Remove blowguns

[Rast]

1. Remove blowguns. They are dumb.
2. Rename needles to darts, and make them throwable. 0 dam, 1.0 base delay, 0.7 min delay
3. Remove at least some of the hex needlesdarts, possible all of them. (paralysis, sleep, confusion, slow, and frenzy)

[duvessa]

4. Remove darts

[TonberryJam]

If anything blowguns are under powered. Ever been hit by a real poisoned needle? Dead in 3 seconds.

[ion_frigate]

Ever been hit by a real poisoned needle? Dead in 3 seconds.

Ever been stabbed by a real sword? Incapacitated in 3 seconds, dead in 3 minutes.

Any game that uses the "critical existence failure" model of health is going to be highly unrealistic. It turns out that more realistic models have a strong tendency to lead to unfun death spirals.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

^ to be fair, those death spirals are fun enough when applied to enemies, and Crawl's monsters are inconsistent from the player anyway

[genericpseudonym]

1. Remove blowguns. They are dumb.
2. Rename needles to darts, and make them throwable. 0 dam, 1.0 base delay, 0.7 min delay
3. Remove at least some of the hex needlesdarts, possible all of them. (paralysis, sleep, confusion, slow, and frenzy)

If you kept the debuff darts I would actually be in favor of this. Needing a blowgun to shoot needles used to be a balance thing when they could carry you to lair at 0 skill, but now that they actually require investment it matters less.

Would probably want to buff the Assassin start though.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

This is a good time to move all the needle/darts/whatever business over to the poison skill. Then the poison skill can become non-magic and influence stuff like the poison brand! Throwing is certainly strong enough without the added hexes.

[xbon]

if anything I support their removal for wanderers... having this as your primary weapon and spawning with no secondary weapon and only having 2 darts is pretty rough, gameplay wise I think they do serve a purpose... easy way to poison early game for one, but definitely underwhelming mid-late.