Remove swiftness spell


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Post Monday, 15th August 2016, 16:54

Remove swiftness spell

Edit. Remove the spell instead.

Original version of the post.
Suggestion
Stairs cannot be used when having either Swiftness or penalty from Swiftness active.

Reasoning
Swiftness makes escaping via stairs too easy. You can walk 100+ tiles to stairs with adjacent monster, cast the spell 10 tiles away from stairs and be guaranteed the monster does not follow you.
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Post Monday, 15th August 2016, 16:56

Re: Disable swiftness + stairs combo

I thought that's the whole point of Swiftness.
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Post Monday, 15th August 2016, 16:58

Re: Disable swiftness + stairs combo

Sprucery wrote:I thought that's the whole point of Swiftness.


On-demand boots of running for everyone who goes for Repel Missiles anyway?

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Post Monday, 15th August 2016, 17:17

Re: Disable swiftness + stairs combo

But the monster did get to hit you when you cast swiftness, so it wasn't entirely free.

If you were going to eliminate being able to escape upstairs, you might as well eliminate the spell entirely...

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Post Monday, 15th August 2016, 17:22

Re: Disable swiftness + stairs combo

dowan wrote:But the monster did get to hit you when you cast swiftness, so it wasn't entirely free.

If you were going to eliminate being able to escape upstairs, you might as well eliminate the spell entirely...


99% monsters cannot one-shot PC and you can always get to 100% HP before casting swiftness. It even will happen naturally as you travel to stairs.

Yes, I would like to remove the spell, that would be another step in fixing kiting/luring/stairdancing. Its main use is too cheap IMHO, other uses like casting the spell to get to good position for fighting ugly things rarely happen.

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Post Monday, 15th August 2016, 17:28

Re: Disable swiftness + stairs combo

You should really just propose to remove the spell if you're going to nerf that hard.

I envision a lot of early game deaths by new players when they attempt, what in their minds was a brilliant strategy, swiftness2stairz. Only to encounter your vicious surprise nerf.

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Post Monday, 15th August 2016, 17:57

Re: Remove swiftness spell

You can already create a gap between you and the monster using that one weird weapon trick.

I don't see why swiftness is so different that it needs to be special cased to avoid this.

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Post Monday, 15th August 2016, 18:01

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Croases wrote:You can already create a gap between you and the monster using that one weird weapon trick.

I don't see why swiftness is so different that it needs to be special cased to avoid this.


That trick is not widely known (I didn't know about it during several years and still refuse to use it).

I don't see why we should keep bad things in the game with reason "other bad things are still in the game".

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Post Monday, 15th August 2016, 19:25

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Only if you reduce/remove lightning spell noise before that.
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Post Monday, 15th August 2016, 19:28

Re: Remove swiftness spell

I approve ;)

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Post Tuesday, 16th August 2016, 01:20

Re: Remove swiftness spell

The weapon swapping "trick" is pointless now that you can use randomized energy to get a gap.

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Post Tuesday, 16th August 2016, 13:40

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Weapon swapping is much more predictable than energy randomization of course.

There are many escape tools, why single out swiftness for removal? If you think Swiftness is too strong, then maybe its level should be increased.

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Post Tuesday, 16th August 2016, 13:44

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Increasing its level to 3 will achieve nothing because RMsl exists and I doubt devs will increase its level by 2.
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Post Tuesday, 16th August 2016, 13:47

Re: Remove swiftness spell

But the real problem is the way stairs work...
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Post Tuesday, 16th August 2016, 14:52

Re: Remove swiftness spell

It sounds like your objection boils down too "you can escape combat" or perhaps "you can escape combat without consumables" which isn't a problem specific to swiftness, all swiftness does is make it less tedious.

I mean honestly, blink accomplishes the same goal, but more powerfully, is it your contention that neither spell should exist? (What about cblink, haste, or even berserk)

There is no particular reason to single out swiftness, and I, personally, would not enjoy a game in which combat was inescapable.
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Post Tuesday, 16th August 2016, 15:02

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Random Blink means it is fun to use (blinking in the middle of orc pack, for example) and requires some tactics (use it immediately after closing a door, turning around a corner etc.) while Swiftness is boring because it works all the time and in any terrain.
Also you can cast Swiftness just once and be done with it while with Blink you can run out of MP if unlucky (and it is fun).
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Post Tuesday, 16th August 2016, 16:58

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Sandman25 wrote:Random Blink means it is fun to use (blinking in the middle of orc pack, for example) and requires some tactics (use it immediately after closing a door, turning around a corner etc.)

oh my god I am the biggest dumbass because I never realized how much stronger regular blink is if you control LOS better. Even though I knew it was "take me somewhere I can see" somehow my brain internalized it as "take me somewhere in LOS range I could move to."

