The Tavern

Most wands can be replicated with other existing kinds of items; witness:

Iceblast - buff exploding tomahawks
Digging - make exploding tomahawks dig tiles adjacent to the center of the blast
Disintegration - cool and elegant, so much so that it should be a spammable rod
Enslavement - frenzy needles exist and are more awesome in every way
Confusion - confusion needles exist
Slowing - curare needles exist

Heal wounds, tele, and hasting copy existing consumables.

That leaves Acid, Lightning, Flame, Polymorph, and Random Effects. That's not enough to warrant the existence of wands as a broad category of items, and some people don't like these effects anyway. Maybe keep one, and it will be a wand - the only wand. Probably Polymorph, if the effect is made less problematic, or perhaps Acid.

Wands are friggin lame-o. Who feels awesome flicking a wand around? Let's regard wands as an unfortunate legacy of the follow-the-leader development that birthed Crawl.

Pakellas may need to drop more rods again, if he still feels like sticking around.

Evo nerf!

disintegration - you throw your explosive tomahawk really hard
enslavement - "wow dude give me one of those exploding tomahawks and we can totally hang out"
confusion - "exploding tomahawk? wtf were they thinking?"
slowing - sometimes your exploding tomahawks injure enemies' feet/wings/whatever, but it renegerates fast because lolcrawl

By the same logic we could eliminate all those things that you mentioned that are not wands. Also we could eliminate most spells, and monsters, and for that matter most branches.

As far as wands "not being badass enough" we have an entire generation brought up on the badass-ness of wand-flicking (whether you are part of it, and/or buy into such nonsense is immaterial)

Also having some duplication actually allows for different types of character focus's lending towards game variation. For any given thing that is duplicated in the game, that requires some kind of training, there's a different *set* of capabilities that go with it, perhaps that's not done as well as it could be, but that's literally the thing that makes crawl interesting enough to play several thousand times, that you can combine different abilities, items, and effects and cobble together a set that works.

Yeah, just remove everything. Then everything is balanced! And stairdancing is gone!

That's a really good point, Siegurt. Replayability is increased when there are different playstyles. There are only so many ways of damaging enemies, and replicating them in different ways is fine. Evocations does a different set of damages from God A, which does a different set of damages from Ice Magiks, etc. Furthermore, you have to play them differently. Ice Magiks can run out of mana, God powers out of piety, and Evo out of charges. Both piety and charges are more stable than mana, but mana can be regened for free. Evo is more dependent on loot, etc.

Yes, overlap of Heal Wounds, Hasting, Teleportation is unfortunate. They could be removed. (Potions of haste could be made slightly more common, in compensation... Or not.) I think an argument can be made for "just six wands" based on that, even if our mummy fans will wince in horror at the suggestion of losing all access to HW and non-spell fast.

However, I would point out that those three wands are not what makes evocations skill too strong. (I do think one can make a case that those items are too good in general, but they are almost as useful at evocations 0 as they are at evocations 27!)

Nor are wands in general the item that is making evocations skill too strong. Rods, elemental evocables, sacks of spiders, etc. are the real culprits there.

Removing all wands would be a mistake. Learning how and when to use them is fun, in my experience, and at least in the early and often mid-game, using wand charges judiciously tends to be a non-trivial decision. Rods and elemental evocables are significantly less interesting, frankly.

I do think that one could make the case for the following suite of changes, though, as well: Wands of one type always generate with some standard number of charges and are fully IDed on pick up; having wands of the same type add their charge together; scrolls of recharging are made rarer, if not removed; no maximum number of charges.

You'll render a God totally useless this way... And I think wands are awesome, actually, I've won my first time wth a Deep Dwarf of Pakellas (dunno how to properly write his/her name) that spammed wands like a bitch.

let's recap:
Siegurt claims that training evo is not as interesting unless it lets you blast or hex monsters damn hard with common but limited items. (I think; with Siegurt, you never know, he could be simply musing.)
jwoodward48ss takes the opportunity to note that OP encroaches upon the Needle Stabber build (which is almost entirely restricted to a specialized subset of Trog/Oka worshippers).
and into wants to wands to remain, but is willing to change everything about them that makes them different from throwable missiles, except which skill they use, and felids.
yesno makes me buy a new keyboard.
a new guy thinks that infinite wands is an essential feature to keep in the game.

