Silence should be reworked

[gameguard]

I feel like Silence as it is right now is a pretty terrible spell. It pretty much makes any situation that you might consider using it more difficult in my experience.

Lets say you use it in tomb. The AOE shrinks quite rapidly and you find yourself silenced while a bunch of mummies are now freely able to torment you. Cancellation potion is a thing but those are rare. Basically, its never a good idea to use silence when there are multiple spellcasting threats, whether it be tomb or anywhere else. In those situations your plan should be how do i get out of here or manage LOS instead of silence and go to town.

So the times you can safely use silence is when there is pretty much only that single threat, but in that situation, you dont need silence to deal with it do you?

I believe there are two ways to make silence actually worthwhile. One way is to make it not shrink during its duration. Personally i would still never use it because being silenced sucks, but at least it would keep the monsters silenced too instead of just yourself. I think the better solution would be to make it possible to end silence like end transformation.

[duvessa]

I acknowledge the problem but I don't like your proposed solutions. Both are basically making it into old Silence again, which was strong but also really bad gameplay. I think the spell should just be removed.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Another option might be to make silence (smite-)targetted and stationary. It could then be experimented with increasing, decreasing or stationary radii. Enemy spellcasters would probably need to treat it as a cloud and try to move out of it.

[gameguard]

I acknowledge the problem but I don't like your proposed solutions. Both are basically making it into old Silence again, which was strong but also really bad gameplay. I think the spell should just be removed.

Remove and replace sounds like a good plan too. It doesnt even work on demonic casters and it will more likely kill you than help in the one place its supposedly useful for, especially now that stair dancing in tomb is no more.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Replace with Aura of Anti-magic. When you get affected by spells, enemies get their spells disrupted for a while. Hmm.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I like Silence, it is amazing for hybrids and I feel like mastering its use is what differentiates players. Everyone can use fireball, only good players can use silence.

Edit. Also it is fun as it can lead to those "oh, sh*t" moments, similar to wrongly timed berserk or swiftness. We need more spells like that, not less.

[Shtopit]

Edit. Also it is fun as it can lead to those "oh, sh*t" moments, similar to wrongly timed berserk or swiftness. We need more spells like that, not less.

Sounds like a good bad mutation to me...

[4Hooves2Appendages]

When silence starts running out before the danger is killed things can get quite tense. Of course a wand of tele is usually the answer.

[chequers]

Suggestion: remove the spell, make silence aura not shrink over time. The scrolls would become significantly better then.

[bel]

So the times you can safely use silence is when there is pretty much only that single threat, but in that situation, you dont need silence to deal with it do you?

The premise seems dubious to me. If you have 2 or 3 tough elves (priest, sorcerer, annihilator say), is it not worth using silence? You can kill them before silence runs out, because elves are squishy. Renewable silence is also pretty good against liches etc., even when they are a single monster.

[Doesnt]

I have a really hard time with the premise; silence is incredibly good even with the risk. ALiches can just erase you with the right rolls and are a major hassle otherwise, as are many other monsters that just get neutered by silence. Yeah, if you're dealing with an awkward spawn or bad positioning you might have a problem, but this applies to a lot of things in the game; -Swift, Berserk cooldown, immolation gone wrong, heavy MP use in general, etc.

[gameguard]

I have a really hard time with the premise; silence is incredibly good even with the risk. ALiches can just erase you with the right rolls and are a major hassle otherwise, as are many other monsters that just get neutered by silence. Yeah, if you're dealing with an awkward spawn or bad positioning you might have a problem, but this applies to a lot of things in the game; -Swift, Berserk cooldown, immolation gone wrong, heavy MP use in general, etc.

throwing nets trivialize liches more than silence. Berserk lets you kill things that you wouldnt have been able to in the early game. Swiftness is hard to mess up... just go up the stairs before it runs out.

I acknowledge that there could be situations
with good positioning where its fairly safe to use silence. But those are precisely the situations that you didnt really have to use it. If your meleedude is strong enough to kill the ALich within the short time it takes the scroll/low power silence to shrink down, did you really need that extra comfort in having it not cast spells?

[VeryAngryFelid]

Edit. Also it is fun as it can lead to those "oh, sh*t" moments, similar to wrongly timed berserk or swiftness. We need more spells like that, not less.

Sounds like a good bad mutation to me...

Yes, it can be a mutation too like berserkitis or teleportitis is. Yet it takes some skill to use the spell (better players die to silence much less than bad ones do) so I'd like the spell to stay in the game too.