I've been playing this game off and on for like seven years.

Just, wow.
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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 07:09

Re: Remove swiftness spell

I've seen people using scroll of fog and sputterflies for that!

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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 07:16

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Sar wrote:I've seen people using scroll of fog and sputterflies for that!


Yeah, I do this. Blink is good. I almost always memorize swiftness but almost never use it. Blink is so much better in so many situations.
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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 08:08

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Remove it; it's a noob trap. Using it incorrectly will kill you; while the only correct use is basically the OP. (before it had the -Swift it was a safe spell for many uses including kiting; now it has a tiny little niche).
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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 08:26

Re: Remove swiftness spell

It used to be too good (and you wanted to have it on constantly), now it's very situational, which is fine imo. If it's too good now, I'm sure there is a spell level were it wouldn't be.

I also memorize it almost always if I find it but then almost never use, because the only situation I would use it is to run to the stairs and I usually don't need it even then (= I start running early enough so I don't need it).
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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 15:05

Re: Remove swiftness spell

bcadren wrote:Remove it; it's a noob trap. Using it incorrectly will kill you; while the only correct use is basically the OP. (before it had the -Swift it was a safe spell for many uses including kiting; now it has a tiny little niche).

Actually its best unmentioned use is on an AE to get correct positoning for double zapping, which is, I'm sure why it's in the AE starting book.

I don't think it is op, or boring, it is certainly less op and boring than haste, and no more OP for escaping up stairs than using an amulet of berserk...

And the whole game is a noob trap, swiftness at least gives you a very immediate and direct understanding of what it does, if you use it wrong, it is very clear how and why it is wrong, so a noob can correct (as opposed to say, skilling wrong, or using bad tactics)
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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 15:10

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Amulet of berserk can kill you with slow effect if there are some new monsters upstairs. With swiftness you still can kill them normally.
About haste I only can mention that I suggested to nerf the spell too several years ago.

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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 15:36

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Sandman25 wrote:Amulet of berserk can kill you with slow effect if there are some new monsters upstairs. With swiftness you still can kill them normally.

That is about the weakest justification for berserk being less OP than swiftness I can rationally envision. Seriously lame sauce. :)

That would mean you either: 1. Escaped down the stairs to escape from something and now have no choice but to retreat back the same way into danger (in which case using berserk as your escape tool would be a bad idea, but if it was your only choice, you should probably burn ?tele) or 2. Something random and dangerous generated in view of the stairs that you are retreating up, and the slow/not slow difference will be large enough to kill you and that you have no other means of teleporting or otherwise avoiding that situation one you got back upstairs.

Neither of those can plausibly happen frequently enough to impact the relative power of escaping upstairs using either method (again, those are only two of a number of methods for accomplishing the same thing, escaping upstairs without a thing following you.)

Removing swiftness does nothing to address the actual percieved problem of escaping upstairs being too powerful and easy (whether it is actually a problem or not is another matter) additionally it nerfs AE who dont really need a nerf, and takes away an actually fun and useful tool for them, which actually requires a little thought to apply properly in the early game.
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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 15:39

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Usually amulet of rage has much higher failure rate than swiftness, even with Evo 10+ you can easily waste several turns.
Also amulet of rage means you cannot wear another amulet like faith or dismissal. Swiftness does not prevent you from anything

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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 16:47

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Sandman25 wrote:Usually amulet of rage has much higher failure rate than swiftness, even with Evo 10+ you can easily waste several turns.
Also amulet of rage means you cannot wear another amulet like faith or dismissal. Swiftness does not prevent you from anything

It prevents you from memorizing other spells (and casting them if your mp is low), you can swap the amulet (depending on what you are wearing) and wasnt one of the objections here that swiftness was too easy for heavy armour users? I am pretty sure that 0 magic skill swiftness in plate has way lower than the 50% evokable berserk chance at 0 evo skill.

