The Tavern

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.

Siegurt wrote: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)

PowerOfKaishin wrote:

Siegurt wrote: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)

"player's versatility before battle (by costing a lot of Piety)"

Making this skill piety based (and the cost non-trivial) means that you do not swap as often.

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.

Again, making it piety-based means that while you may use this strategy, it's only when you really need it, which can't really be described as a tedious moment.

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)

100 auts is the amount of time needed to change armour. 200 is twice this amount, which may be slightly unreasonable but not to the degree you are saying. I think there is some unit confusion here. A single normal-speed movement action is 10 auts or 1 turn.

luckless wrote:Having played Hellcrawl, I've come around to the (hardly original) view that curses (and identification) serve no purpose other than to make the early game more annoying. But this doesn't require letting Ash worshippers to switch equipment at the cost of time and piety alone, much less make this a good idea.

Like Siegurt says, the point of Ash's equipment swapping is to make it cost a plentiful, not-otherwise-that-useful, but basically finite resource. !rc's are ideal for this purpose, but there are other candidates. Permafood (a la vampiric weapons in most cases) is a good one. (Of course, having played Hellcrawl I also think there should be no food, in which case the replacement is less obvious. Maybe !curing, wand charges, or the like. Or just gold.)

TonberryJam wrote:curses have been nerfed severely to make them feel more tedious over the last couple of years.

The purpose of curses was to kill your character. It was to force you to be cautious, while really trying to increase the temptation of blindly putting on something you really liked. The curses used to be good. Now, not so much. The game I think is being streamlined in favor of playing faster, which is a shame I think.