[VeryAngryFelid]

throwing nets trivialize liches more than silence.

How is that?

[VeryAngryFelid]

I acknowledge that there could be situations
with good positioning where its fairly safe to use silence. But those are precisely the situations that you didnt really have to use it. If your meleedude is strong enough to kill the ALich within the short time it takes the scroll/low power silence to shrink down, did you really need that extra comfort in having it not cast spells?

  Code:

       Silence           |       |       |       |       |       |     3 |    42 |    21 |     4 ||    70

Good luck trying to find 70 scrolls of silence in the game.
It's MuEn of Chei, typical En, I couldn't even run away while waiting for silence to be over.
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/CheiMu/morg ... 023212.txt

  Code:

Silence           |       |       |       |       |       |       |     5 |    13 |    11 ||    29
Poison Arrow      |       |       |       |       |       |       |   321 |   535 |   139 ||   995
Death Channel     |       |       |       |       |       |       |       |    31 |    75 ||   106
Poisonous Cloud   |       |       |       |       |       |   176 |   142 |    72 |    68 ||   458

It's MuCj, typical Cj, of Chei again. As you can see the spell can be good even when your main way of killing is magic
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/CheiMu/morg ... 051207.txt

  Code:

    Silence           |       |       |       |       |       |       |    10 |    14 |     9 ||    33

MuGl of Chei, typical Gl, yet Silence was easy to get on the way to Deflect Missiles.
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/CheiMu/morg ... 230317.txt

[Airwolf]

Spellpower helps the duration a ton.

[watertreatmentRL]

The demon spells not affected by silence thing is a pretty strong sign there's a problem with the spell. I'm not wild about the scroll either, but at least without the spell the "demonic power" silliness could be removed. I suppose you'd have to worry about Ereshkigal, but there you could make a version of silence that leaves her tile unsilenced and call it a day.

[duvessa]

Is Ereshkigal's Silence even useful in the first place? Characters that choose to kill her with spells are almost certainly doing so from outside of its range anyway.

[VeryAngryFelid]

The demon spells not affected by silence thing is a pretty strong sign there's a problem with the spell.

Why? Demons are immune or almost immune to many other things like all necro spells, venom spells, hex spells (including invisibility of course), dagger of electro and alike. The whole point of extended game is to require different tools for it, not just to fight a monster 10 turns instead of 5.

[watertreatmentRL]

Yet mummies are not immune to silence and you meet plenty of demons outside the extended game...

@duvessa: I'm not convinced Ereshkigal's thing has to be silence either. As a monster spell, silence would have a lot more impact if it had a large radius that always affects the edge of LOS and a hole around the caster so that it forces a closer encounter against the kinds of character you're talking about. Currently, it is indeed straightforward to just stay out of range, which is what you want to do anyway.

[bel]

It's not clear to me what "strong sign" follows from "demons are unaffected by this spell". If anything, it would be a sign which says that silence affecting demons would be too strong, which is kind of the opposite of OP's point, which says that silence is not worth using in general. Both propositions can't be true simultaneously.

Or is the proposition, "if silence affected demons, it would be useful; right now it's crap?"

[watertreatmentRL]

The proposition I'm putting forth is that that the spell silence is not worth the additional mechanic of "demonic/magical abilities" that are not affected by silence. Are curse skulls affected? What about curse toes? Without looking it up, I only vaguely remember it's one but not the other. If something like this were proposed today, it would not get very far.

That said, I somewhat agree with the OP that silence does not make sense for most characters since if it's not very bad for your guy to be silenced, that generally means it takes a lot of skill points to use the spell. With that amount of investment, there are other better options. For example, I would consider mana vipers strictly superior.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Yet mummies are not immune to silence and you meet plenty of demons outside the extended game..

This is arguably good, unlike many other things the spells stays useful in extended too. I am still not sure why you think immunity to a specific spell proves there is a problem with that spell. Would you like to use one and the same spell like Ens. Hibernation or Invisibility vs everyone including orb of fire? That would be a problem, not the opposite situation.

[VeryAngryFelid]

silence does not make sense for most characters

Great, we need more spells like that. Instead of animate foo, blink, spectral weapon etc. which are used by everyone and require just a small investment.

[pedritolo]

IMO, silence, when used properly, is very strong.
It's also great that it has a dangerous downside, balancing the risk/reward thing rather well. It's the kind of stuff that makes the game interesting.

[bel]

The proposition I'm putting forth is that that the spell silence is not worth the additional mechanic of "demonic/magical abilities" that are not affected by silence. Are curse skulls affected? What about curse toes? Without looking it up, I only vaguely remember it's one but not the other. If something like this were proposed today, it would not get very far.

