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Currently the player can get 22 stacks of throwables and needles. (Not counting the offbrand ammo store). This is far too many, because it hogs so much inventory. The reason there haven't been more complains is because throwing is both OP and super annoying to use, so everyone prefers not to talk about it.

Code:: case MI_NEEDLE: // Curare is special cased, all the others aren't. if (got_curare_roll(item_level)) { rc = SPMSL_CURARE; break; } rc = random_choose_weighted(30, SPMSL_SLEEP, 30, SPMSL_CONFUSION, 10, SPMSL_PARALYSIS, 10, SPMSL_FRENZY, nw, SPMSL_POISONED); break; case MI_JAVELIN: rc = random_choose_weighted(30, SPMSL_RETURNING, 32, SPMSL_PENETRATION, 32, SPMSL_POISONED, 21, SPMSL_STEEL, 20, SPMSL_SILVER, nw, SPMSL_NORMAL); break; case MI_TOMAHAWK: rc = random_choose_weighted(15, SPMSL_POISONED, 10, SPMSL_SILVER, 10, SPMSL_STEEL, 12, SPMSL_DISPERSAL, 28, SPMSL_RETURNING, 15, SPMSL_EXPLODING, nw, SPMSL_NORMAL); break;

My suggestions for removal:
1. Needle of confusion = bad wand of confusion.
2. Needle of paralysis = bad wand of paralysis.
3. Needle of sleep. Generally super ineffective, because the monster wakes up again right away. And we have a spell for it already.
*** Once removed as standalone brands, sleep and paralysis effects could be rolled into the curare brand, with the exact effect (slow, sleep, paralysis, strong poison) per shot varying by RNG and monster toughness.
4&5. Returning brand. This is super super boring, on both monsters and for the player. It could remain as a special case for the kobolds in that one bailey.
6&7. Poison on javelins and tomahawks. Steps on needles.
8. Steel brand tomahawk. Just use a javelin. If you're too small to use javelins, too bad.
9&10. Silver brand. This is relevant against 2% of monsters, but the only ones worth the inventory slot comes at the very end of the game.

Spoiler: show

Silver brand seems to me a good ability to give to Zin. You activate it and, while it's active, all weapons (ranged and melee) you use are silver-branded.

Returning is very convenient to use, though...

Instead of returning existing, it would be better if all ammo mulched on every shot, and monsters had infinite ammo that doesn't affect the amount of ammo they were going to drop.

I agree with most of this.

1. Needle of confusion = bad wand of confusion.
2. Needle of paralysis = bad wand of paralysis.

Suggestion: leave one as only a needle, and the other as only a wand.

6&7. Poison on javelins and tomahawks. Steps on needles.

The different base damage makes them pretty different for higher throwing skill players. But perhaps poison tomahawks could be removed to improve the differentiation between poisoned needles/javelins.

I opened a PR that implements some of these suggestions https://github.com/crawl/crawl/pull/587

Fighting limited inventory slots and inventory management in general by removing items doesn't sound like the best idea to me, though it's certainly an easy way out.

Leszczynek wrote:Fighting limited inventory slots and inventory management in general by removing items doesn't sound like the best idea to me, though it's certainly an easy way out.

It worked for wands. And the differences between the various thrown brands (exceptions: dispersal and piercing) are less than the differences between the various removed attack wands.

Inventory clutter is a persistent issue in Crawl and I'm generally supportive of measures to reduce it. Playing anything but pure melee gets on my nerves because of it. Don't make a special exception for the kobolds in *that bailey* though; hammering through the messages every time they spam their tomahawks for little or no damage is really annoying, and it's the least interesting bailey layout anyway IMO. I wouldn't mind if I never saw it again.

Bumping this since it's been a year.

I suspect the reason nothing has changed is that dev team has plans for a Grand Ranged Combat Overhaul, and in the meantime nobody wants to make a short-term quality of life improvement. Well, speaking as a player, I'll take the a QOL improvement now over a balance change sometime in the unknown future.

Here's the relevant section of makeitem.cc: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/552 ... em.cc#L532

Here are my suggested changes:

Code:: case MI_NEEDLE: // Curare is special cased, all the others aren't. if (got_curare_roll(item_level)) { rc = SPMSL_CURARE; break; } rc = random_choose_weighted(20, SPMSL_FRENZY, nw, SPMSL_POISONED); break; case MI_JAVELIN: rc = random_choose_weighted(35, SPMSL_PENETRATION, 25, SPMSL_STEEL, nw, SPMSL_NORMAL); break; case MI_TOMAHAWK: rc = random_choose_weighted(15, SPMSL_DISPERSAL, 30, SPMSL_RETURNING, 20, SPMSL_EXPLODING, nw, SPMSL_NORMAL); break;

I slightly increased the weights of the kept brands to make up for the removed ones, but feel free to bikeshed those numbers. The important thing is reducing inventory stacks.

