Qazlal Tweaks

[infinitevox]

I had a god idea I was working on, with a very heavy elemental theme, but it became abundantly apparent that the conduct I think it requires will be considered far too tedious for most players.
Instead, I'm taking duvessa's advice and formally proposing a couple Qazlal changes based on some of those abilities:

...it'd make Qazlal less awful.

Qazlal God Abilities
Piety(......): Cloud Immunity - No change

Piety(*.....): Storm Shield - No change

Piety(**....): Upheaval - No change

Piety(***...):
- Old: Elemental Force (active, MP/piety) - Turn elemental clouds around you in Elementals
+ New: Force of Nature (active, MP/moderate piety/food) - You can instantly teleport to an elemental cloud. This consumes the cloud. You also passively leave an elemental cloud behind whenever you blink/tele. (Blink Range, in tiles = Piety Level)

Piety(****..): Elemental Adaptation (passive) - No change

Piety(*****.): Disaster Area (active, MP/piety) - No change

Piety(******):
+ New Elemental Avatar (passive) - As a one-time ability, Qazlal will brand your attacks with a random element for as long as you worship Qazlal. This brand applies to unarmed attacks, and stacks with weapon brands.

• Elemental Avatar, Option 1 - You choose the element you want, your attacks are always branded with the chosen element: (flaming, freezing, electrocution, crushing/vorpal/piercing/etc)
• Elemental Avatar, Option 2 - Your element is random and ever-changing, each time you attack you randomly get a different element

I would like to punch things with electric fists please.

[Tiktacy]

Force of nature is a great idea, way more interesting than just giving you allies, and unarmed branded combat under a god ability is something I've wanted to see for a long time. I like option 2 way better than option 1 though.

[Siegurt]

What if you got a short term elemental charge from the cloud you jumped.

[andreas]

A very minor note, but please don't have the final ability require going to an altar to activate it. Just let it be an ability that is available by pressing a.

[infinitevox]

Force of nature is a great idea, way more interesting than just giving you allies, and unarmed branded combat under a god ability is something I've wanted to see for a long time. I like option 2 way better than option 1 though.

Maybe I should nip it in the bud and just combine the two; allow "random" as a selection to Option 1.
That would keep everyone happy I think.

What if you got a short term elemental charge from the cloud you jumped.

Not entirely sure what you mean... care to extrapolate?
Something like an elemental version of the Spines mutation?

A very minor note, but please don't have the final ability require going to an altar to activate it. Just let it be an ability that is available by pressing a.

Done. Not sure what I was thinking, as praying at altars for god abilities was fixed a while ago iirc :p

[Siegurt]

What if you got a short term elemental charge from the cloud you jumped.

Not entirely sure what you mean... care to extrapolate?
Something like an elemental version of the Spines mutation?

No sorry i meant for your branded attack override top end ability, rather than it giving you a passive random brand or a pre set brand, it would give you a short term branding whenever you teleported to a cloud, of that clouds elemental type "your <foo> is surrounded by the clouds of <element>"

[infinitevox]

Oooooohh, I gotcha. That would be pretty neat!
Would give you some semblance of control over your branded element. Would also give a taste of neat elemental brands on demand.
(Would it stack with your ****** ability if your weapon is unbranded though? hrmm.......)

Do you think it would detract from the ****** ability though? Stepping on toes?
Also what about code complexity? I don't know how difficult it would be to juggle the brands like that :p
I'll have to dig through the code when I get home and see how that stuff works.

[Siegurt]

Oooooohh, I gotcha. That would be pretty neat!
Would give you some semblance of control over your branded element. Would also give a taste of neat elemental brands on demand.
(Would it stack with your ****** ability if your weapon is unbranded though? hrmm.......)

Do you think it would detract from the ****** ability though? Stepping on toes?
Also what about code complexity? I don't know how difficult it would be to juggle the brands like that
I'll have to dig through the code when I get home and see how that stuff works.