That said, I somewhat agree with the OP that silence does not make sense for most characters since if it's not very bad for your guy to be silenced, that generally means it takes a lot of skill points to use the spell. With that amount of investment, there are other better options. For example, I would consider mana vipers strictly superior.

Ok, these are two separate complaints.

For the first issue, the problem is too much complexity? If it is a problem, I think it's a minor one: whether a monster is affected by silence or not is displayed in the x-v screen. Getting rid of the special case of "demons are unaffected" would need a much stronger justification because if you could silence demon lords and pan lords, it would be a massive buff to silence. I don't think "there are some weird cases" is enough justification; one can simply remove the cases if required.

As for the second issue, there are many ways to play. If someone thinks that silence is too weak, they are welcome to not use it. One can see disagreements in this thread about its utility. This is a good thing: because it indicates that the spell is not a "no-brainer".

Incidentally, I can say that I have used silence in situations where my character was mostly a "mage". For instance, I remember one occasion where I used it against Zonguldrok while playing an AE with a staff of air. Since Zonguldrok resists electricity, I used silence and hasted/mighted myself to take it down quickly, without risking it summoning a fiend or hitting me with a crystal spear. I don't remember whether it was a spell or a scroll.

[Shtopit]

Silence is pretty great for melee characters. It greatly lowers the chances of being tormented/agonized/crystal speared/hellfired/paralysed/wtv while keeping your main options fully open (hitting people with a stick and running away from them with haste). It's like a version of rage that instead of making you awesome pulls out the fangs of casters: it allows you to go safely against high level threats that would normally have a good chance of wasting you. It also excludes some of the more battlefield-control-oriented spells, like encircling blink, which I find very dangerous, especially since monsters can spam spells if they want to. No sentinel's mark, no convokers, no enemies healing each others...

I understand that an air elementalist with tornado may not really wish to cast it, but, in general, it's a very solid spell with some strategic and tactical costs attached that stop it from being an ubiquitous trump card.

[watertreatmentRL]

There are two choices with respect to any given spell either of which can be a no-brainer: Get it or don't get it. There is also a question of whether you get it for free either from unrelated skill allocation decisions or from being in extended so that skill points are effectively infinite. You can't get too excited when the "get it" option is not a no-brainer, because as in this case the "don't get it" option could be a no-brainer unless you have the skill points there anyway.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

At the moment we have so many spell slots available that it's mostly possible to have anything. The only restriction is perhaps XP and that really only applies in the beginning.

In that sense there is almost no significant cost to having silence available.

[VeryAngryFelid]

You can't get too excited when the "get it" option is not a no-brainer, because as in this case the "don't get it" option could be a no-brainer unless you have the skill points there anyway.

I can get excited about "get it" not being a no-brainer because it means I must carefully consider whether I should (or even want) get the spell. It is decision-making, there are several ways to win and it is not obvious what to do.

[VeryAngryFelid]

In that sense there is almost no significant cost to having silence available.

Well, I yet have to see a Tr with Silence in 3 rune game.

[watertreatmentRL]

The cost to an armored melee character is significant until the endgame in a 3 rune game, at which point silence is highly unlikely to provide the strongest value among available support spells, which typically includes mana vipers and other summons or necromancy spells. If your primary means of attack is not melee, I don't think silence is useful often enough for it to be worth getting, except for free as I described.

[VeryAngryFelid]

The cost to an armored melee character is significant until the endgame in a 3 rune game, at which point silence is highly unlikely to provide the strongest value among available support spells, which typically includes mana vipers and other summons or necromancy spells. If your primary means of attack is not melee, I don't think silence is useful often enough for it to be worth getting, except for free as I described.

Let me change that to heavy armoured melee character without huge Str/Int and no source of wizardry. Mf in leather armour, any species with Chei for Str/Int bonus or Ashenzari can be happy to find the spell. My favorite background for Silence is En (arguably a melee background), Invisibility + Silence makes Elf 3 very fun and relatively easy.
Again what is the problem exactly? You feel like going for the spell is a bad idea for some characters? This is intended and very good.

[watertreatmentRL]

Like I said, I don't think it makes sense unless you get it essentially for free which is what I would call most of the situations you mention. The situations where it makes sense to get it are situations where it's not a real decision because there is no investment. Then there's the question of whether you use it when you have it. I really can't recall a 3 rune game where I've gotten silence and I used it enough that it provided significant value over the silence scrolls I would have anyway. I like silence with darkness in tomb, but that's a very niche use and it's so strong I don't see why it should even exist.

