No ctele with the orb (marvinpa very recent change). Yes, you could escape them a second time, but you never know which one is going to show up and when. You could even have the bad luck of meeting 2 of them at the same time. You could continue stealing the runes, but it would be more dangerous. And it would give you a reason to kill them the first time, because you could prepare properly for it and be safer on the orb run.