I think i would need to sit down and actually do some checking to see how much evo equates to how much magic xp in what sorts of armour to be able to realistically compare fail rates (which i am not going to do from my phone)

However i will say that is a better argument than "the slow makes it harder to fight things upstairs"

So your contention is that it takes more XP to use "berserk than it does swiftness, and possibly also that the need to either use your amulet slot or keep it swappable is more valuable than the spell slots plus the need to reserve the mp needed to cast swiftness (the latter is a point i probably agree with, thw former i dont have enoungh information to agree or disagree with)

However even if that is true it doesn't necessarily lead to "swiftness should be removed because it is even easier to use than berserk amulets"

The point was that berserk is *one* example of an ability that lets you escape combat by running upstairs after engaging, and quite frankly i don't think you have established that the alternatives are better, so arguing for the removal of one option (which in the grander scheme isn't a whole lot easier than the others) really doesn't make much sense unless you've established that:

1. Being able to run away from combat upstairs is worse than the alternatives. And
2. Swiftness is the biggest offender in making it easier to run away. (or that it is the most tedious option, or that it is the most available etc.)

What i see is that swiftness is one of the *least tedious* options for running away. Taking it away doesn't reduce the behavior, it just makes it more tedious, thereby making the game overall more boring and therby worse.

Yes, swiftness (among many other things) makes the game easier in the sense of "taking less work" but not in the sense of "being less challenging". Without swiftness, the challenge would be the same (you can still run away) but the work more, that isnt the sort of difficulty that makes games better.
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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 17:10

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Can we please stop derailing the thread with rage, it is about swiftness? As I wrote above
I don't see why we should keep bad things in the game with reason "other bad things are still in the game".


FWIW I try to avoid using berserk when possible, even on stairs, because of monster generation. And the deeper I am in the game the more reluctant I become about berserking.

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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 17:15

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Siegurt wrote:1. Being able to run away from combat upstairs is worse than the alternatives. And
2. Swiftness is the biggest offender in making it easier to run away. (or that it is the most tedious option, or that it is the most available etc.)

What i see is that swiftness is one of the *least tedious* options for running away. Taking it away doesn't reduce the behavior, it just makes it more tedious, thereby making the game overall more boring and therby worse.


1. Yes, it is bad to always be able to reliably run away from adjacent monster without using consumables. It means you cannot die to a single monster unless it can one-shot you. Should I really prove why it is bad?

2. I would use "100% safe" instead of "least tedious". With other ways like energy randomization, blink or berserk you can be killed by either the monster which is running for you or by other monsters who come into view. With swiftness you don't care about those monsters, you still can fight normally or use any consumable if you have to.
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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 17:46

Re: Remove swiftness spell

This thread becomes increasingly mysterious. There are many spells that allow one to reliably run away from nearly all monsters without using any consumables. Almost any spell that produces allies fits this description, for example. Indeed, one of the best spells for this purpose is a level 1 summon.

What's next? "This spell allows the player to reliably kill hostile creatures in the dungeon..."
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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 17:50

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Summon spells still use random placement and depend on terrain so they are not 100% safe unlike swiftness. Many monsters often ignore summons and continue attacking player.

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Post Wednesday, 17th August 2016, 22:07

Re: Remove swiftness spell

on the other hand many monsters are faster than a player with swiftness, but will be held back by summons

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Post Thursday, 18th August 2016, 06:34

Re: Remove swiftness spell

goodcoolguy wrote:This thread becomes increasingly mysterious. There are many spells that allow one to reliably run away from nearly all monsters without using any consumables. Almost any spell that produces allies fits this description, for example. Indeed, one of the best spells for this purpose is a level 1 summon.

What's next? "This spell allows the player to reliably kill hostile creatures in the dungeon..."

The theme of this thread, as I see it, is "Escapes with no drawback shouldn't exist unless they take up a consumable item slot." This would shift the burden of how many times a player can screw up and press 'undo' onto floor item generation, and away from abusing engine quirks that have historically enabled easy escapes.

The unspoken assumption is that the game would be more interesting if the ability to escape from dangerous combat situations became more rare.


Aside from Swiftness and staircases, that aforementioned thread theme also covers things like: aut manipulation gap creation techniques (energy randomization, breadswinging, etc.), monster pathing gap creation techniques (nonthreatening fast monster threat blocking/displacement when kiting, cornermove pathing being able to displace threats when dealing with groups of monsters of equal speed, delaying monsters with shallow water pathing), floor feature gap creation techniques (fighting near identified traps [perma-/teleport traps, webs, net traps]), stealthbased LOS-breaking gap creation, pathblocking gap creation techniques (summons, conjure flame, damaging clouds, etc.), status effect gap creation (mephitic cloud, ensorcelled hibernation, confuse, recite, etc.), and probably a bunch more stuff I'm forgetting to mention.

This theme can be extended to cover poorly-limited itembased gap creation (status inflicting ranged items that mulch at less than 100% [curare, nets, status needles], rechargable evoker items of gap-creating effect [wands of slow/confuse/paralyse/teleport, fan of gales, bag of beasts, sack of spiders]), and also poorly-limited godbased abilities that can be used for gap creation [summons are a big offender here].