I was suggesting it replace the top level ability (like your top end ability is to upgrade the teleport to cloud ability so that it adds branding)

In terms of code complexity, my suggestion is no more complicated than either of your top end ones, (i mean ever so slightly, since you have to look at the type of cloud before you remove it)

The real challenge is actually stacking brands in the way you are thinking, since brands don't actually stack like that (really you would just make a different thing that appeared to stack like brands, but actually functioned more like infuse, which would be easier to control and balance anyway, i would likely make it invocation dependant damage, were i the one doing it)

[genericpseudonym]

The "cblink into a cloud" ability seems to go from moderately good with just qaz clouds (which are mostly within 2 range of the player) to absurdly OP with access to some kind of cloud spell/rod.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

what exactly do you mean genericpseudonym

cloud spells are level 6 and triple-school and don't go to the edge of LOS without manipulation

cblink is level 8 and single-school

rod of clouds has limited range

cflame is barely out of Qazcloud range

and unlike cblink, you spend at least a turn creating the cloud, without moving anywhere

cblink doesn't cost piety or make a ton of noise every turn, and it displaces you immediately

that leaves just one spell that becomes even more problematic (mephitic cloud)

PoG is a level 4 single-school spell that is at least as reliable as "cblink into a cloud"

[duvessa]

also you'd have to be worshipping qazlal to get it

you know, the god with what is probably the most crippling drawback (constant noise) of any god in the game

[Tiktacy]

also you'd have to be worshipping qazlal to get it

you know, the god with what is probably the most crippling drawback (constant noise) of any god in the game

You aren't honestly suggesting he has worse drawbacks than chei are you? Or Xom?

Granted, he still gets the bronze medal, which is still pretty bad.

[duvessa]

i am suggesting exactly that, yes

[andreas]

cflame is barely out of Qazcloud range

But this means that if cflame is what you have for generating clouds, you're incentivized to set it up before the battle, so that it is at the edge of LOS when you're fighting.

What you ought to do is set the flame up beforehand at what you expect will be the edge of your LOS when you're fighting. So whenever you think you're about to get into a fight (e.g., you're about to open a door, or enter a new room or vault, or your antennae tip you off), you should back up, cast cflame, and then walk forward to get the enemy into LOS.

It's really bad because most of the time these shenanigans won't even matter, because jumping back one or two spaces is usually good enough to escape stuff, so you might as well just jump to your Qazlal cloud. But occasionally, in reasonably common and dangerous scenarios, it may matter. For example, you might find that your anticipated enemy turns out to be something fast and scary like centaurs, bees, or a black mamba, or one of those might enter LOS while you're fighting (say, attracted by the noise), and it really would be better to jump back as far as possible away from them. These are some of the most dangerous things in the early game, so an advantage in this case is not trivial.

You might compare setting up passages of golubria before tough battles, although this case is probably worse because conjure flame's range limitation makes the task more fiddly.

This isn't really about power level (I guess duvessa just answered that problem), but about incentivizing an unfun but non-trivial way for players to buff themselves pre-battle.

[TeshiAlair]

If we're avoid tedium in crawl, we should probably remove Spriggans and Centaurs. This is far less irritating than kiting all game/

[andreas]

We should shape our proposals with avoiding tedium as one goal. Perhaps we should remove spriggans and centaurs. But this thread is about something else.

I am not saying that this problem with the blink ability couldn't be fixed, by the way; I am flagging a problem worth seeing if we can fix. And if it turns out we can't, maybe the god is fun enough that it's worth putting up with it. But it does seem like a drawback to the proposed ability as given.

[infinitevox]

I understand questioning things in the development stage, instead of the implementation stage, but I really thing that you're a little too worried about something that won't be a problem.

There are a couple things that you may have overlooked:
- It takes 2 turns to execute the blink most of the time.
- The piety cost on the ability will keep you from being able to setup an escape cloud for every fight, unless you're running amulet of faith
- At the piety level where you'll have access to the blink ability, Qazlal
will be causing you to generate so much noise, that even if you did setup a cloud prior to fights, you'll be surrounded again very quickly.
- If you're using the blink ability as much as you think people will, then you'll really never have enough piety to use Disaster Radius, which is one of the primary reasons for worshipping Qazlal

I mean really, how much different escape-mechanism wise, would this be from Lug's Enter the Abyss ability? That one is also instant AND completely removes you from the level.

