Crypt Cleanser
Posts: 689
Joined: Saturday, 12th December 2015, 23:54
Remove Monster Banishment
Hear me out on this one, guys.
- While you can often (but not always as another thread has demonstrated) avoid banishment via good tactical positioning, the danger of the effect once you're hit with it is completely independent of your old positioning. Compare to slow, sleep, or paralysis where your position when the hex lands has a significant impact upon how dangerous the resulting situation is going to be. Banishment is less tactically interesting than these other hexes because there's a complete disconnect between your old and new positions.
- Banishment interrupts the situation the player was in. It is bad for gameflow to forcibly take the player out of a situation and have them dick around in a completely different level for potentially thousands of turns before popping them back in to that original situation. As I said above, most other hexes keep the player within roughly the same context; the only major exception I can think of is teleport other.
- The other half of the "fuck banishment" coin: banishment at high level is an annoying waste of time. Dropping players to deeper abyss levels from highlevel banishment was an attempt to fix this but imo it did not work. Banishment simply does not scale effectively as a threat throughout the game. When an orbrun ancient lich 2%s me to abyss:5 and forces me to screw around with large abominations and starcursed masses for 10 minutes before I can get back to winning the game, it's about the least dangerous thing that could have happened but also one of the most frustrating.
IMO replace banishment with slow or sleep in every spellbook and see how it turns out.