The Tavern

Posting this here because it's a poison post not involving remove or acid so it might be taken remotely seriously.

So at the start I'll say that I do enjoy both poison magic and VM however people often complain that poison magi is rather shallow. Which is true, it is a bit shallow compared to other spell schools. Currently god overflow and increasing redundancy are also somewhat problematic leading to the rejection of Wudzu who will be missed, his powers however still live on in code and have a nice mix of semi-incomperable effects, summon forest is also currently in existence and the races that are currently best at poison magic all have a strong attachment to nature.

So a bit of a modest proposal here...poison retheme.

Namely~

Rename poison magic&VM (calling it wood for this post): The name is just restrictive at the moment and seeing any non-fedhas nature aspect in the game would be nice, we have druids in the game so, that'll work. Slightly adjust the starting book.

Existing spell school changes: Ignite Poison/Intoxication to pure transmutations (these never needed to be a 3 school 3 mp spell or a 2 schcool level 5 spell), summon forest/hydra to wood/summoning, lower summon hydra to L6 to reflect the new dual school status, sticks to snakes/hydraform to wood/Tm and adjust hydraforms spell level accordingly (probably level 5 to make it worthwhile ever).
Remove: OTR (Broken as shit, no longer thematic).
Incorporate Wudzu powers as spells: Summon briars and snaplasher vines were both pretty damn cool.
Let Fedhas interact with/support the school: Significant buff to a strong god I know but fedhas is NOT fun to play for anyone right now. Fed would keep her current invo/power curve just... slightly buff spell power I guess and make snaplashers/briars better, the school is still capping out at level 7 and focused pretty tightly on main school+2 subs so there's room for enough invo to use Fed... or any god really, she's not always going to be the optimal choice.

Poison damage is still poison damage.

Pro's: Everything exists, a lot of lesser/never used spells get indirectly buffed. Opens up room to actually play with the school later. Nerfs sticks to snakes.
Cons: RIP:OTR, Snake and swamp potentially become much meaner. It's a pretty big change so it would probably need to see testing in a branch if it ever gets that far.

Tentative proposal open to suggestions/flame I guess.

Edit: Wood was chosen as the tentative name because the changed school falls under the classical Chinese/Taoist element of wood. This was intentional, and is very much "not nature". Nature is the domain of fedhas/quazlal/eventual god of the hunt

Whenever the nature magic topic comes up there is always a "Fedhas overlap" response but playing VM is so shitty and unfun I'm up for any change, including removing poison as some have suggested.

Eh flavor wise the overlap is classicly avoided via

Spells = unnatural growth (insanely venemous shit, mad brambles, weird critters)
Divine = Blessed growth (pretty much fehas in a shellnut + dire things)

Mechanical overlap is somewhat nonfactor here.

Is it really a problem that a challenge book start exists?

MainiacJoe wrote:Is it really a problem that a challenge book start exists?

Calling VM a 'challenge book start' is quite a bit of a stretch. The problem is that the mechanics of the entire poison skill revolve around kiting monsters around with DoT status effects, which is a problematic mechanic that has bad effects on gameplay that are much more severe when it makes up the majority of gameplay. Diluting poison magic into a handful of rump spells on a much broader-focused 'nature magic' might do the trick, but I suspect removal is a much better plan in the long term.

VM is low-key very good, it mercilessly slaughters every single non Rpois thing in the game with the starting book and scales to a full screen iron shot on crack. The DoT aspect is much less noticeable than the "holy fuck that burst damage on non-rpois" especially with good ole ignite poison.

Vm also has a nice bit of downtime between L5 and L7 spellslots to pick up high end necro/earth/mele before going after non-spider runes. You do need to branch into an alternate killdude lightly before lair but that's not a big issue since VM has the easiest early Orc in the game.

The spell school is just shallow and cannot function as a stand alone school of magic as is and the tavern is the tavern so, remove VM became a meme because of the schools shallow and silver bullety nature.

"Nature" is a pretty damn broad term to be entirely covered by one aspect of the game (Fedhas). Please stop the "overlap" meme, it's getting very stale very quickly.