[VeryAngryFelid]

You keep saying about "almost for free".
Did you miss my first example with light armour and Mf? I can add Sp, DE, Ko, Ha, Te... All these species often use light/middle armour and it takes some significant XP to get Silence online so it is up to player to decide whether to go for the spell or not.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Another example:
MuSu of non-Chei in ring mail, Str 14, Int 17, no wizardry in 3 rune game used Silence 18 times.

  Code:

 - Level 12.3 Spellcasting
 - Level 6.1 Hexes
  - Level 10.0 Air Magic

http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue/ ... 021625.txt

I think it is not exactly "almost for free" and IMHO it proves that the spell can be useful to many more characters than you think.

[edgefigaro]

Silence's interaction with spellpower is odd. It lasts longer and is bigger on high int caster types. Bigger is unquestionably good, but lasting longer?

Maybe silence behaving in the opposite direction would be good? Like, the ring slowly gets bigger, spellpower determines speed of ring growth//starting radius. At high spellpowers, there could be a few turns where the field is silenced but the caster is not.

[watertreatmentRL]

Another example:
MuSu of non-Chei in ring mail, Str 14, Int 17, no wizardry in 3 rune game used Silence 18 times.

  Code:

 - Level 12.3 Spellcasting
 - Level 6.1 Hexes
  - Level 10.0 Air Magic

http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue/ ... 021625.txt

I think it is not exactly "almost for free" and IMHO it proves that the spell can be useful to many more characters than you think.

I don't think the fact that you got silence on a winning character proves anything. My feeling based on what you've said here is that you just overvalue the spell.

edit: The idea of the expanding radius version upthread is kind of good in my opinion, though it is generally easy to "cook" a start up like that by pretty elementary luring tactics. Could be cancellable by using a spell/item/ability that requires sound. This would be pretty clean and much more generally useful. Maybe bump the level up to 6.

[VeryAngryFelid]

My feeling based on what you've said here is that you just overvalue the spell.

It is hard to overvalue impunity to laugh at Ancient Lich which has Lehudib's Crystal Spear (3d48) and can kill most characters in 2 turns.
My feeling is that you undervalue the spell, maybe you play just heavy melee characters, I don't know.

[watertreatmentRL]

Yeah, probably the reason I think that silence is bad is that I don't know how much damage ancient liches with LCS can do. That makes sense.

[amaril]

If silence is bad from a game design standpoint, its strategic power is irrelevant. It could be a lv. 9 spell used by almost no one or a lv. 3 spell that everyone picks up and still have the same gameplay issues that it currently has: it single-handedly neutralizes a portion of enemies in the game (when those enemies are faced in isolation).

If I were to guess, the reason silence doesn't work against demons is b/c whoever designed it believed that mashing tab against demon lords/fiends who can't retaliate isn't good gameplay.
It is worth noting though that silence is a skill-testing spell in the sense that if you use it in an unsafe place where new enemies may wander, you can get punished pretty badly.

[njvack]

Crawl is a game that is full of incentives to lure dangerous monsters into 1v1 fights. I don't know that Silence is any better or worse than other effects in that regard. But it's probably good to limit the number of effects that work that way.

+1 for "remove spell, make scroll stronger" for that reason and also because having spells that duplicate consumables is not very interesting.

[bel]

If silence is bad from a game design standpoint, its strategic power is irrelevant. It could be a lv. 9 spell used by almost no one or a lv. 3 spell that everyone picks up and still have the same gameplay issues that it currently has: it single-handedly neutralizes a portion of enemies in the game (when those enemies are faced in isolation).

If I were to guess, the reason silence doesn't work against demons is b/c whoever designed it believed that mashing tab against demon lords/fiends who can't retaliate isn't good gameplay.
It is worth noting though that silence is a skill-testing spell in the sense that if you use it in an unsafe place where new enemies may wander, you can get punished pretty badly.

Is silence bad from a game design standpoint? Most people in this thread seem to be arguing that it's just a weak spell, not that it's badly designed. It's not clear to me what is badly designed about it.

For the rest of points in the post, they apply just as well to all hexes.

Many hexes single-handedly neutralize a portion of enemies in the game: namely those monsters having low MR. The mechanics for hexes don't need enemies to be isolated; nor does silence, for that matter -- if one finds oneself surrounded by a group of nasty elves, silence can work just fine.

