The used wands store

[Rast]

This shop was OK back when you could hope it had a yellow wand for sale that you would recharge repeatedly for the rest of the game.

Nowadays, it's pure garbage. By the time you have recharging identified and this shop shows up, you already have a wand worth recharging.

Now, it's OK for crawl to have pointless features like clubs and food and robe of clouds, but it's also OK to improve them enough to make them relevant.

My suggestion is that the wands in the used wands store all have 1 change remaining. Except scattershot and clouds should still have zero.

That is all.

[duvessa]

Just remove wands already. They create tons of inventory clutter, their identification mechanic is obtuse and pointless, the only one with a unique impact on the game is digging and you can always turn digging into a different consumable if you want to save it. The rest are overly similar to existing conjuration/hex spells except consumable, and Crawl already has a zillion consumables.

[Floodkiller]

Just remove wands already. They create tons of inventory clutter, their identification mechanic is obtuse and pointless, the only one with a unique impact on the game is digging and you can always turn digging into a different consumable if you want to save it. The rest are overly similar to existing conjuration/hex spells except consumable, and Crawl already has a zillion consumables.

It sounds like the real problem is that spells are infinite, so remove those instead.

For an actual response, I like the 1-2 charges left approach but I could also get on board with only offering high quality wands like acid/scattershot/clouds.

[Shard1697]

instead of removing wands remove wand identification mechanic and make wands stack

[radzia]

Or trim wands and remove:

Flame
Confusion
Lighting
Random Effects

Those overlaps withs spells or are to weak to have fun with them

[nago]

Random effects is worth to be saved for Ar!

[watertreatmentRL]

Removing wands sounds good to me, but it's not like random effects and flame have to generate normally in the dungeon just because of Ar. It's totally possible to make those wands exclusive to the Ar start.

late edit: Somehow forgot to say.... hellcrawl has stacking wands without the id nonsense. Along with removing lots of junk items from dcss, like food, id scrolls, curse scrolls, potions/scrolls of uselessness, etc. you generally don't have to think about running out of inventory slots until over half way through a game and you don't have to keep dropping things every other minute of play after you reach that point. It is a massive improvement over dcss. You get much fewer charges in hellcrawl though.

[amaril]

This is a tangent but hellcrawl's inventory situation is worse than regular crawl's due to the lack of stairs. You have to pick up every single item you could conceivably want and then when your inventory fills you are stuck making the same trivial decision btwn probably useless items, except you have to be more careful b/c if you leave the floor w/o an item you can never get it back.

[watertreatmentRL]

Actually, backtracking to get items is bad. It is true that it would be an improvement if you could automatically recall items on a hellcrawl level when you use downstairs to cut down on autotravel silliness, but that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about. It is definitely not the case that there is an inventory management problem with being forced to permanently leave behind items. You can carry a large number of marginal to obviously useless equipment alts and wands without running into inventory problems.

[Siegurt]

Actually, backtracking to get items is bad. It is true that it would be an improvement if you could automatically recall items on a hellcrawl level when you use downstairs to cut down on autotravel silliness, but that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about. It is definitely not the case that there is an inventory management problem with being forced to permanently leave behind items. You can carry a large number of marginal to obviously useless equipment alts and wands without running into inventory problems.

Explain to me what the difference is between backtracking for an item, possibly by way of a macro that returns you to your current location, and "automatically recalling an off-level item" aren't they identical except for turn count? How can you claim one is good and the other is bad?

[watertreatmentRL]

To be clear, I think items should be gone forever when they're left on an old floor, not recallable. The recall I mention in the previous comment would only be a convenience when the player uses stairs to leave a level, to save the player having to remember to enter the search screen manually and subsequently autotraveling to items and picking them up.

Assuming you actually play this game, you're aware that backtracking in crawl is not simply a matter of "using a macro." Autotravel involves random encounters with spawns, not all of which end in a clean kill, but instead monsters going in and out of line of sight, often more than once. You usually have to resume once or twice because of hunger messages as well. Often enough you have to eat things too. Since backtracking necessarily means you're traveling through the dead space of cleared levels, nothing that happens during this process has any potential to be interesting. It is pure simulationist garbage. Obviously an item recall feature would be better in that it you would simply get the damned item without fighting imps and ogres with your level 18 character, getting hungry, eating, and so on.

But again, the best thing would be to eliminate the old levels and the items they contain entirely.

[Leszczynek]

please remove zin's purification station vault (altar + shop), it's really silly with one potion of curing in it. zin is really damn cheap this way, not only the greedy bastards takes some of your money, he's stingy with goodies as well. i don't use capital letters because reasons

@duvessa
inventory clutter
not a reason to remove them, it's a reason to make them stack
identification mechanic is obtuse and pointless
about as pointless as the identification game; you are forced to spend a consumable to increase the number of uses more or less, UNLESS you level up Evocations and get a bit lucky and I think it's actually a neat idea as long as we still have ?id around - the problems are some of the other ?id uses IMO
The rest are overly similar to existing conjuration/hex spells except consumable
so what's the point of saying it this way? i mean trying to prove your point by twisting the truth? because hexing spells are sure damn useless without a considerable investment, and a complete waste of xp for heavy armor, low int users, while there are no player-accessible conjurations like acid bolt, iceblast or scattershot. obviously the point of wands is to give an access to some spell effects to troglodytes or semi-troglodytes, but i'm very sure you are perfectly aware of this, so i wonder why you wrote it like that. or do we want tabbers to tab even more?
Crawl already has a zillion consumables
that's true, but i don't see any real merit in trimming viable options out of the game except for progressing the neverending epic chase after the mystical beast of B'Loat