My suggestion is to just remove all the remaining ammo brands, including needles and blowguns.

duvessa wrote:My suggestion is to just remove all the remaining ammo brands, including needles and blowguns.

Just keep curare for Sonja and kobold packs, those are F U N

Make Snakebite a crossbow and generate Sonja with it

This thread is a year old, but I have to say that characterising confusion & paralysis needles as 'bad wands' is pretty uncharitable.

There's plenty of monsters with high MR (and lowish HD) that can be confused/paralysed with a needle, like high-level elves for example, but not with a wand.

Do the needle brands deserve to be in the game? I don't particularly care, but they're alot better than their wand counterparts in certain situations.

There's plenty of monsters with infinite MR that can be confused/paralysed with a needle, like fucking Panlords for example, but not with a wand.

I don't really want to get into the discussion of how dumb it is for confusion from spells to respect MR and confusion from needle to ignore MR.

So how about this:

Code:: 40, SPMSL_FRENZY,

There, now confusion needles have been exactly replaced with frenzy.

Everything that checks HD should be removed. Why? Because I don't want to explore with blowgun with needles of paralysis and compare success chance for wand of paralysis (MR check) and success chance for needles of paralysis (HD check) for every monster. Currently success chance is not even displayed for needles and mephitic cloud which makes it even worse because I need spoilers and calculation to compare them..

Just display the success chance for HD dependent effects. Also remove either needles or wands of paralysis.

Get rid of all brands from thrown. Get rid of blowgun and all needles except poison and curare and turn those into darts. All ammo mulches and you get bigger stacks to compensate. Stick to snake uses more arrows.

Bumping this again. Each time I look at the list of ammo brands, the number that I think are worth keeping gets smaller.

Code:: case MI_NEEDLE: // Curare is special cased, all the others aren't. if (got_curare_roll(item_level)) rc = SPMSL_CURARE; else rc = SPMSL_POISONED; break; case MI_JAVELIN: rc = random_choose_weighted(50, SPMSL_PENETRATION, nw, SPMSL_NORMAL); break; case MI_TOMAHAWK: rc = random_choose_weighted(30, SPMSL_DISPERSAL, nw, SPMSL_NORMAL); break;

Returning would still show up in that one bailey, and of course the off-brand ammo shop would stick around as a fun joke.

But I get the impression that, unfortunately, there's no desire on the dev team to remove ammo brands except as part of another grand ranged combat reform.

If brands aren't removed, I would at least like if throwing items were goldified.

KoboldLord wrote:Instead of returning existing, it would be better if all ammo mulched on every shot, and monsters had infinite ammo that doesn't affect the amount of ammo they were going to drop.

That means the rock giant throws the rock endlessly.

Rast wrote:Bumping this again. Each time I look at the list of ammo brands, the number that I think are worth keeping gets smaller.

Code:
case MI_JAVELIN: rc = random_choose_weighted(50, SPMSL_PENETRATION, nw, SPMSL_NORMAL); break; case MI_TOMAHAWK: rc = random_choose_weighted(30, SPMSL_DISPERSAL, nw, SPMSL_NORMAL); break;

Returning would still show up in that one bailey, and of course the off-brand ammo shop would stick around as a fun joke.

But I get the impression that, unfortunately, there's no desire on the dev team to remove ammo brands except as part of another grand ranged combat reform.

While more careful discussion on needle changes will be needed, reducing the brand of javelin and tomahawk seems to be an immediate option. It is also a very simple work.

Could it be possible to put ammo in a separate inventory, similar to the spell library? You could access it with Q

sdynet wrote:
KoboldLord wrote:Instead of returning existing, it would be better if all ammo mulched on every shot, and monsters had infinite ammo that doesn't affect the amount of ammo they were going to drop.

That means the rock giant throws the rock endlessly.

That would be an improvement.

Wait, they don't? I assumed monsters had infinite ammo.

Yes, stone giants (and some other monsters) typically only have 3 big rocks. Also, they don't pick them up again after they've thrown them. So if you can't afford to take 2 consecutive rocks to the face, its a good trick to go back upstairs after a rock connects and heal up, and the monster will stop throwing rocks after you've done this often enough.
If you have good AC/EV/SH, you can stand still in LOS, wait for the stone giant to run out of rocks, and fight him at the location of your choosing.
I like this monster behaviour.

I'd like it if the monsters had a maximum missiles that can be looted, but had infinite missiles to throw (auto-mulch over the loot limit).

duvessa wrote:
sdynet wrote:
KoboldLord wrote:Instead of returning existing, it would be better if all ammo mulched on every shot, and monsters had infinite ammo that doesn't affect the amount of ammo they were going to drop.