KoboldLord wrote:DoT is a problematic mechanic

If you insist with this meme then you should agree that Tornado should be removed at once. DoT Clouds (including the ones from Firestorm and Glaciate) and Poison are not so bad because their damage is not that high and a lot of monsters resist them but Tornado works against everything, viable to use almost any time you have mana and has ridiculous damage to boot; it's a spell you anti-DoT memers should be attacking but aren't.

Tornado is a lvl 9 spell so it falls into the "game is already won meme" category.

dynast wrote:Tornado is a lvl 9 spell so it falls into the "game is already won meme" category.

So using what you've said, Poison Magic should be free to get a lot of higher level spells that ignores balance ASAP since Poison Magic is falling behind. Yet for some reason Poison Magic isn't getting even a single new spell since the devs are insistent on letting it stay as a school that is only useful for 3 runing; somewhat like Hexes but worse.

Keep in mind that the devs want the different types of spell schools to be distinct from each other, so making an argument trying to compare them only works against you.

dynast wrote:making an argument

But I'm not. I cannot even attempt to convince them to buff it when they clearly do not want to in the first place. I'm not a masochist. I'm just pointing out that "DoT is bad" being used as a reason to why Poison Magic isn't being buffed nor reworked, is completely wrong and misleading when Tornado sticks out like a sore thumb.

ONIchinchin wrote:
KoboldLord wrote:DoT is a problematic mechanic

If you insist with this meme then you should agree that Tornado should be removed at once. DoT Clouds (including the ones from Firestorm and Glaciate) and Poison are not so bad because their damage is not that high and a lot of monsters resist them but Tornado works against everything, viable to use almost any time you have mana and has ridiculous damage to boot; it's a spell you anti-DoT memers should be attacking but aren't.

You can use other spells while tornado is going on, right? It also does more damage when enemies are closer, so kiting is discouraged.

Sure, lets accept that poison and tornado are both DoT(which is true) and take a deeper look into both of them:
Tornado requires a insane amount of exp investment, does a lot a damage during a short period of time, requires you to be as close as possible to your target to maximize damage output and is cancelled if you blink, teleport, go upstairs, downstairs, to abyss and so on. It has a short cooldown during which you cannot cast it again.
Poison does damage based on how many times you affect the target over a long period of time, during which it doesnt matter where you are(you can run, blink, teleport, go upstairs, downstairs, to abyss and so on.

True, Tornado is risky while Poison isn't. That may also be the reason why a lot of softie casters do not use Tornado even in extended because the other lvl 9 damage spells (Firestorm/Glaciate/Shatter/Dragon's Call) are safer to use.

So if Poison Magic got a hypothetical level 9 spell that is risky to use and immediately cancels its ongoing Poison effects once you stop taking this risk then it's a pass?

ONIchinchin wrote:True, Tornado is risky while Poison isn't. That may also be the reason why a lot of softie casters do not use Tornado even in extended because the other lvl 9 damage spells (Firestorm/Glaciate/Shatter/Dragon's Call) are safer to use.

So if Poison Magic got a hypothetical level 9 spell that is risky to use and immediately cancels its ongoing Poison effects once you stop taking this risk then it's a pass?

No level 9 spell could *possibly* ever be a relevant consideration when talking about a starting background. It is possible to use level 9 spells eventually, but a starting background sets the ground rules for the initial play experience, an experience from which the player will naturally diverge at some point over the course of the game before level 9 spells are even a thing that can be legitimately considered. When we're talking about starting backgrounds, we're talking about that initial toolkit and the gameplay it naturally results in, which will invariably make up a large part of the experience of playing that background because the player hasn't accumulated the xp or loot required to choose to change that initial gameplay.

The Venom Mage has a poor and undesirable initial gameplay experience. Every background needs to kite in the early game when there's a problem for the player to recover from; the venom mage kites even when everything is working perfectly as desired. While occasional kiting is fine, it should not be consuming the first part of every game to the extent that it does with that specific background. So the venom mage has a problem that needs to be fixed one way or another, regardless of what happens with poison's late game or whatever else people are complaining about today.

As I see it, the venom mage background can either be cut completely or completely rewritten. Nearly everything in the background is either bad or available in some other background, so a redesign is essentially starting from scratch. Removal of the background is very easy and doesn't prevent it from re-added later, should some developer have some brilliant epiphany about how to divorce poison magic from the DoT problem. If you want to fix the background instead, feel free to brainstorm as much as you like, but bear in mind that this is extremely well-trodden ground and there's a whole history of brainstorming that has already taken place that hasn't gone anywhere.