@Shard1697
instead of removing wands remove wand identification mechanic and make wands stack
and remove stairs up ha ha
but really, this is one of the better features of hellcrawl, just remember to reduce the number of charges a bit too

@radzia
Confusion
not a completely bad idea, as para and enslave already exist and confusion has a ridiculous amount of charges
Lighting
not a completely bad idea because lightning rod exists. by the way, please make lightning rod recharge over time always, not only when you use up all charges. it's really damn silly to have to zap it to zero after a fight that leaves you with 1 or 2 charges.
Flame, Random Effects
don't remove these completely, make them stop spawning after, say, dungeon and lair, or only in d:1-10. even random effects can be useful for something early and flame is simply good before lair
removing is always easy by the way, veeeery eaaasy, thinking of meaningful replacements abiding to more and more restrictive guidelines (due to continuous removals) is the hard part.

@watertreatmentRL
backtracking for items is not bad in crawl at all, it takes little to no time unless you suddenly decide you need all tomahawks the game has spawned so far. if you want nasty backtracking, play something like adom for comparison.

this is one of those threads that will get 40+ posts and also completely ignored otherwise, isn't it

[watertreatmentRL]

Backtracking is bad and it is unnecessary. There is absolutely no reason backtracking should exist in crawl. "Old items have to have a location." No they don't. "Shops have to have a location." No they don't. "Dungeon branch entrances have to have a location." No they don't. Locating things in old, dead levels serves absolutely no gameplay purpose. It is purely simulation. It's just trying to be cute. You can recall old items, you can destroy old items. You can give the player order forms or catalogs instead of generating shops. You can give the player rune-like items that allow them to enter dungeon branches, you can set the dungeon up the way hellcrawl does.

It is also totally false that backtracking is quick and easy. It is tedious and the amount of time it takes depends on your connection. I am baffled that anyone would defend backtracking in crawl.

[duvessa]

inventory clutter
not a reason to remove them, it's a reason to make them stack

making them stack does reduce the inventory clutter, but not by as much as removing them entirely

because hexing spells are sure damn useless without a considerable investment

...are you trying to make this sound like a bad thing?

there are no player-accessible conjurations like acid bolt, iceblast or scattershot

there are seven player bolt spells (shock, bolt of draining, bolt of magma, venom bolt, bolt of cold, bolt of fire, lightning bolt) and iceblast is a copy of fireball. I admit scattershot doesn't have a near-identical spell, probably because if a spell as confusing as scattershot were in the game it would be rightfully removed. But the niche of "awful range and more affected by AC than usual" is occupied by sandblast.

backtracking for items is not bad in crawl at all, it takes little to no time unless you suddenly decide you need all tomahawks the game has spawned so far. if you want nasty backtracking, play something like adom for comparison.

this is like saying "it's not bad at all that someone pooped on your doormat, because they could have pooped in your hair instead"

this is one of those threads that will get 40+ posts and also completely ignored otherwise, isn't it

imo the devs are not obligated to do something just because a crappy gdd thread got 40+ replies

[Leszczynek]

i think i see your point of view better now, thanks.

probably because if a spell as confusing as scattershot were in the game it would be rightfully removed
you mean like dazzling spray?
but jokes aside, why is it confusing?

this is like saying "it's not bad at all that someone pooped on your doormat, because they could have pooped in your hair instead"
but it's the player who poops in the first place

imo the devs are not obligated to do something just because a crappy gdd thread got 40+ replies
shhhh i'm trying to be funny

[duvessa]

yeah, dazzling spray is just as bad, no argument there

[Shard1697]

why is it confusing that something would shoot out multiple projectiles in a scatter

everyone who plays videogames is familiar with shotgun spread

[Lavandula]

Just remove wands already. They create tons of inventory clutter. ... The rest are overly similar to existing conjuration/hex spells except consumable, and Crawl already has a zillion consumables.

Then just don't collect them. "Press x to win" builds such as NaBe don't need wands anyway, those are mostly for challenge characters.
Might as well merge entire hexes school into evocations, which would actually reduce spellbook clutter without limiting replayability or encouraging grinding. Most hexes already come in better version from either wands (paralysis is better than slowing) or gods.

[duvessa]

why is it confusing that something would shoot out multiple projectiles in a scatter

everyone who plays videogames is familiar with shotgun spread

if it's so simple, then try to explain how much damage it does

[Shard1697]

I don't know how much damage any wand does on average. that doesn't mean they confuse me.

I just have a general feeling borne of playing lots of games about what can and cannot get killed by different things. ex, scattershot shreds most anything without much AC. and that's something that doesn't take long to figure out. especially because the description directly states that it's bad against armor

[Rast]

My experience with scattershot is that it either underwhelms or is adequate.

It's like using a shotgun in one of the few games where a shotgun isn't amazing.

[bananaglory]

Bring back Pakellas and make wands exclusive to him. Also some unique monsters can have wands too.

[Fingolfin]

That would step on Nemelex' territory as a god who gifts exclusive evokers.