That means the rock giant throws the rock endlessly.
That would be an improvement.

This is essentially the same as Iron Shot, which has no range limits and cannot be prevented by anti magic or silence. So far, this power has been tolerated because of a quantity limitation. So, if this restriction is even lifted, what should they pay for?

It's actually fine to make monsters more dangerous.

I'd say:

1) if a char can afford to let a stone giant to run out of his rocks, there aren't big difference if he has unlimited rock. If a char can't afford to face a rock, it doesn't matter if it is one or unlimited.

2) abusing limited rock supply of stone giant and especially cyclops (slow speed yuppi doh) to make them not dangerous at distance is bad design

3) I do not think buffing stone giant is good because of power spiral problems, but dcss already suffer heavily of that and stone giant are probably far less threating than anything else in depths nowadays and of most thing in vault too

nago wrote:I'd say:
1) if a char can afford to let a stone giant to run out of his rocks, there aren't big difference if he has unlimited rock. If a char can't afford to face a rock, it doesn't matter if it is one or unlimited.

From my experience, I disagree

Some examples of characters who abused rocks running out:
A felid, who could be 2-shotted
A octopode, who could be 2-shotted
A hybrid barachi summoner, with only the starting summoning book, who found a rock giant on Orc:1. He needed many (~7) tries to kill the stone giant, which meant he had to escape often. If the stone giant hadn't run out of rocks, he wouldn't have been able to escape safely, and hence wouldn't have been able to engage safely.
A underleveled character in depths, who had to run away from fights fairly often, and really appreciated the way some fights got easier after a while.

The general theme is that running away is a lot easier/safer when you become out-of-range when you step away one extra tile. Some characters need to be close to do damage, so they can't damage a creature with a full-LOS attack in a way which allows them to retreat safely. They can safely tank a limited number of such attacks, and they can safely manage a hard-hitting melee creature. Hence they can manage a rock giant by baiting it to throw all its rocks.

nago wrote:I'd say:

1) if a char can afford to let a stone giant to run out of his rocks, there aren't big difference if he has unlimited rock. If a char can't afford to face a rock, it doesn't matter if it is one or unlimited.

2) abusing limited rock supply of stone giant and especially cyclops (slow speed yuppi doh) to make them not dangerous at distance is bad design

3) I do not think buffing stone giant is good because of power spiral problems, but dcss already suffer heavily of that and stone giant are probably far less threating than anything else in depths nowadays and of most thing in vault too

You can do this with more monsters than just giants/cyclops. It's a thankless way to handle something like Vashnia + 4 sharpshooters, but you CAN.

I rather dislike ranged enemies camping stairs. It's too prone to stalemate scenarios/annoyance where you just go down repeatedly until they finally miss enough that you can do something safely, then go back up. I do not consider a scenario where their ammunition is infinite to be an improvement to design in this context.

In other words, yes it does matter whether the ammo is infinite or not.

Also while the game already has inconsistency between player and monster options (spells costing mana and a few other effects) having monsters but not players access infinite ammo is another non-intuitive inconsistency that I don't see adds enough to the game to merit going that route. It's already odd that literally identical (in terms of name/appearance) spells can be so much stronger (fireball) or weaker (poison arrow) on monsters, even to the point that a servitor mirroring player's own fireball is better than its master with that and only that spell most times.

TheMeInTeam wrote:You can do this with more monsters than just giants/cyclops. It's a thankless way to handle something like Vashnia + 4 sharpshooters, but you CAN.

I rather dislike ranged enemies camping stairs. It's too prone to stalemate scenarios/annoyance where you just go down repeatedly until they finally miss enough that you can do something safely, then go back up. I do not consider a scenario where their ammunition is infinite to be an improvement to design in this context.

That you can theoretically go down a staircase twenty or more times to run Vashnia's band out of bolts suggests a major design problem with the player's ability to repeatedly disengage from fights. The problem here lies in the going down repeatedly and should be tackled from that angle. Extended stairdancing of this type certainly shouldn't be rewarded by eventually trivializing the fight.

There are various ways to tackle player/monster consistency if there's the will to implement them. Whether that means removing player ammunition limits as well, automulch with sufficiently large stacks of ammo such that running monsters out of ammunition is infeasible, spell-ifying relevant ammunition-using monster attacks, or some other option, I think inconsistency problems are surmountable.