If we suppose that we take cutting the background as a given, then the skill is basically gutted and nothing is left to it. All the non-problem spells can be merged into some other skill or are a palette swap of another effect that is already very common.

KoboldLord wrote:
ONIchinchin wrote:True, Tornado is risky while Poison isn't. That may also be the reason why a lot of softie casters do not use Tornado even in extended because the other lvl 9 damage spells (Firestorm/Glaciate/Shatter/Dragon's Call) are safer to use.

So if Poison Magic got a hypothetical level 9 spell that is risky to use and immediately cancels its ongoing Poison effects once you stop taking this risk then it's a pass?

No level 9 spell could *possibly* ever be a relevant consideration when talking about a starting background. It is possible to use level 9 spells eventually, but a starting background sets the ground rules for the initial play experience, an experience from which the player will naturally diverge at some point over the course of the game before level 9 spells are even a thing that can be legitimately considered. When we're talking about starting backgrounds, we're talking about that initial toolkit and the gameplay it naturally results in, which will invariably make up a large part of the experience of playing that background because the player hasn't accumulated the xp or loot required to choose to change that initial gameplay.

The Venom Mage has a poor and undesirable initial gameplay experience. Every background needs to kite in the early game when there's a problem for the player to recover from; the venom mage kites even when everything is working perfectly as desired. While occasional kiting is fine, it should not be consuming the first part of every game to the extent that it does with that specific background. So the venom mage has a problem that needs to be fixed one way or another, regardless of what happens with poison's late game or whatever else people are complaining about today.

As I see it, the venom mage background can either be cut completely or completely rewritten. Nearly everything in the background is either bad or available in some other background, so a redesign is essentially starting from scratch. Removal of the background is very easy and doesn't prevent it from re-added later, should some developer have some brilliant epiphany about how to divorce poison magic from the DoT problem. If you want to fix the background instead, feel free to brainstorm as much as you like, but bear in mind that this is extremely well-trodden ground and there's a whole history of brainstorming that has already taken place that hasn't gone anywhere.

If we suppose that we take cutting the background as a given, then the skill is basically gutted and nothing is left to it. All the non-problem spells can be merged into some other skill or are a palette swap of another effect that is already very common.

Really (and i have said this before) all that it takes to make vm not-tedious is a low level summon that can soak hits and suplement damage while the poison damage does its work.

If it is immune to poison it can do double duty up through mid lair it it has enough hps.

ONIchinchin wrote:So if Poison Magic got a hypothetical level 9 spell that is risky to use and immediately cancels its ongoing Poison effects once you stop taking this risk then it's a pass?

dynast wrote:Keep in mind that the devs want the different types of spell schools to be distinct from each other

I enjoy VM as it is and don't think anything needs to be changed.

However, if kiting is such a problem to some, VM could be turned into a warrior-mage background. This could be done by first making poison unble to kill directly. So being poisoned could only take anyone to 1 HP and the killing blow should be delivered in some other way*. Then of course VM should be given a weapon etc. and the background and spells should probably be adjusted some way.

I like many of the poison spells and would hate to see them gone completely.

* Of course this should then apply to the PC as well!

E: Siegurt's suggestion is fine as well.

Siegurt wrote:Really (and i have said this before) all that it takes to make vm not-tedious is a low level summon that can soak hits and suplement damage while the poison damage does its work.

If it is immune to poison it can do double duty up through mid lair it it has enough hps.

Replace summon forest with summon swamp?

If the only problem with kiting is gameplay experience, I am not sure kiting is necessarily bad. Some people seem to like it, who am I to tell them to not play however they like?

Anyway, assuming kiting all the time is undesirable, here's a suggestion. (I don't imagine I'm the first person to make this suggestion, but I couldn't find anything in quick search of the archives):

Replace "poison" status with a "vulnerable" status which, say, doubles all damage taken by the monster. The status can stack. Since 0 x 2 = 0, it will discourage kiting. It is not tied to an element like poison or acid, so monsters like zombies will not fuck you up for no reason in the early game, and the game doesn't need more elements anyway.

