The Tavern

Currently a transmuter has few situations where a mid-combat change of form is necessary. Or rather, you don't transform to escape - aside from changing form to alter defences while waiting for tele to kick in. Hence:

Blink Frog form
Lv 6 Transmutations/Translocations
Turbo blinkitis: every turn, you involuntarily blink and take Contam


I'm not sure myself if this is a serious suggestion or not, but I want a discussion on the design philosophy of "transform to escape".

Sounds cute, but note that Spider Form got nerfed to normal movement speed, so lost its fleeing capacity.

I agree, Blink spell should be moved to level 6 and require 2 schools.

It's better to have escape effects attached to (fixed at itemgen and nonrechargeable) charge limited items within Crawl's ruleset. Otherwise you run into the problems extant with Charms, Summoning, Necromancy, Ce/Sp, Translocations, rechargeable wands/evokers, staircases, energy manipulation techniques, etc., namely that you enable infinite or effectively infinite fight resets without an attached requirement of forward dungeon movement, thus allowing for some very tedious yet optimal to a player who doesn't value their own sanity playstyles.

Old spiderform was wrong. New spiderform is still very strong. Movedelay buffs aren't necessary to make useful Transmutations.


Edit: Escape effects attached to spells could certainly work in Crawl, but the spellcasting cost would have to have a (slowly recharging) downward level movement / unexplored terrain exploration component attached. MP and the current implementation of Hunger do not work for this purpose. (Hunger could work to limit spells in this way, but only if you got rid of chunks, drastically increased spell hunger, and merged food types to two or three types differentiated only by auts to eat / hunger returned. I don't think that the changes necessary to make Hunger effective would make DCSS more fun to play, thus it's probably better to scrap Hunger entirely, instead attaching a system to perma-escape spell costs that more explicitly requires forward movement.)