Notably, many of these gap creation techniques lose their potency if staircase escapes are disabled. It doesn't matter how many ways you have to create gaps, if you still have to deal with the thing you're running from. Removing staircase escapes would thus rather obviously have the effect of making DCSS combat significantly more dangerous, to the point where it might require a rework of available escapes and recovery consumables to achieve a reasonable target difficulty. It's not immediately clear that this would result in better gameplay within the DCSS ruleset, but it would probably be interesting to tinker with in a branch.


As a whole, this theme of escape reduction reduces down to: "Where do you draw the line?"

One example:
Does Controlled Blink as a level 7/8 spell run afoul of this notion of "unlimited escapes shouldn't exist without drawbacks"?

It's easy to argue that Controlled Blink as a level 8 spell in current versions has enough of a drawback in the relatively large experience sink necessary to bring it online that it should be exempt from such discussions of trivial unlimited gap creation, yet if you begin down the path of removing the simpler methods and restricting consumable escapes (while leaving Tloc alone), at some point along this theoretical line of removals the balance would eventually shift in favour of many characters going for heavy Translocations as default. Does this speak to a more fundamental problem with Tloc existing as a school? Or alternatively, does this simply represent one possible endpoint of a reductio ad absurdum that has no basis in the actual game?



Pull a hatchet job on too many features, leaving only those escapes that are proscribed from on high as okay, and you might eventually find in future versions that the game feels far too sterile. Players have already complained about feeling this effect with the loss of some spell interactions in the past (I'm thinking specifically about the reaction to the loss of sticks to snakes + inner flame at the moment, but there have been others), so you probably don't want to go too far with cutting features that have resulted in imaginative usage / emergent gameplay. Again: Where do you draw the line?

Players aren't machines that use escape features with 100% efficiency. This seems obvious, but it should probably be explicitly stated anyway. If you want a player to have the option of escaping and actually use it, you might need to throw several such options at them in the hope that they see one.
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For what it's worth, my opinion is that escaping in DCSS is currently too easy for most characters once you've passed D:5 or so and have several items identified.

Particularly vulnerable starts are possibly justified in having an early reusable escape available to them, but rather than leaving these things as spells, it would probably be better to shift those early escapes over to charge-delimited item starts, with enough charges to reach D:5 or so.



edits: clarity, phrasing
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Post Thursday, 18th August 2016, 07:09

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Sandman25 wrote:Summon spells still use random placement and depend on terrain so they are not 100% safe unlike swiftness. Many monsters often ignore summons and continue attacking player.

This is why you cast it in a corridor and then swap place with your summon. Now there is a butterfly between you and your enemy, and even if they kill it immediately you've still created 1 tile of space which you can use to safely exploit staircase mechanics. If the enemy misses or doesn't oneshot your summon then you get even more distance.

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Post Thursday, 18th August 2016, 07:22

Re: Remove swiftness spell

i just wanna remove swiftness because its a status effect

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Post Thursday, 18th August 2016, 15:58

Re: Remove swiftness spell

genericpseudonym wrote:This is why you cast it in a corridor and then swap place with your summon. Now there is a butterfly between you and your enemy, and even if they kill it immediately you've still created 1 tile of space which you can use to safely exploit staircase mechanics. If the enemy misses or doesn't oneshot your summon then you get even more distance.


Corridors are dangerous for escaping, it is easy to get stuck between two monsters. Open area is safer (100% safe with Swiftness!)

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Post Thursday, 18th August 2016, 18:10

Re: Remove swiftness spell

This isn't Sil.
The only time you have a serious chance of being caught between two enemies in a corridor is against Robin when she throws her pal behind you.
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Post Thursday, 18th August 2016, 18:24

Re: Remove swiftness spell

why does everyone want to remove everything? i don't even use swiftness because it sucks. look, if there's a spell that helps good players and kills terrible players (i'm in the second group because I can't imagine swiftness ever being good) then it's a GOOD spell as long as it doesn't require ancient lost knowledge to use correctly.

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Post Thursday, 18th August 2016, 18:31

Re: Remove swiftness spell

genericpseudonym wrote:This isn't Sil.
The only time you have a serious chance of being caught between two enemies in a corridor is against Robin when she throws her pal behind you.


I am not sure what you mean as serious chance but I am sure it is greater than zero unlike with Swiftness in the open.
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Post Thursday, 18th August 2016, 19:12

Re: Remove swiftness spell

snow wrote:(i'm in the second group because I can't imagine swiftness ever being good)
You can't imagine being next to a dangerous melee enemy(ex:early ogre) and wanting to go faster than them back to the stairs so you can go up without them following you?

