The Tavern

Hello, crawl world.



As some of you may be aware of, some time ago the Mass Confusion spell got removed in favor of Alistair's Intoxication; because having 2 spells that essentially do the same thing was kinda obsolete.
Since Alistair's was the more interesting of the two, it got to stay. So far, so good.

In the process, Alistair's got improved a little (only gives vertigo status instead of confusing yourself, no chance of draining int, chance to affect rPois enemies). It also got moved to level 5 from 4.

While this was a much appreciated step in the right direction, and despite my stong dislike for black/white thinking, for me the fact remains (after some testing) that...

...Alistair's is still a terrible spell. Not niche use, no secret Korean strategems, just flat out bad.

The main reasons for this are:

1. It's level 5 and 2 spell schools. Chances are you have to invest quite a bit of XP to get this running at reasonable power and percentage. The weird dead end combination of Tmut/Poison doesn't help things...
2. So many ifs and buts... first of all it CAN (no guarantee) affect ONLY enemies with human intelligence. Even lower chances if they have rPois.
3. So if somehow all planets aligned during a blood moon and you finally managed to make it work on a few enemies (with multiple casts)... the duration is CRIMINALLY low!
4. It makes your head spin round round which makes it hard to take full advantage of the few precious seconds you got.

Mass Confusion may have been boring and I can see why it was cut, but it was everything that Alistair's was not: simple and effective. I think Alistair's needs some love to become a worthy replacement.

Have a good day!

removeely

Edit: To be fair, I had a game where Alistair's was my only way to deal with some uniques that I otherwise had no means of defeating (or merely escaping), so props to that. But it was certainly not great having to rely on sheer luck to get out of a sticky situation either.

Edit 2: As to how to actually improve this, I think simply upping the % of afflicting enemies and especially the duration need to go up. The selection of valid victims is low enough to make it not OP imo.

Also change it it Hex/Poison instead of Tmut/Poison so the characters who are most interested in confusing things can actually use it relatively easily.

By the way there's no restriction to only humanoid enemies. It just requires that the target have human Intelligence (as opposed to animal or mindless).
I don't see why it shouldn't work on animal-intelligence enemies though... That's another place to potentially buff it.

Also, I just looked at the wiki article for Alistair's and it was awful. Some wiki editor misread the patchnotes and just find-replaced confusion with vertigo through the whole article. So that's fixed now, at least.

Thanks for pointing that out, I got confused. Perhaps by Alistair's.

Can DCSS please just euthanize the poison magic school? It's already comatose and only going to get worse.

Poison magic doesnt need AI when you have something better and easier to cast like meph.