Sprucery wrote:if kiting is such a problem

It's not. It's a non-issue coated by memers with their "I don't like" opinion to make it look like an actual problem.

1) Put Ignite Poison in the starting book. This \ changes the way the background plays from the moment it becomes castable. May obsolete OTR.
2) Add Spider Form to the starting book.

I predict either of these two changes significantly the way VM plays and what it builds into. Both would feel like a new background, probably stronger than VM as currently exists, but not near Su or IE.

I like the proposal, except perhaps for the interaction with Fedhas that just complicates things.

An even more modest first step is to straightaway incorporate briar patch and summon vines as poison magic spells (you can do anything with flavour lol), and worry about retheming poison magic to nature magic later.

Proposals to change VM starting book should be done separately IMO.

ONIchinchin wrote:It's not. It's a non-issue coated by memers with their "I don't like" opinion to make it look like an actual problem.

Can we stop calling any frequently-repeated argument that we disagree with a meme? What are people supposed to do, come up with a new counter-argument every single time the same idea is proposed? I feel like there's no point in even trying to argue with you because you just dismiss all the counter-arguments as memes without showing any attempt to actually understand what other people are trying to say.

Personally, I think kiting is an issue, because it's frequently boring but optimal to do. Sometimes it's interesting, most of the time kiting consists of running away from a monster while watching it die, and requires about as much thought as spamming tab but takes longer. I don't necessarily want all forms of kiting gone, but I certainly think the game would be improved if poisoning the enemy and then running away until it dies or the poison wears off were no longer a viable strategy.

Are you saying.... you're sick of the meme meme?

dowan wrote:Are you saying.... you're sick of the meme meme?

I am sick of the mean meme meme

dowan wrote:Are you saying.... you're sick of the meme meme?

Very much so.

Two quotes and no thanks. I see how it is tavern...

Quazifuji wrote:without showing any attempt to actually understand what other people are trying to say

Calm down

, then can you at least provide and enlighten us with some evidences to support these two entertaining unfounded arguments I always see

1. DoT is bad
2. Kiting is bad

ONIchinchin wrote:1. DoT is bad

DoT is the least interesting way to deal damage to enemies and if you did your homework you would have observed how changes are trying to deal with the problems DoT brought to the game(clouds now disapear when you leave their LoS), most of them due to your ability to kite enemies. There are only 2 interesting DoT spells that is tornado and summon forest because they go against the idea of kiting.

ONIchinchin wrote:2. Kiting is bad

Kiting is not good, but it is the drawback of giving freedom of movement to the player, which prevents this game from turning into desktop dungeon. Any argument against kiting should instead adress where the kiting is coming from(in this case DoT), trying to argue against kiting itself is just silly and something someone who is not capable of understanding its "love and hate relationship" would do.

dynast wrote:
ONIchinchin wrote:1. DoT is bad

DoT is the least interesting way to deal damage to enemies and if you did your homework you would have observed how changes are trying to deal with the problems DoT brought to the game(clouds now disapear when you leave their LoS), most of them due to your ability to kite enemies. There are only 2 interesting DoT spells that is tornado and summon forest because they go against the idea of kiting.
ONIchinchin wrote:2. Kiting is bad

Kiting is not good, but it is the drawback of giving freedom of movement to the player, which prevents this game from turning into desktop dungeon. Any argument against kiting should instead adress where the kiting is coming from(in this case DoT), trying to argue against kiting itself is just silly and something someone who is not capable of understanding its "love and hate relationship" would do.

I think of it in the opposite way. DoT is fine, it's kiting which is the problem. Here are three scenarios:
(a) You poison the monster (usually from range) and run for 15 turns waiting for it to die.
(b) You cast direct damage conjurations at a monster from range.
(c) You keep it in a cloud for 5 turns.

The control over the monster goes from (a) > (b) > (c) - not always, but in most cases. It seems to me that the (good) basis for cloud spells is that you do more damage in return for less control over monster actions (and thus more risk).

The nerf to clouds is in keeping with this principle; you can't simply cast a cloud and then run away. As you said above, DoT is not the same as kiting, because I think of kiting as involving less risk because you typically stay out of range of the monster.