I don't have much to add at the moment.

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:let's recap:
Siegurt claims that training evo is not as interesting unless it lets you blast or hex monsters damn hard with common but limited items. (I think; with Siegurt, you never know, he could be simply musing.)

That isn't what i said at all, it isn't even remotely close to a synopsis.

manolao wrote:You'll gender a rod totally useless this way...

Sorry, couldn't resist.

On topic, I agree with removal of hasting/healing/teleportation wands. The potions/scrolls achieve that better.
Evocations probably do too much, for one single skill with so many applications... the evokables are cool, hopefully someone comes up with a fun nerf.

Make wand effects change with evo, that way you can bring back wand of fire/cold/magic darts/etc without having to add new ones. For example flame has a chance to zap fire bolt based on evo, darts disintegrate, frost cold bolts, yada yada... This is a crude proposal but the basic idea is to keep a narrow number of wands while keeping the number of wand effects, this also makes zero evo wands less useful.

Too many wands in the game, both in kind and raw number, but the other proposal is much better than this, which is at best a comment on the other thread.

Strong candidate for Yiufanasia.

Siegurt wrote:That isn't what i said at all, it isn't even remotely close to a synopsis.

well, Siegurt, I don't know then! Your whole post reads like a complaint or rebuttal, in particular regarding removing an available skill+effect set (which is plainly: blasting and hexing):

Siegurt wrote:By the same logic we could eliminate all those things that you mentioned that are not wands. Also we could eliminate most spells, and monsters, and for that matter most branches.

As far as wands "not being badass enough" we have an entire generation brought up on the badass-ness of wand-flicking (whether you are part of it, and/or buy into such nonsense is immaterial)

Also having some duplication actually allows for different types of character focus's lending towards game variation. For any given thing that is duplicated in the game, that requires some kind of training, there's a different *set* of capabilities that go with it, perhaps that's not done as well as it could be, but that's literally the thing that makes crawl interesting enough to play several thousand times, that you can combine different abilities, items, and effects and cobble together a set that works.

it would help if you spelled out what you mean as it relates to the thread, otherwise it just looks like food for thought.

jwoodward48ss wrote:Oh yeah, I just basically killed Pakellas. Sucks to be you, right? Maybe drop more rods? Of course, that'll be hell to balance, but who cares?

That's funny, I originally wrote "Pakellas may need to drop more rods, which would be easier to balance anyway", but I edited it out to reduce wordiness and because I thought it was obvious.

Solution is to remove needles, which have a much more annoying interface, and replace wand of enslavement with wand of frenzy.

Heh, I like your thinking. But why remove duplicates? They're fine.

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:it would help if you spelled out what you mean as it relates to the thread, otherwise it just looks like food for thought.
.

I made 3 points:
1. Your stated functional reasoning (deduplication) doesnt support your proposed solution, it is general enough that it can equally be used to support the opposite conclusion.

2. Your stated flavor reason (not powerful feeling) is both subjective and counter to a fairly obvious popular meme.

3. Your premise (duplication is automatically bad and should be removed) is flawed from a game design point of view.

I stupid removed more jokes, let's stay on topic in GDD, please.

I can't exactly follow points 1 and 3, Siegurt, not in how they manifest for wands. I didn't think out my premises.

phloomp wrote:needles have a much more annoying interface

much more? I can think of 3 needle-related interface annoyances:
1. needing to wield a blowgun
2. ammo not always mulching
3. you can miss (therefore your chance of success = chance of hitting x chance of beating HD/MR, which is more complicated)
1-2 are easy to change, 3 would be harder to justify (tho maybe just buffing their accuracy would suffice). I'd like to know the contribution of annoyance from each of these factors and whether I'm missing something.

