To address a general point: maybe "tedium" or "repetitiveness" isn't the right way to describe what I dislike about mechanics like transmutations, charms, and food. What really frustrates me about the design of these mechanics is that they impose a non-trivial cost on the player's attention for wholly trivial purposes. Buffs expiring or the possibility of starvation only impact the player in a vanishing number of goodplayer situations and feel like cheap deaths for new players. Likewise, the fact that buff spells require a skill XP investment to be usable at all is far less interesting than the tradeoffs one sees with equipment, where you can use something earlier at the cost of shield penalties or slow weapon speed and the like.
Meanwhile, the actual cost of these mechanics
is impactful. The flow of gameplay gets interrupted every time you have to recast a spell, and having a buff feels so important that many players go so far as to force a "-more-" press whenever a form is about to expire. Making tmut spells permanent doesn't work with the current spell paradigm; MP and spell levels aren't designed around offering the player pseudo-equipment, and all of the suggested fixes for this either don't solve the problem (max MP costs) or would be unplayably unfun (continual MP drain).
It doesn't seem like many people (or devs!) share my view on this, but nevertheless. Now to respond to some points I didn't get to earlier:
Siegurt wrote:Actually it limits them even more, when you start as a transmuter, you are guaranteed to have enough spells to get you pretty far into the game, increasing the value of the uc investment, with no guarantee of getting the higher level tranmutations, there is little to no incentive to train uc over a non-evocation requiring melee skill.
I'm not sure how this is meaningfully different from any other skill investment in Crawl, Siegurt.If it's really a problem, you could make the items keyed off of UC instead and then tune them to provide far more modest melee benefits than they do presently.
e: on reflection, the biggest difference is that the Tm background provides what is effectively a complete set of weapons when you start the game, especially since blade hands is more than enough to win a 3-rune game (or a 15-rune game with good equips). That seems more like a bug than a feature, frankly. This goes for Shtopit's criticism as well, as the notion that the Tm background "works" is a little suspect in my opinion.
bel wrote:It's not clear to me what OP is trying to achieve. One can't really plan a Tm character based on finding items.
You realize, of course, that this is exactly what every melee character does? With a similar number of items, no less?
Tm is halfway decent because you can survive early game using spider form, and blade hands is really good all the way and it is in your starting book. Or, would Tms receive all these items at the beginning (it's not clear)? Otherwise, Tm is very XP-hungry. Can one imagine a situation in mid-dungeon and Lair where one finds one of these items and is tempted to switch? I can't.
As I (thought I?) noted, these items would be keyed off evocations and tmut would be removed as a skill. Assuming that you're training UC, why wouldn't you switch on evo and start branching out?
Imo, just make transmutations not expire until you end them. The MP cost is not significant; it's very rare that one can't cast blade hands because one doesn't have 5 MP.
This is exactly the problem with permabuffs: the MP cost is not significant. Why should they cost MP at all, if it's not going to be significant?
Psieye wrote:I side with removeelyvilon's view of "make forms an actual interesting choice" - achieved in Lair but not so much afterwards. archaeo's objection to this is that Tmut forms 'feel more like weapons than situational tools' due to each form being 'more or less straight better than the last one'. There are 2 ways to solve this: change the monster set (of every branch) or change the forms. The latter is much more feasible.
How, exactly, would you make forms "more situational"? What does that mean? How do you make forms an interesting choice? Because as far as I can tell, the interesting choices Crawl provides when it comes to developing responses to different situations is handled at the strategic level: nearly all skills are relatively narrow, and the only exception, evocations, has a design that provides breadth of effects in exchange for tradeoffs, making them an interesting and appropriate home for transmutations when you make them incompatible with wand use.
e: as an additional point, while I tend to like statue form and necromutation as amulets, I could honestly see a real advantage to making both of them capstone abilities for Chei and Yred, respectively. It would certainly be popular with speedrunners (tabstorm would probably pay the devs in exchange for built-in statue Chei) and casual players alike without representing such a significant buff as to make it unreasonable, as long as one considers that neither Chei-with-statue or Yred-with-necromut would be unbalanced when you compare them to Trog, Veh, Makh, or, uh, Kiku. Just another idea.