Crypt Cleanser
Posts: 746
Joined: Thursday, 5th December 2013, 04:01
Reduce inventory management for throwing weapons
I propose two changes to help with this issue: Remove most or all javelin and tomahawk brands, and remove blowguns and rename needles to darts (same effect but no launcher). These changes aren't connected (one could easily be done without the other), but both would help make using throwing less annoying.
1. Remove most or all javelin and tomahawk brands
Steel is boring. Poison and silver are both boring and badly designed (silver revolves around otherwise-rarely-used monster tags like chaotic, and poison encourages tedious kiting). Poison is also redundant with poison needles. These three should be removed without a doubt.
Exploding Tomahawks are just terrible. Nearly insignificant damage, auto-mulching, and they make loud noise. They could be buffed or removed, I think it's probably better to just remove them. You could make the argument that it's redundant with Wand of Iceblast.
Returning weapons can be useful at times, but I don't think they're interesting enough to be worth the inventory management they create. If removing this would hurt supply of javelins and tomahawks in early game too much, you could always make normal ones generate in slightly larger stacks on average.
Dispersal tomahawks can be interesting, but also feel kind of out of place in a weapon category that otherwise does purely damage. I feel like it might make sense to either remove these or reflavor them as a needle.
Penetrating javelins are powerful and serve a clear purpose. You could make a case for keeping or removing them, really.
So that's at least three brands that should absolutely be removed, one that should be buffed or removed, and three that are debatable, in my opinion.
2. Remove blowguns, change needles to darts:
There are three problems with blowguns:
- It's unintuitive that blowguns use throwing skill, and something new players might not realize.
- Switching to a launcher is annoying, half the reason I use throwing instead of a launcher-based ranged weapon sometimes is just to avoid needing a launcher.
- They take up yet another inventory slot in an item category that already takes up too many inventory slots.
Granted, this is a pretty big buff to throwing weapons. A lot of needles are ones that can be very useful in a pinch, and you rarely want to use more than a few needles at a time (you're generally either trying to just poison an enemy enough to kite it to death, or cause a status effect and then run away or attack with something else), so removing the extra aut it takes to switch from hitting an enemy in melee to trying to curare or confuse them or whatever isn't insignificant. Maybe this is too big a buff (although the first proposal would be a net nerf), but if it's not it would make blowguns a lot less annoying and throwing more cohesive as a skill.
- For this message the author Quazifuji has received thanks: 6
- Cimanyd, duvessa, nago, Speleothing, stickyfingers, ydeve