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:I can't exactly follow points 1 and 3, Siegurt, not in how they manifest for wands.

You started with:

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:Most wands can be replicated with other existing kinds of items;

That's what I gathered was one of your reasons for wanting to remove wands, implicit in this statement are two assumptions that I refer to in points 1 and 3:
1. That the places where wand effects are duplicated would be better served by the removal of wands (Rather than the removal of the non wand portion of the duplication)
and
2. Removal of redundant items is automatically a net gain.

The other justification for removal of wands I see in your initial argument is:

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:Wands are friggin lame-o. Who feels awesome flicking a wand around?

which is the "flavor" justification I refer to in my second point.

In short, you made the point that we *could* remove wands, but you haven't made a successful argument that we *should* do so (Although you've made some statements that sort of try to vaguely give a rationale)

So if that's not your justification for why we should remove wands, what is it? Why do you think the game would be better without wands?

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:
phloomp wrote:needles have a much more annoying interface

much more? I can think of 3 needle-related interface annoyances:
1. needing to wield a blowgun
2. ammo not always mulching
3. you can miss (therefore your chance of success = chance of hitting x chance of beating HD/MR, which is more complicated)
1-2 are easy to change, 3 would be harder to justify (tho maybe just buffing their accuracy would suffice). I'd like to know the contribution of annoyance from each of these factors and whether I'm missing something.

4. using the quiver menu to change needle type

I would say the distribution is 30-30-10-30 in that order.

4. "using the quiver menu to change needle type"

Are you joking at me? The quiver is a completely optional interface feature, without which, you'd have to choose needles in exactly the same way that you choose wands. But thanks for the helpful reply. (I did suggest removing quiver.)

and yeah, as for the Harry Potter thing, the wands there are deeply flavored and custom, and are used to enable spellcasting, somewhat like Crawl's staves but more so. Crawl was released at about the same time as the first HP book. I'm pretty sure it had no influence on Crawl. I do think that a nasty and gritty feel befits Crawl, and it's hard to fit wands into that aesthetic, especially when there's a wide assortment of the things and especially when some are junk. A few hardcore wands, tho, say some version of digging, polymorph and acid, now that's a different story!

Siegurt wrote:the places where wand effects are duplicated would be better served by the removal of wands (Rather than the removal of the non wand portion of the duplication)

yes, I just didn't think proving this was appropriate. Evo is overstuffed and no-one knows what its design space is supposed to be, there's too much wand spam available, etc.

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:I do think that a nasty and gritty feel befits Crawl

Crawl, the game with double swords, yaktaurs, killer klowns, and death cobs?

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:yes, I just didn't think proving this was appropriate. Evo is overstuffed and no-one knows what its design space is supposed to be, there's too much wand spam available, etc.

I think it's definitely fair to say that Evo has a greater breadth of mechanics and effects than any other single skill within a given game, sure. And I get the impression that lots of people think that "overstuffed" is a fair assessment, though the removal of cards from random generation cuts down on that significantly imo. It could do with some judicious pruning.

I wouldn't say nobody understands the design space; Evo's a "use magic item" skill for items that should require investment to use properly. Are there too many magic items like this? Almost definitely. I like most of them individually, but there sure are a bunch of them, and the limiting factor that's supposed to provide the trade-off here (stricter/different limits on use than weapons/spells) is applied very inconsistently.

Mechanically, I think rods (and some randart staves) are the real outliers, and that wands/evokers/boxes/bags/balls/mirrors all at least can be e(v)oked like one (r)eads scrolls or (q)uaffs potions. I would prefer collapsing rods and wands and then pruning from there, personally; the interface cost of using rods frustrates me, though if Lasty ever gets around to ranged reform they might work as something you could put in your ranged weapon slot.

Honestly didn't occur to me that you don't need to use the quiver menu for needles. Insofar as discoverability is part of interface design, this supports my case that needles have a worse interface. I am only 40% being sarcastic.

The Tavern

Just zero wands

Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands

Re: Just zero wands