The same commonality with other hexes is true for the issue of silence not working on demon lords/pan lords. It is very common for hexes to not work (reliably) on high-level threats. Usually hexes work through MR or HD; high level enemies tend to have high MR and HD. Silence is different in this respect in that it doesn't use HD or MR, but rather "demonic" status and "innate abilities"; and it's a binary mechanism. The reason for the different hex mechanisms is the same; it would be bad if many high-level enemies could be disabled reliably with a low- or medium-level spell. Neither mechanism is perfectly consistent: many threatening monsters have low HD and/or MR, and there are many demons which are not threatening.

[amaril]

FWIW I don't mind that silence is a spell, but I get the argument that if silence needs special-casing to not break the game's balance and special-cases are unintuitive and already excessive in crawl, maybe silence just shouldn't exist outside of consumable form. I also think that the typical hexes (i.e. confusion) are far less problematic than silence because they come with a considerable chance of failure, and therefore you have to be prepared for the possibility of them not working as intended. Invisibility functions similarly to silence, and it is even more problematic: a charm that makes the player invulnerable to a portion of enemies isn't great gameplay.

As an aside: a lot of the most 'fun' characters in crawl are pretty broken, one way or another. I feel like the strategic challenge in crawl is to make your character overpowered given what the dungeon gives you.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I add silence to many characters and I usually enjoy using it. Occasionally it has landed me in hot water, so to speak, when it ran out before the enemy caster was dead.

[Chicken]

I remember trying silence just once recently - Mara, who according to his description "possesses a number of magical abilities, negated by antimagic". I double checked, triple checked, and, needless to say, just as I kind of figured, he kept right on casting without the slightest hindrance. (I got away only because he wasn't hindered from casting Blink either, and decided to let me run away) Once the devs get it into their heads that something "doesn't always work", what that means is that it never works when you actually need it to, no matter what the posted rules are. Even stuff you have to hit with, like various ice spears and iron shots, are doubtful. So I just throw out all that crap, spellls with limitations, spells with chances to resist, stuff you might look up in the Wiki but it's probably out of date anyway, focus on some stuff like clouds and explosions that they didn't make a mechanic to have just fail whenever it matters.

[njvack]

I remember trying silence just once recently - Mara, who according to his description "possesses a number of magical abilities, negated by antimagic".

Heh, that's funny, I remember trying to silence Mara back in the day (back when silence scrolls were insanely rare) and being super pissed when it didn't work.

[bel]

FWIW I don't mind that silence is a spell, but I get the argument that if silence needs special-casing to not break the game's balance and special-cases are unintuitive and already excessive in crawl, maybe silence just shouldn't exist outside of consumable form. I also think that the typical hexes (i.e. confusion) are far less problematic than silence because they come with a considerable chance of failure, and therefore you have to be prepared for the possibility of them not working as intended.

Ok, thanks for elaborating. I'll take the points in turn.

Intuitiveness of silence:

First, silence does not need to be intuitive: one can just x-v the monster. BTW, I don't think it's particularly non-intuitive (aside from a few weird cases like curse toe and curse skull). Let me compare it with resistances; there is often no "intuitive" indication about which monsters have rElec. Why do azure jellies have rElec but acid blobs don't? Why do bone dragons have rElec, but normal dragons, skeletons and liches don't; while ancient liches do? Unless you are familiar with the monster, you just use the x-v screen. Moreover, many mechanisms in Crawl are based on non-transparent and non-intuitive things like monster HD, max HP and even AC/EV. In contrast, most of what you need to know about whether silence would work is shown in the x-v screen.

Comparison with hexes' reliability:

The unreliability of confusion comes from the fact that you may not land it. The unreliability of silence comes from the fact that you may not be able to dispose of the monster in the time silence runs out, or you may be caught by a wandering monster while you're silenced. Hexes like confusion are actually less unreliable in many ways: once you land the hex, you know that it will last for a fairly long time (enough to stab the monster or run away). In contrast, when you use silence, you only realize later on that you're screwed; indeed this is one of the points OP was trying to make.

[Shtopit]

rElec for liches comes from d&d, I think. Bone dragons may have it as derivative dracoliches, but I haven't checked how they were in older versions.

[Chicken]

My feeling based on what you've said here is that you just overvalue the spell.

It is hard to overvalue impunity to laugh at Ancient Lich which has Lehudib's Crystal Spear (3d48) and can kill most characters in 2 turns.
My feeling is that you undervalue the spell, maybe you play just heavy melee characters, I don't know.

It seems pretty easy to laugh at them. The spear usually misses ... Dispel Undead doesn't.