PowerOfKaishin wrote:Remove curses and scrolls of remove curse. They really serve no point other than Ashenzari's conduct.
Currently Ashenzari's conduct is just an ?rc tax and really all it does is increase the time needed to swap items by 10 auts (and another 10 to regain lost skill levels via recursing). This just adds tedium when dealing with enemies that show up at the edge of LoS and aren't immediately threatening (quite a bit of them) and really, most people can find the 3 needed turns to swap an item (up from 1).
Change Ashenzari to allow cursing and uncursing of items at will. Cursing an item takes the standard 10 auts for an action (or 0, doesn't really matter), but uncursing costs a good chunk of Piety and takes 100 or 200 auts, making it silly to use in the middle of combat in most cases. Ashenzari's conduct is supposed to prevent swaps, so why not have it penalize swaps?
This makes swaps a much worse idea in battle and penalizes the player's versatility before battle (by costing a lot of Piety), which is what Ashenzari's conduct is meant to do.
1. You have mischaracterized the point of ash's equipment swapping. It isn't too prevent you from swapping tactically as needed, it is to prevent you from swapping as *often*, it is to force the choice of when and how much you do so to be strategic, to have a long term cost. Maybe we should shift the focus here, but you made no argument to that effect. (If you believe that we should, please tell us why)
2. A long delay just forces people to retreat upstairs before switching equipment, it is already often a decent plan, this would make it a requirement, adding lots of tedium to the game.
3. An action that long, even if taken out of combat, is prone to having wandering monsters stop by. I assume you mean for the action to be interruptable, (changing equipment as a 200 turn paralysis death trap sounds pretty awful, as does starvation by equipment changing) so if you are interruptable, do you just have to start over, do you intend for the player to spend thousands of turns trying to swap out a cloak because rats wander by? I think an action that long with a binary yes/no status is pretty annoying, and tracking progress is annoying in its own right (plus it is prone to being gamed, e.x. trying to get the uncursing status to be just before it is actually uncursed, so you can swap it out tactically at a later point freely)
There was a proposal a while back that curses just sort of wear off after a while of normal play (maybe xp gated, or exploration based, which would go with ash's theme) which might be close to what you had in mind while not presenting some of the technical design problems of a super long action.