Actually, repeatedly stairdancing a mob of ranged units is a good way to get killed. Eventually they're all going to hit you, and in Snake you can get constricted on the stair. If you're forced to stoop to trying to make Vashnia run out of arrows, I think this is punishment enough.

petercordia wrote:Actually, repeatedly stairdancing a mob of ranged units is a good way to get killed. Eventually they're all going to hit you, and in Snake you can get constricted on the stair. If you're forced to stoop to trying to make Vashnia run out of arrows, I think this is punishment enough.

Agreed, "stairdancing" is not always free. There are some situations where attempting it is a direct cause of player death, and others where it is relatively safe. For example you can tank the rounds of arrows multiple times with high enough odds and have cleared a good chunk of the level --> can blink and walk to other stairs if really unlucky. However as you say, going down stairs into ranged with an enemy that can constrict you, paralyze you, remove the stairs, or remove your character from the stairs will cost resources to escape at best and end the run at worst. Frail species are especially vulnerable and can sometimes die w/o a turn to stuff that wasn't even visible when they went up the stairs.

In many cases the same thing could be accomplished vs Vashnia (who is relatively slow) by simply maintaining near edge of LoS and tanking arrows, then walking away. I'm not convinced crawl would be better with more areas playing like tomb.

I opened a PR: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/pull/1048
Remove throwables ammo brands(poison, steel).

sdynet's PR has been incorporated into this branch: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/pull/1062 which I plan to merge soon (pending todo completion).

It's less severe in removals and I make no attempt to solve the Big Crawl Problems of Ranged Combat and also Stairs and Food Too, but it reduces the number of throwables from 20 to 12, and removes blowguns. Of those 12 three are large rock, stone, and throwing net, which are respectively mostly unusable, useless, and very rare. For a normal sized species that throws, gets rad drops, and doesn't insist on carrying stones, this frees up 10 inventory slots (from 19 throwables plus blowgun to 9 throwables, no blowgun).

Some fun facts in this project:

Throwing was left out of the last big ranged brand consolidation. The last serious time throwing items and brands were looked at was 0.6!
You could use a blowgun while netted but not throw anything else nor use other launchers. Now you just can't throw stuff while netted.
Re-using the Jester SPMSL_BLINDING type led to a bug that took a really long time to hunt down, but as a bonus any save compatibility Jesters get a rare atropa branded tomahawk if they still had their pies around.

On one hand I'll miss the returning brand - the bailey with kobolds and returning tomahawk was alone enough to train some throwing for char even without Oka and Trog. On the other hand throwing has so many problems that anything improves remotely it it's a huge progress. Kudos for your work!

I am always grateful for the ardor and commitment of the dev team. Kudos for your work!

Is this a nerf for needle-stabbers?

petercordia wrote:Is this a nerf the end for needle-stabbers?

FTFY

petercordia wrote:Is this a nerf for needle-stabbers?

Basically, yes. But there are one positive aspects that we'll see in. We don't need to switch weapons anymore. You don't have to switching them three times to stab the three enemies.

petercordia wrote:Is this a nerf for needle-stabbers?

Unsure. Saving actions in switching is an advantage, having sleep be a chance over confusion/paralysis might or might not make things worse. It's a powerful stab, but they wake up so easily so it depends how close.

I'm going to miss nets (relevant to stabbing and have a lot of powerful use cases) and stones (inexpensive item to throw to aggro with minimal noise, though the monster will still make noise). I don't want to mulch comparatively rare tomahawks/etc just to aggro something, and while you can technically throw anything to get a monster's attention it's less convenient.

I don't see how stones are "useless" either, since they serve not only as a poor throwing tool/aggro inducer but also as ammunition for slings against popcorn. Sling bullets are relatively rare and if they're considered too strong for early game this wouldn't be my pick for nerfing them.

Needle stab was my 90% of the time tech for late uniques, especially pan and hell lords (with drowning Cerebov being the funniest of all)... RIP

No penetration javelins either...

No.

ebering wrote:To differentiate the different types of throwables, javelins now always penetrate. This overlaps some with crossbows, which provide a penetrating brand, but a crossbow user can choose from many brands and has access to weapon enchantment.

Ah, I just read the original proposal and this thread, I didn't dig deep enough

I have a small proposal to improve QoL of the boomerang(new name of tomahawk). What do you think about the 0% chance that the boomerang will not return when the skill level is high enough?
According to Wiki, the chance of not returning is 'At 3 or more skill, (1/(4 + skill))%'. In this case, the chance is 3.22% when the skill is 27.
I propose to add the following conditions to this: If chance of not returning is less than 4%, the chance is 0%.
The now chance is exactly 4.0% when the skill level is 21. Therefore, if this condition is applied, the chance is 0% after skill level 22.
When the skill level is above 22, the player will be able to escape the hassle of picking up the boomerang he threw again. Wouldn't it be okay for a player with a skill level of 22 to enjoy that level of comfort?

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