The Tavern

Here are two things that annoy me.

(1) Potions of brilliance are useless to non-spellcasters.
(2) I have to invest in Evocations to get much use out of wands, even in the early game when I don't know if I'll find enough stuff later to justify the investment (or when I just want to get my weapon skill to 14 so I don't have to worry about it for a while).

To be clear, I do not think both of these are problems, exactly. From a game design perspective both are plausibly legit. They're just annoying. Crawl would be more fun for me if they were different.

To that end, I propose that potions of brilliance increase the player's effective Evocations ranks (ballpark: by 5 ranks or so) in addition to its other effects. This would make them useful to virtually everyone and give players who have not invested in Evocations situational access to wands. In my view this would result in more opportunities for tactical decision-making and more fun, at limited cost to balance.

Thoughts?

Might is useless for casters. Make it give you archmagi.

At least in early game, !might is not useless for casters at all.

Indeed "oh crap i am out of mana and have crappy melee skills, but cant just walk away" is a fantasic reason to use !might. I would argue that is is actually more useful for someone who has crappy melee skills than it is for someone who already destroys things with melee.

You hardly ever get into a "oh crap my spellcasting skills suck, but if i don't cast this spell i will probably die" other than like weird, contrived circumstances. I guess *maybe* if you are trying to like brilliance cast blink to escape or something.

I know you were joking but other than some redundancy with brilliance this seems like an amazing idea

Right. But I get ”oh crap if I could only use this wand decently" all the time. It'd be awesome to have a potion for that.

I suppose, maybe more for the hex wands than the damage ones, hexes are more binary where there is a fail/success status, i cant see "this wand of ice blast will do 10% more damage" being the thing that makes the difference.

Maybe we don't need a different buff potion for all 3 stats

Brilliance is pretty strong on mele if you like not dieing to missiles.

Because... you are using brilliance to cast rmsl/dmsl?

Yes.

It's also a highly situational escape tool, ally generator, and cloud generator.

Strong potion is strong.

rmsl/dmsl aren't that good in the first place and using brilliance to cast them is definitely not worth the consumable

Are there any talks about how to reform these 3 potions? It's annoying having to carry 3 of them and I think it's quite easy to merge them into 1 potion that shuffles between 3 effects so they'll have that RNG feel that they didn't have before.

that RNG feel

Fuck praying to the RNG on valuable consumables. Just have all three activate at once.

I honestly rarely know whether I should quaff !might or !agility. I mean, !agility if I'm being pincushioned, but if I'm about to melee something dangerous there's !might which is the "kill things faster so I don't die as much" or !agility which is "don't die as much so I have longer to kill things" one. !brilliance at least has a very clear niche.

Brilliance and agility were added in a misguided attempt at symmetry for symmetry's sake. Might works okay as a kill-monsters-faster buff, although berserk and haste fill that role just as well - in fact, haste is better at it since it's a lot less opaque. Brilliance and agility, however, do not have functional designs at all. Brilliance's success rate bonus encourages you to memorize spells that you will never cast without brilliance, and that's pretty much all you use it for because the increase in spell power does approximately nothing. The item directly leads to degenerate gameplay without adding any depth. Meanwhile, agility is just +EV that you'll mostly quaff in the same places where you would quaff might, plus when teleporting or trying to stab TR. This is not as aggressively bad as brilliance but it also doesn't add anything to the game that might doesn't already add.

At least two of these potions should go away, whether by merging all three into one potion, or just going back to having might as the only one, or just removing all three since potions of haste fulfil the same purposes and have a better design in every possible way.

+1 to merge in a single potion with all effects stacked

+1 to replacing them all with !haste — duvessa is right; it has a lot of the same function as the other potions ("be better at doing what you want to do") with the added bonus of being mechanically clear.

If the description of might said what it did it would be mechanically clear. It's just confusing to new players because it's not obvious it adds 1d10 damage, if you are new it seems like it just increases Str by 5(which can then lead you to believe that increasing str by that much leads to huge damage increase, look how much stronger I was when I drank this +5 str potion)

I don't know that this one more way to increase melee damage (also why does it not affect throwing or slings or bows, that's weird) is helpful; we already have base weapon damage, weapon skill, fighting skill, slaying, and a bunch of brands that increase damage in similar-but-not-quite-the-same ways. And this is in addition to attack speed and accuracy.

It's not functionally the same as haste though, a flat 1-10 bonus to attack damage from might has a relatively small effect on some weapons, and a REALLY large effect on for example, quick blades or daggers. It's possible to use !might to kill an OOF with a quick blade, !haste just lets you do not enough damage faster.

For *many* applications haste is more powerful than !might or !brilliance, although it doesn't really apply to !agil at all (!agil is closer to "lignification, but you can also move") but for some applications, !might/!brill are more useful, the quickblade example above, and for example being able to cast spells you couldn't normally in your current condition (drained/wearing armour/etc) sometimes those spells make a larger difference than the effect of !haste.

So while there are examples where there's a significant overlap, there's also sufficient area where they *don't* overlap that they have a pretty large value in terms of giving you tactical choices.

Flattening the game into "these choices are all kinda sorta close, so let's only make them one choice" makes the game shallower, if the choices *completely* overlap, then yes, you don't lose anything, but if there's areas where they don't overlap, then those areas are valuable choices in terms of game depth.

These !might and !brilliance occupy 2 distinct areas which don't overlap with haste, 1. The general case of "they make you better at doing what you already do" for this application, they are actually *generally a little worse and available earlier and/or more frequently* and 2. The specialized uses where they mechanic of their application makes them better for certain specific purposes.

!agility really doesn't relate to haste at all (I guess you could argue that running away faster is, in the general sense, a better defense than not getting hit, but it's hard for me to even see any "overlap" there)