The definitive flying/drowning/terrain reform thread
Posted: Saturday, 29th April 2017, 18:58All of these suggestions below have come up before, so here they are in one coherent package.
Potion of Flying: Remove. It's an extremely narrow and weak temporary effect that eats a player inventory slot.
Evokable Flying from items: Remove. Even worse for Crawl than potion of flying, because it's tedious also.
Perma-flight from items: Keep. Feel free to bikeshed which item slots this ego should show up on. My suggestion is cloaks, boots, and randarts only.
Racial perma-flight: Keep.
Racial temporary evokable flight: Remove. Tedious.
Toggling perma-flight on and off: Remove. It's tedious.
Player flying from tornado and monster-cast tornado: Keep. This will be less of a shit-show than it currently is with the changes to deep water and lava below.
Extra damage to flying player from the Airstrike spell: Remove. Flight is not a strong enough resistance to need a drawback, and this drawback in particular is extremely tedious to deal with optimally for the 0.3% of the enemies where it is relevant.
Roots monster spell temporarily removing flight: This is fine. But the flight needs to automatically restore itself when the roots spell ends.
Tengu flying faster than they walk: Remove. We have enough races with fast movement speed. It doesn't make sense that no other flyers get this bonus.
Tengu getting a weird 20% EV bonus when flying: Remove, replace with a fixed EV bonus gained at specific XLs.
Flying and traps: Flying should give immunity to all traps except teleport and zot. Rationale: This flight buff goes towards making it a worthwhile resistance.
Shallow water: Should slow player movement by a fixed amount, and give a fixed chance of fumbling attacks. Large or swimming races would still be immune. Currently the mechanics for how much the player is slowed and how often he fumbles are pointlessly complicated and opaque.
Deep water: Should slow all player movement and actions by a large fixed amount, but no drowning or HP loss. Insta-death does not belong in crawl.
Lava: Should slow all player movement (including large and swimming races) like shallow water, and apply a large amount of fire damage every turn. But, no insta-death until your HP runs out.
Flying and terrain: No change, should still make the player immune to terrain. (from a real world physics perspective, flying above lava is about as bad as walking on it, but that shouldn't apply in crawl)
Items in shallow or deep water: Should be available for pickup by the player just as in normal terrain.
Items in lava: Should be instantly destroyed.
Items in Shoals: The action of the tides should gradually move all items towards normal terrain. QOL improvement.
Potion of Flying: Remove. It's an extremely narrow and weak temporary effect that eats a player inventory slot.
Evokable Flying from items: Remove. Even worse for Crawl than potion of flying, because it's tedious also.
Perma-flight from items: Keep. Feel free to bikeshed which item slots this ego should show up on. My suggestion is cloaks, boots, and randarts only.
Racial perma-flight: Keep.
Racial temporary evokable flight: Remove. Tedious.
Toggling perma-flight on and off: Remove. It's tedious.
Player flying from tornado and monster-cast tornado: Keep. This will be less of a shit-show than it currently is with the changes to deep water and lava below.
Extra damage to flying player from the Airstrike spell: Remove. Flight is not a strong enough resistance to need a drawback, and this drawback in particular is extremely tedious to deal with optimally for the 0.3% of the enemies where it is relevant.
Roots monster spell temporarily removing flight: This is fine. But the flight needs to automatically restore itself when the roots spell ends.
Tengu flying faster than they walk: Remove. We have enough races with fast movement speed. It doesn't make sense that no other flyers get this bonus.
Tengu getting a weird 20% EV bonus when flying: Remove, replace with a fixed EV bonus gained at specific XLs.
Flying and traps: Flying should give immunity to all traps except teleport and zot. Rationale: This flight buff goes towards making it a worthwhile resistance.
Shallow water: Should slow player movement by a fixed amount, and give a fixed chance of fumbling attacks. Large or swimming races would still be immune. Currently the mechanics for how much the player is slowed and how often he fumbles are pointlessly complicated and opaque.
Deep water: Should slow all player movement and actions by a large fixed amount, but no drowning or HP loss. Insta-death does not belong in crawl.
Lava: Should slow all player movement (including large and swimming races) like shallow water, and apply a large amount of fire damage every turn. But, no insta-death until your HP runs out.
Flying and terrain: No change, should still make the player immune to terrain. (from a real world physics perspective, flying above lava is about as bad as walking on it, but that shouldn't apply in crawl)
Items in shallow or deep water: Should be available for pickup by the player just as in normal terrain.
Items in lava: Should be instantly destroyed.
Items in Shoals: The action of the tides should gradually move all items towards normal terrain. QOL improvement.
I mean, this *is* supposed to be something of a strategy game, and taking out strategies isn't a good idea.