The same principle applies to summons. All summons (not just summon forest) can be thought of as mixing DoT (summons do damage over many rounds) and kiting (they keep the monster away from you). I like the former but not the latter. There have been changes to reduce the latter aspect (kills by summons giving less XP, summons not attacking outside LoS and so on).

(There are other aspects to all spells, I have oversimplified somewhat.)

Perhaps we are talking about the same thing in different words, I don't know.

I think DoT would be good, if the school were aimed more towards melee. Whack whack add DoT spell whack whack whack cast again whack whack...

Anyway, the problem with Poison is that there comes a time in which the school becomes useless because there are too few enemies that can be affected, and has no buffs or self-targeting spells outside spider form.

The idea is OK to me, since it tries to address these issues. The only problem would be overlap with other summoning schools. I could see call canine familiar and summon small mammals and butterflies coming into this school. Call the new VM Druid, the skill something like "Natural Magic".

Yeah I cut the summoning overlap at hydra to distinguish "wood magic" and "nature" since the later could potentialy eat like half the spells in the game and hydra's are explicitly locked to lair/swamp "most of the time" and fit the flavor of magicaly manipulated growth.

Naming a school "nature magic" is something I'm actually dead set against as that is divine territory and has so much overlap with everything.

bel wrote:I think of it in the opposite way. DoT is fine, it's kiting which is the problem.

Of course you do.

bel wrote:The control over the monster goes from (a) > (b) > (c) - not always, but in most cases. It seems to me that the (good) basis for cloud spells is that you do more damage in return for less control over monster actions (and thus more risk).

Are you actually saying that clouds are not useful for crowd control? Are you real?

bel wrote:you can't simply cast a cloud and then run away.

Except you can, its the main strategy of Fire elementalist and Venom mage.

bel wrote:The same principle applies to summons. All summons (not just summon forest) can be thought of as mixing DoT (summons do damage over many rounds) and kiting (they keep the monster away from you). I like the former but not the latter.

Ok, forget the kiting, forget the DoTs, im really curious if you really, really believe it would be more interesting if summons didnt block enemies or didnt took damage for you? Do you actually see summons as simple damage boosts?

bel wrote:Perhaps we are talking about the same thing in different words, I don't know.

We are saying the same words because you aknowledge that everything BUT kiting is being changed, you just created this mental olympics for no reason.

The main strat of FE is to burn everything.

Cflame/Sflame is mostly used for a nice mele-range yak roast.

dynast wrote:
bel wrote:I think of it in the opposite way. DoT is fine, it's kiting which is the problem.

Of course you do
Spoiler: show
bel wrote:The control over the monster goes from (a) > (b) > (c) - not always, but in most cases. It seems to me that the (good) basis for cloud spells is that you do more damage in return for less control over monster actions (and thus more risk).

Are you actually saying that clouds are not useful for crowd control? Are you real?
bel wrote:you can't simply cast a cloud and then run away.

Except you can, its the main strategy of Fire elementalist and Venom mage.
bel wrote:The same principle applies to summons. All summons (not just summon forest) can be thought of as mixing DoT (summons do damage over many rounds) and kiting (they keep the monster away from you). I like the former but not the latter.

Ok, forget the kiting, forget the DoTs, im really curious if you really, really believe it would be more interesting if summons didnt block enemies or didnt took damage for you? Do you actually see summons as simple damage boosts?
bel wrote:Perhaps we are talking about the same thing in different words, I don't know.

We are saying the same words because you aknowledge that everything BUT kiting is being changed, you just created this mental olympics for no reason.

I am detecting sarcasm or accusation of bad faith here. I have no interest in fighting with you, so I will not say anything else than what I said already. I also have no interest in "mental olympics".

I have been told IRL that I'm passive-aggressive (in a loose, not pyschiatric sense) but it's hard to judge oneself. Rest assured, it is not intentional, or at least it isn't conscious.

dynast wrote:
ONIchinchin wrote:1. DoT is bad

DoT is the least interesting way to deal damage to enemies and if you did your homework you would have observed how changes are trying to deal with the problems DoT brought to the game(clouds now disapear when you leave their LoS), most of them due to your ability to kite enemies. There are only 2 interesting DoT spells that is tornado and summon forest because they go against the idea of kiting.
ONIchinchin wrote:2. Kiting is bad

Part of the problem here is that you haven't actually explained *why* it is bad, you made a statement of opinion ("least interesting") followed by support in the form of "dev efforts have gone into fixing problems caused by the implementation"

But neither of those explain why it is bad, or the "least interesting" option.

