Monday, 11th July 2011, 12:48 by Galefury
There is an entirely different view about useless high level skills held by some people, which I think is also valid: not every skill needs to be useful at high levels. Investing into something that is strong early and weak later is an interesting character development decision. This mostly applies to poison and to some extent to throwing, short blades and slings (if you don't find slaying), not to most weapon skills and T&D which just have diminishing returns at some point but stay very useful. Of course this part of character development requires knowledge of the late game, which can be seen as a problem.
About poison, assuming making it useful in late game is desired:
Add high level acid spells to the school? Interesting effects would be possible, like a high damage acid cloud that spreads and eats items, corpses and walls. Also the equipment destruction potential from acid spells could be interesting.
I think acid has a natural synergy with poison, both thematic and in gameplay. Equipped enemies rarely resist poison, while demons and most (all?) other enemies that resist poison come without equipment, meaning acid spells have no penalty against the enemies poison does not work against. Some enemies would need to get acid resistance of course, or damage could be lower than for frequently resisted elemental spells. So putting both poison and acid into the same school could be seen as bad (one school works against everything). But it would fix the poison school's uselessness at high levels. Adding acid as another element easily accessible by the player would require some balancing of course, and adding interesting new high level spells is a lot of work too.
Another option would be resist piercing like poison arrow has (still poisons resistant enemies, I'm not talking about the physical "arrow" component). Resist piercing Olgreb's Deadly Halo might be a nice level 7 or 8 spell. Poison's everything in LOS every turn, even resistant enemies, does not affect self, duration of around 20 turns. Kind of like a poisonous version of Tornado with lower damage and longer duration. Of course this has some of the same problems Tornado has.
About T&D:
I don't think Crawl is made for setting traps. It would work somewhat well with Ash, but having to scout first, then retreat when something dangerous turns up, then spend finite resources to create a trap and then lure the dangerous enemy into the trap just seems like an extremely tedious way to kill something before you normally could. Just blasting things with a wand avoids the tedium and is just as interesting, at least to me. Stuff like placing turrets based on the information announced to you to fend off a superior foe works well (the entire tower defense genre is built on that premise, and there are often scripted sequences in action games built around this). In situations that are not explicitly built around traps they always seem to facilitate AI abuse (BG2 is a prime example of a game with bad traps).
Making T&D more relevant is easy, just bump up frequency of dangerous traps in endgame and extended endgame areas or add new ones. Train it or get mutated, banished and killed by zot traps. Adding interesting new traps would be much better than just turning up frequency IMO.
Moving hell effects to a trap-like mechanic might be cool. It could work like this: hell effects do not immediately happen, instead a trigger area is placed randomly in LOS (connected area, somewhat irregular form, about 10 tiles total, possibly placed directly on the player, leading to an immediate effect). When you enter any of the affected tiles the effect goes off and the trigger area disappears. Next hell effect means a new trigger area is placed and the old one disappears. Effect frequency would have to be raised to compensate for the effect not always happening. High T&D could allow you to detect those areas (you sense a malignant aura), allowing you to walk around them.
Something like this could also be added to other areas with malignant powers, with lower frequency. Zot, the orb run and pan are all good candidates for this.
Tloc:
Raising CBlink to level 8 sounds okay. Maybe add an intermediate (level 6 or 7) semicontrolled blink spell that can be upgraded to controlled with ctele.
Weapons:
Doubled weapon speed means doubled damage for all weapons, regardless of base speed. So why should it be easier to reach min delay with lighter weapons than with heavier ones? Having some progression from lighter weapons to bigger ones with raising skill level is good, but I think it currently is a bit too steep. I think all weapons should reach min delay at skill level 20+, heavy ones at a higher level (20 plus min delay could work nicely). The speed progression should be fast at low levels, then slow down for higher ones.
Alternately keep it simple: all weapons reach min delay at a fixed level, and attack speed increases linearly with level. Increase the to hit gain with skill level, tie damage more closely to stats. The progression from light to heavy will be caused by lack of accuracy with large weapons at low skill levels.
Another problem in my opinion is that twohanded weapons are heavier than onehanded ones. The progression from light to heavy is also a progression from onehanded to twohanded, so if you use a shield (which most people do) there is no reason to train skills further. Making some onehanded weapons heavier and slower and some twohanded ones lighter and faster (without changes to damage and min delay) might work. This would give shield using chars something to train for (cant use that demon whip without high skill anymore) and make twohanded weapons a bit more attractive (you can start using them with lower skill). Decoupling min delay from base delay would open up some balancing possibilities by allowing direct tuning of the amount of skill a weapon needs without affecting endgame performance, but would make calculating delay more complicated. An overview of combat performance with various weapons in inventory (delay, damage, accuracy, this has come up in talk about making combat stats more transparent) would be necessary to make this work. Of course delay is not the only thing that could change, there are many weapon stats. I just think delay is a pretty natural fit because it is currently the stat that most affects how effective a weapon is at low skill.
Charms:
Charms is another skill that is frequently trained only to medium levels. Haste --> 7? High level charms other than Death's Door?