[andreas]

... I really thing that you're a little too worried about something that won't be a problem.

Sure, maybe! I would try it if I were a --FE^Qaz, or a hybridized character that found the Book of Flames on the floor. Maybe it won't work as well as I am guessing, though.

There are a couple things that you may have overlooked:
- It takes 2 turns to execute the blink most of the time.

I don't understand this one? If you set up the cloud beforehand, it takes you one turn to blink away, no? (One turn in the actual fight, which is when it matters.) This is the same as if you blink to a Qazlal cloud that spontaneously formed around you?

- The piety cost on the ability will keep you from being able to setup an escape cloud for every fight, unless you're running amulet of faith

I thought the blinking cost piety. It costs no piety to cast conjure flame, though. It costs mp and nutrition, and some characters will not want to spend the mp, but some may.

- At the piety level where you'll have access to the blink ability, Qazlal
will be causing you to generate so much noise, that even if you did setup a cloud prior to fights, you'll be surrounded again very quickly.

This might be right; I don't have experience with Qazlal, and I'm totally prepared to defer to people who do. But a priori ''you get surrounded really fast'' seems to me like a reason to be more concerned with having quick escape options out of the scrum, not less. Notice that ''escape'' in this context might just mean warping to more favorable terrain, like a hallway or something. (This is one part of why Qazlal is the god of stairdancing, no?)

- If you're using the blink ability as much as you think people will, then you'll really never have enough piety to use Disaster Radius, which is one of the primary reasons for worshipping Qazlal

The worry isn't that people will blink a lot. It's that people have an incentive to often be setting up the blink by casting conjure flame before fights, in case they need to use the blink ability. A cautious player might end up setting up the escape very often without actually using it very often.

I mean really, how much different escape-mechanism wise, would this be from Lug's Enter the Abyss ability? That one is also instant AND completely removes you from the level.

The difference I am concerned with is that Lug's ability doesn't give you incentive to set anything up before fights, but this ability does. For Lug you just train invocations and use the ability if you're in trouble. The worry is not about the power of the suggested ability, but that it opens up the door to tedious manipulation of clouds through spells prior to battles.

(It would fix my complaint entirely if you could only blink to Qazlal clouds, but this might be too fiddly, and annoying from an interface perspective.)

EDIT: Probably I wasn't blunt enough before: I do think instantly and relatively cheaply teleporting to clouds is a cool idea, that taking advantage of your randomized Qazlal clouds to reposition would be fun, and that especially combined with the proposed peak ability it has a ton of flavor. I would rather save the idea than abandon it; I'm just not sure what the solution is.

[ydeve]

You could make it so you can only blink to clouds of dust. Spells don't make those. Would be a bit weird though.

[infinitevox]

I see what you're saying :p
Honestly, I'm in the camp of, If someone wants to play extremely tediously, let 'em. How they play their game is none of my concern so long as nothing is broken.
What we could do to fix the potential tediousness of the ability, is to limit the range at (***...) and increase it with piety till you have full LoS at (******).
This way you can only play the super tedious way once you've hit max piety.
Using the most tedious play possible, you're also looking at an opportunity cost of ~6mp, 300-400 nutrition, and a moderate amount of piety (making some assumptions on the numerical costs of FoN)

If people call him the king of stairdancing, it's only because you hit a point very quickly, where you're getting swarmed and need to make a quick exit
I generally refer to Qazlal as the king of hallways, as that gives my Disaster Radius a lot more Ooomph.
One of the coolest things I've done with Qazlal, is go to V:5, blink to favorable terrain, read !immolation, then cast Disaster Radius once and watch the entire screen explode. It works extremely well with Qaz because of the noise generation, it draws all the monsters to your little death-hole.

[crate]

Honestly, I'm in the camp of, If someone wants to play extremely tediously, let 'em. How they play their game is none of my concern so long as nothing is broken.