For what it is worth, i think i can guess at a reasonable rationale, but i don't want to put words in your mouth.

dynast wrote:Kiting is not good, but it is the drawback of giving freedom of movement to the player, which prevents this game from turning into desktop dungeon. Any argument against kiting should instead adress where the kiting is coming from(in this case DoT), trying to argue against kiting itself is just silly and something someone who is not capable of understanding its "love and hate relationship" would do.

Again, you make a blanket statement of opinion "kiting is not good" without any explanation and in this case go on to say that this "not good thing" is symptom rather than cause. It is a completely reasonable position to take, and one you will find a lot of agreement on, but assuming someone agrees with your underlying premise when they are explicitly questioning it doesn't actually communicate.

I do personally think that bad behaviors need their motives addressed rather than simply trying to prevent the behavior. Enough behavior preventing and you no longer have any choices to make, and it stops being a game and starts being a story (and let's face it, dcss is not a very entertaining stand alone story)

Don't take this as disagreement or agreement with your underlying point. I just think that you haven't (yet) clearly stated it clearly enough to defend your premise against someone who has expressed that they don't know that they agree with it.

The only pure "kiting" spell in Pmagic is sting, and uuuh that's every level 1 attack spell but freeze yo.

Optimal OTR movement is not-kiting as often as it is kiting. It is however the only "kite spell" other than sting in games where ignite poison does not drop. It's removed in this proposal. This is not because "kiting is bad lol" it's because OTR is broken as fuck.

If you kite with clouds you are doing it very, very, very, very wrong.

As a mechanic kiting is a necessary evil because the game actively encourages you to run away from enemies, and anything that "fixes" this actively encourages much more obnoxious behavior or makes the dungeon less interactive with the player. So if it bothers you just worship Chei more.

ONIchinchin wrote:
Quazifuji wrote:without showing any attempt to actually understand what other people are trying to say

Calm down , then can you at least provide and enlighten us with some evidences to support these two entertaining unfounded arguments I always see

1. DoT is bad
2. Kiting is bad

Did you read my whole comment? Because I explained why in the second paragraph. Running away from a monster you've poisoned (the form of kiting that is relevant to DoTs) is safer, slower, and less interesting than spamming tab. Tactics that are slower than spamming tab should be more interesting, and generally strategies that involve spending 90% of your time running away are pretty boring.

Spamming tab is imo the least interesting thing in Crawl.

Spoiler: show

Quazifuji wrote:
ONIchinchin wrote:
Quazifuji wrote:without showing any attempt to actually understand what other people are trying to say

Calm down , then can you at least provide and enlighten us with some evidences to support these two entertaining unfounded arguments I always see

1. DoT is bad
2. Kiting is bad

Did you read my whole comment? Because I explained why in the second paragraph. Running away from a monster you've poisoned (the form of kiting that is relevant to DoTs) is safer, slower, and less interesting than spamming tab. Tactics that are slower than spamming tab should be more interesting, and generally strategies that involve spending 90% of your time running away are pretty boring.

Yeah i would say that walking away is more interesting than using tab, perhaps not by a large enough margin to justify the effort, but at least while retreating you decide how to make the best use of your terrain and where you should retreat back to, plus sometimes you have to react to wandering stuff in your path and adjust on the fly.

That isn't too say it is interesting enough, only that it is more interesting than tab.

Quazifuji wrote:Did you read my whole comment?

Of course, but these

Quazifuji wrote:because it's frequently boring but optimal to do

Quazifuji wrote:Running away from a monster you've poisoned (the form of kiting that is relevant to DoTs) is safer, slower, and less interesting than spamming tab.

and even these

dynast wrote: DoT is the least interesting way to deal damage to enemies

dynast wrote: Kiting is bad

could just be safely summed up as another one of those "I don't like" opinions to either DoT or Kiting as a result of Poison Magic or not; in other words a meme. I asked why they are bad in itself. Like how lvl 6 charm Haste is bad because it can be practically spammed whenever you like it making the overall game easier, how good wands were bad because they result into good consumables overload making the overall game easier as long as you get more ?recharging and the 3 wands. As I see it, you still haven't provided even one of the likes of these, you just "don't like" how Poison deals damage. Poison Magic doesn't break the game balance one bit, in fact it's overall too weak for a killdude spellschool for anyone with a working pair of eyeballs that it deserves multiple threads but is DoT or Kiting its issue? Not really.