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Post Friday, 19th August 2016, 22:29

Re: Remove swiftness spell

snow wrote:why does everyone want to remove everything? i don't even use swiftness because it sucks. look, if there's a spell that helps good players and kills terrible players (i'm in the second group because I can't imagine swiftness ever being good) then it's a GOOD spell as long as it doesn't require ancient lost knowledge to use correctly.


This

I also get the impression that sometimes this board is filled with veterans who beat the game a hundred different ways and keep crying for nerfs that will block weaker players from succeeding, just so that the veterans can feel more unique. I keep reading that such and such feature is OP and should be nerfed, yet most player keep failing at bringing the 3 runes. Can't veterans concentrate on how to speedrun ziggurats instead of nerfing the best tools for the early players ?

With its low XP cost, swiftness is a very good incentive for weak players to branch away from Trog and try new playstyles where spells offer tangible and easily accessible benefits that "Smash with a melee weapon" and "turtle in a plate armor" will not provide. Spells should provide valuable utility on top damage, and that is precisely what swiftness does. What's wrong with that ?

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Post Friday, 19th August 2016, 22:54

Re: Remove swiftness spell

I don't even want Swiftness removed and I can tell you that the reason veterans want OP features nerfed/removed is not so that they can be the only ones with winning morgues using those things... new players aren't getting their first wins with swiftness anyhow, they're winning by going heavy armor trog/oka and tabbing their way through the game without bothering with spells.

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Post Saturday, 20th August 2016, 14:46

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Shard1697 wrote:new players aren't getting their first wins with swiftness anyhow, they're winning by going heavy armor trog/oka and tabbing their way through the game without bothering with spells.


I got my first win with a really sloppy SpAK game where I used a bit of everything: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/banan ... 160253.txt
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Shoals Surfer

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Joined: Wednesday, 9th March 2016, 20:00

Post Saturday, 20th August 2016, 23:46

Re: Remove swiftness spell

bananaken wrote:
Shard1697 wrote:new players aren't getting their first wins with swiftness anyhow, they're winning by going heavy armor trog/oka and tabbing their way through the game without bothering with spells.


I got my first win with a really sloppy SpAK game where I used a bit of everything: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/banan ... 160253.txt


...But not Swiftness. Checkmate atheists! 8-)
If I play online, I do so under the screenname Marenglen.

Slime Squisher

Posts: 395

Joined: Monday, 28th April 2014, 19:50

Post Sunday, 21st August 2016, 05:17

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Malevolent wrote:
bananaken wrote:
Shard1697 wrote:new players aren't getting their first wins with swiftness anyhow, they're winning by going heavy armor trog/oka and tabbing their way through the game without bothering with spells.


I got my first win with a really sloppy SpAK game where I used a bit of everything: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/banan ... 160253.txt


...But not Swiftness. Checkmate atheists! 8-)


Spriggans don't even benefit fron swiftness unless they're slowed or wearing ponderhat or something. 0.6 is the lowest normally available move delay.

Temple Termagant

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Joined: Sunday, 29th May 2016, 17:58

Post Monday, 22nd August 2016, 21:12

Re: Remove swiftness spell

Shard1697 wrote:I don't even want Swiftness removed and I can tell you that the reason veterans want OP features nerfed/removed is not so that they can be the only ones with winning morgues using those things... new players aren't getting their first wins with swiftness anyhow, they're winning by going heavy armor trog/oka and tabbing their way through the game without bothering with spells.


My point was that after a first win with a MiBe, GrBe or TrBe , a plaer may want to try a GRFi of Hek, or some similar combinationn, that trades some melee strength for cool spells. And very good low level spells such as the current swiftness are what makes it an interesting tradeoff instead of a straight handicap.

I think that Troglodytes (or equivalent meleers), Conjurers and archers are valid and interesting archetypes. For the hybrid "fighter with a few spells" build to be also a valid archetype, the game needs good scaling low level spells, suchs as the current Swiftness. Making optimal spell learning into either "casting Firestorm in Lair" or "Burnn books as a Trog granted abuility" is stupid, and for "low spell investment" to be an attractive option, the game needs very good low level utility spells that don't cost you much XP yet give you worthwhile rewards for their cost (such as an easy escape route at the cost of investing in Trog-disapproved spells), even though only a dedicated spell build (either through conjuration or summoning) will grant you enough magical potency to rely on magic as your main offensive weapon.

For this message the author Lameador2 has received thanks:
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