That's ok if you are the one making your own game, but this is expressly contradicting crawl's design philosophy so when discussing crawl design you have to care about this stuff.

[andreas]

I see what you're saying :p
Honestly, I'm in the camp of, If someone wants to play extremely tediously, let 'em. How they play their game is none of my concern so long as nothing is broken.

In addition to what crate said:

I said I would try doing this if I had a --FE^Qaz or whatever. I'm not insane---I don't mean I would do this before every battle, but before projected tough fights or when I am about to transition into bad terrain. Just as no one (?) cast Phase Shift before every fight, but most people saved it for the ones where you couldn't just hold down tab, so I would treat this tactic.

But then say I misjudge, and don't prep when I should have, and die as a result. Then I get to think to myself that I could have lived if I had just been a little less lazy. That feels awful!

So here is at least one reason why play that promotes winning and play that isn't really unpleasant to do should line up, where they can. It is not just abstract, but about how actual players will experience the game, even when they're not playing in a extremely tedious or scummy way. They will feel torn between the goals of winning and having fun.

[infinitevox]

Right, right. Makes sense.

Lemme throw this out there then:
It's been my experience that anything but a super-tank character who worships Qazlal ends up a super-dead character very quickly. Flimsy casters, even with high EV, have an extremely difficult time standing up against what seems like an unrelenting stream of noise generated bad guys.
So it's extremely plausible, that the possible tedious play won't even be an issue, because Crawl will "take care of that" for us :p

Other than my anecdotal evidence, what you you guys think of scaling the range of the ability with piety?

*Edit*
I was just thinking... I don't know if it's possible, but what if you could only blink to "full power" clouds?

[duvessa]

Yes, we know Qazlal is terrible already. You acknowledged it in the first post. This doesn't "take care of" grindy play.

[CanOfWorms]

Right, right. Makes sense.

Lemme throw this out there then:
It's been my experience that anything but a super-tank character who worships Qazlal ends up a super-dead character very quickly. Flimsy casters, even with high EV, have an extremely difficult time standing up against what seems like an unrelenting stream of noise generated bad guys.

I've played a SpEn of Qazlal. It was pretty fun.

[andreas]

Here's a simple idea to adjust the force of nature ability, if infinitevox is still interested in this proposal.

As an amendment to the storm shield passive ability, Qazlal followers no longer spontaneously spawn clouds as they walk around. Instead they spawn something else. We'll come up with a name later, it doesn't matter much; for the moment call them ''elemental surges'' or just ''surges.'' They get a new symbol, and they get some new flavor in their description that works to distinguish them from clouds and associate them uniquely with Qazlal, but also to make it clear that they are a similar sort of thing as clouds. Ideally their glyph and tile is also sort of similar to the glyph and tile for clouds. These things can be hammered out further if everything makes sense from a gameplay perspective.

The key point is that surges and Qazlal's clouds as they are now can have all the same mechanics, with the exception that Qazlal's new force of nature ability only allows you to blink to surges, not clouds. This can be flavored as Qazlal allowing you to interact in a special way with the surges that *he* is gifting to you. (After all, Qazlal is not sovereign over every elemental cloud; he already does not make you immune to naturally occurring clouds or enemy generated clouds.)

(The problems about cheese come about because the proposed ability interacts with other ways the game provides to manipulate clouds. So just separate the ability from those other ways. The reason I could see for not restricting the blink ability to the clouds generated from storm shield was that this would be confusing and hair-splitty for a lot of players. (''Why can't I blink to a cloud made by my rod of clouds? That's silly, a cloud is a cloud is a cloud.'') But that mechanical distinction between clouds and storm shield's clouds is much less confusing if there is a clear cosmetic difference as well; so let's just add a clear cosmetic difference.)

[infinitevox]

Oh I'm still interested in the proposal, I'm just sitting in the think tank :p

[HardboiledGargoyle]

Qazlal followers no longer spontaneously spawn clouds as they walk around. Instead they spawn ''surges.''

Qazlal's new force of nature ability only allows you to blink to surges, not clouds.

