Post Thursday, 25th January 2018, 02:55

Split Yred/Beogh "recall" abilities in two

For those of us who like playing DCSS as armchair generals commanding our monster armies, I think this would be a relatively simple and very useful change. Basically, the proposal is to replace the "Recall" abilities of Yred and Beogh with these two abilities:

  • Recall Nearby (or Recall Current Floor, if the other name is not intuitive enough): Gradually recalls all allies from the current floor only, at the same rate as the original Recall does, from most elite to least.
  • Recall All: Works just like Recall does currently: gradually recalls all allies from all dungeon floors (except derived undead you raised in the case of Yred), at the same rate as the original Recall does, from most elite to least.

Both of these recalls can be stopped just like now.

The main benefit of this is annoyance reduction. One of the annoying parts of ally management is when you want to split up which allies you want to take with you and which you want to leave behind, e.g. you want to take some weaker orcs down to the next floor to see if some of them will survive long enough to upgrade, while leaving your strongest orcs behind because you want to save them later and not lose them to AOE attacks. Currently, it can be frustrating to Recall your allies if you have teleported away, for example - all your most powerful allies will be recalled in first and you will have to do the job of separating them all over again. Having a separate Recall Nearby ability allows you to just keep a specific pack of orcs/undead together on the current level and not have to sort them out all over again each time you have to use Recall, while the Recall All ability will still allow you to call in your heaviest troops when SHTF. There is no annoyance added for those who don't want to micromanage their allies to this level either, which means this is a purely positive change.

As a side benefit, it might also make it more obvious to a newb that undead slaves/orcs can be recalled from anywhere in the whole dungeon.
If I play online, I do so under the screenname Marenglen.

For this message the author Malevolent has received thanks: 2
PlatinumSpider, VeryAngryFelid