Convince us why DoT OR Kiting are bad. Keep in mind from now on that Ranged Attacks (conjuration spells, crossbows, bows, slings, throwing), Summoning, Clouds, Sticky Flame, Swiftness, x>speed 10+Polearms, Spriggans, Centaurs, Felids, etc are also included in the ones you're trying to attack, not just Poison Magic. Your preference is not an evidence. by the way.

Tab simply means "automate combat", it doesn't mean "easy combat", unless one is fighting popcorn, which doesn't matter.

What's more "interesting"?
(a) Press "Tab". You hit the monster one round, the monster hits you one round. This can lead to monster's HP going down by 10 and your HP going down by 5.
(b) You poison the monster and run away for 1 turn. The monster's HP goes down by 2 and your HP remains the same.

We can see that if you repeat (b) for 5 turns, you decrease monster HP by 10 and your HP remains the same. Therefore, it takes 5 times as much work as (a) and has lower risk (modulo some wandering monster finding you). Therefore, it is "tedious and optimal", pretty much the archetype of the thing one is supposed to avoid.

One should not confuse number of keypresses with number of interesting decisions made or the amount of risk taken. The other day, I used OTR to clear out Orc almost without getting hit. I killed an orc warlord by kiting it the whole length of the floor without it able to hit me once. Is that "fun"? I don't think so: I wasn't risking anything.

Of course, I'm oversimplifying things, all things are not the same between (a) and (b), in particular, armour choices, skill choices, etc. The scenario is simply given to illustrate a point.

Sprucery wrote:
Spoiler: show
I know I'm crazy but I don't use tab at all.

Me neither, my brain seems to have hardwired melee & movement to the right hand and everything else to the left hand, so I find tab extremely unintuitive.

bel wrote:One should not confuse number of keypresses with number of interesting decisions made or the amount of risk taken. The other day, I used OTR to clear out Orc almost without getting hit. I killed an orc warlord by kiting it the whole length of the floor without it able to hit me once. Is that "fun"? I don't think so: I wasn't risking anything.

Of course, I'm oversimplifying things, all things are not the same between (a) and (b), in particular, armour choices, skill choices, etc. The scenario is simply given to illustrate a point.

No you're over complicating things. So very muchly.

VM in bipedal/insect areas just swaggers casually forward and laughs, casually tossing out a venom bolt from time to time when a red enemy pops up. It's like the least tedious thing in crawl and the main cause of death is laughing too damn hard.

I was not a VM. I found a staff of olgreb and my evo wasn't high enough for venom bolt to trigger reliably. It's not relevant to my point anyway.

bel wrote:It's not relevant to my point anyway.

Tabbing is also not relevant anywhere in this thread. You seem to intentionally ignore that melee doesn't cost a single mana to execute, works against everything and that melee dudes almost always tend to prefer and have higher AC than casters because they mostly do not care about encumbrance as early as D1. This off-topic Spellcasting vs. Melee should be taken somewhere else, regardless of how pointless it is.

ONIchinchin wrote:You seem to intentionally ignore that melee doesn't cost a single mana to execute, works against everything and that melee dudes almost always tend to prefer and have higher AC than casters because they mostly do not care about encumbrance as early as D1.

bel wrote:Of course, I'm oversimplifying things, all things are not the same between (a) and (b), in particular, armour choices, skill choices, etc. The scenario is simply given to illustrate a point.

It's like you don't want to read, just keep repeating, "it's a meme, it's a meme" over and over. It's ok, if you don't want to read, I have no interest in talking to you.

The Tavern

A possibly workable change to poison magic.

A possibly workable change to poison magic.

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Re: A possibly workable change to poison magic.

Re: A possibly workable change to poison magic.

Re: A possibly workable change to poison magic.