The ability to blink to any cloud - fog, translocational, miasma, steam, rain, whatever - is among the most interesting/promising aspects of the proposed ability.

Also, conjure flame doesn't last all that long. If you cast it before a probably-easy fight, and the enemy doesn't stand in the flame, the flame will go out before you start getting your ass kicked. IME.

If those spells actually pose a problem, would it not be acceptable for Qazlal to simply hate Conjure Flame and Mephitic Cloud? There would actually be a good reason to enforce this conduct, unlike e.g. Dith's Fire conduct.

Speaking of Dith, and assuming similar amount of paranoia, Dithites can summon a quokka and petrify it before going into a fight or opening a vault, every time. Is this THE PROBLEM with Shadow Step, one that must be cared about and solved before implementation? Do people really feel bad about not summoning and petrifying quokkas on a regular basis while following Dith?

[4Hooves2Appendages]

It might have been mentioned, but you could just restrict the range of the blink to 2-4 tiles. It would be similar in utility (-damage) to power leap then. It avoids the set-up-clouds-at-the-edge-los-problem.

[andreas]

Conjure flame can last up to 23 turns maximum, if the wiki is to be believed, beginning at 20 spellpower (3 pips) (but it is more probable with more spellpower).

I think it is an excellent idea to no longer allow shadow step to work on your own summoned creatures. (It may be niche enough not to deserve the effort to code the change, but that's not a problem for an ability that's not implemented yet.) It seems it would be in the spirit (if not necessarily the letter) of the change that made the ability no longer work on plants:

cc00329 | gammafunk | 2015-03-26 16:55:07 -0500

Don't allow Dith's shadow step to work on firewood
The intent of the ability is to sneak up on still, hostile threats, and
plants and fungi aren't a threat. It still works on stationary enemies
that do pose a threat, since those give xp and aren't classified as
firewood.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

That change was a controversial decision. Shadow stepping to firewood was significant.

So what you get out of that is that not allowing something nobody does anyway is an excellent idea? Okay. But it would be simpler and as effective to make Shadow Step work only on resting/dormant monsters, as opposed to monsters that are paralyzed or petrified or put to sleep, since if you can incapacitate a monster, surely you don’t need shadow step to kill it (though it may be better to buff Shadow Step instead: make it a silent Blink Close, and nerf/remove some other part of Dith, like bleeding fog.)

[Siegurt]

Also you can extend conjure flame's duration by casting it again....

[andreas]

So what you get out of that is that not allowing something nobody does anyway is an excellent idea? Okay. But it would be simpler and as effective to make Shadow Step work only on resting/dormant monsters ....

I don't know, perhaps so. Maybe make a thread about Dith if you are very concerned with his mechanics?

As for Qazlal's new ability, I think I have said plenty about what I take the problem to be, and why I take it to be a problem. It's okay with me if you value the importance of ruling out that sort of behavior differently, and so aren't convinced by what I said. Just be not convinced.

[infinitevox]

As for Qazlal's new ability, I think I have said plenty about what I take the problem to be, and why I take it to be a problem. It's okay with me if you value the importance of ruling out that sort of behavior differently, and so aren't convinced by what I said. Just be not convinced.

I'm bumping this thread after sitting and thinking on it a while
I've changed the suggestion, taking andreas' arguments into consideration, so that the blink range on the cloud hopping ability is now = piety level.
So (*.....) piety means you can blink up to 1 tile away, while (*****.) piety means you can blink up to 5 tiles away.

Further thoughts?
I'd offer to code a patch, but I've got enough projects on my plate at the moment :p

[andreas]

So what you get out of that is that not allowing something nobody does anyway is an excellent idea? Okay. But it would be simpler and as effective to make Shadow Step work only on resting/dormant monsters ....

I don't know, perhaps so. Maybe make a thread about Dith if you are very concerned with his mechanics?

As for Qazlal's new ability, I think I have said plenty about what I take the problem to be, and why I take it to be a problem. It's okay with me if you value the importance of ruling out that sort of behavior differently, and so aren't convinced by what I said. Just be not convinced.

Ugh, how ill-tempered of me. Sorry HBG!