The Tavern

All demonspawn mutation (except body slot mutations) are designed to be much or less beneficial while nightstalker's LOS reduction can hurt you. For a ranged fighter/caster longer distance between you and enemy often mean more damage done to enemy before it comes into melee range.
It would be great if the player could decide whether to have that LOS reduction or no and turn it on/off via abilities menu.

Even for a ranged fighter/caster the benefits of nightstalker surely outweigh all disadvantages.

Anyway, there are other DS mutations that I wish I could just switch off, most notably the demonic guardian, or the spirit shield. But I'm afraid that will never happen.

Nightstalker, spirit shield, demonic guardian, etc. are overall beneficial for all characters, at least in terms of survival. In the case of nightstalker, extremely beneficial; in my opinion it is stronger than all the other Ds mutations put together (and possibly all other mutations in the game put together).

Nightstalker is detrimental for turncount, and therefore high-score runs, but the game is clearly not designed around those. As far as simply winning the game goes, nightstalker is a massive advantage.

But you know what, that doesn't even matter. Demonspawn mutations are supposed to have disadvantages sometimes. You don't get to toggle off your horns and wear a helmet, you don't get to toggle off your rough black scales and get 3 Dex back, you don't get to toggle off nightstalker and shoot your crossbow 7 squares away. Toggles would both decrease the impact of the disadvantages (bad) and introduce micromanagement (very bad).

Demonic guardian causes awful gameplay but the solution to that shouldn't be "let players toggle it off to avoid the bad gameplay, at the cost of gimping their character". You shouldn't have to gimp your character to avoid the bad gameplay, it shouldn't exist in the first place. This could be fixed by revising or removing demonic guardian, but not with a toggle.

duvessa wrote:Nightstalker, spirit shield, demonic guardian, etc. are overall beneficial for all characters, at least in terms of survival.

Nighstalker on: Oh I see the wolf's pider in LOS, let me fireball it! Oh no, it's already in melee range! I'm dying, help me!
Nighstalker off: Oh I see the wolf's pider in LOS, come get some fireballs! Yeah, glad I can cast FB 3 times until it comes close!

Spirit shield on: Omg brimestone fiend is in los! Too bad for him, I have bolt-o-cold! Oh no I lost almost all my mana because of torment! I can quaff mana pot, what the... (died from damnation)
Spirit shield off: Omg brimestone fiend is in los! Too bad for him, I have bolt-o-cold! You don't want to die from 1 bolt? Get glaciate on your head (butt)! Yeah, 50% HP pff, but I'm alive!

Demonic guardian on: Damn that reaper spawned and I can't cast Fire Strom upon all that crowd. Wait! I can! Screw that scythe-bearer!
Demonic guardian off:Noone spawned and I can cast Fire Strom upon all that crowd. Ha-ha!

And you know, Crawl is not about winnig, it's about fun. Players may want to make not optimal decisions and have fun!

ololoev wrote:Nighstalker off: Oh I see the wolf's pider in LOS, come get some fireballs! Yeah, glad I can cast FB 3 times until it comes close!

With toggles it will be quite different:
Oh, I see the yaktaurs, let's turn nightstalker on to instantly get out of their shooting range. Now I can cast FB at the edge of my view, the yaktaurs will be wounded and I am completely safe because they still don't see me.
So you basically get a free fireball in every fight and you will want to turn nighstalker on and off in every fight. It reminds me how I casted Necromutation during autoexplore, really time-consuming and unfun.

ololoev wrote:
duvessa wrote:Nightstalker, spirit shield, demonic guardian, etc. are overall beneficial for all characters, at least in terms of survival.

Nighstalker on: Oh I see the wolf's pider in LOS, let me fireball it! Oh no, it's already in melee range! I'm dying, help me!
Nighstalker off: Oh I see the wolf's pider in LOS, come get some fireballs! Yeah, glad I can cast FB 3 times until it comes close!

Spirit shield on: Omg brimestone fiend is in los! Too bad for him, I have bolt-o-cold! Oh no I lost almost all my mana because of torment! I can quaff mana pot, what the... (died from damnation)
Spirit shield off: Omg brimestone fiend is in los! Too bad for him, I have bolt-o-cold! You don't want to die from 1 bolt? Get glaciate on your head (butt)! Yeah, 50% HP pff, but I'm alive!

Demonic guardian on: Damn that reaper spawned and I can't cast Fire Strom upon all that crowd. Wait! I can! Screw that scythe-bearer!
Demonic guardian off:Noone spawned and I can cast Fire Strom upon all that crowd. Ha-ha!

...Even these hypotheticals don't make any sense. Fireball is much better with nightstalker since its range is short; with nightstalker it can easily hit out-of-LOS monsters even without a corner, without nightstalker it can't. Fireball also works fine against adjacent monsters, so what's wrong with the spider reaching melee range?
Torment with spirit shield cannot possibly remove "almost all" of your MP. Spirit shield enforces proportionality between HP and MP, and torment damage is 50% of your current HP, which means you can lose 50% of your MP at the very most in the absence of harm, and in practice it's going to be less than that because your HP pool is not infinitely larger than your MP pool. With harm, that number goes up to a whopping...60% of your MP at most.
Fire storm is smite-targeted and bolts/beams pass right through demonic guardians so it's nearly impossible for them to interfere with a spell. They do steal xp and piety and open doors, though.

VeryAngryFelid wrote:So you basically get a free fireball in every fight and you will want to turn nighstalker on and off in every fight.

It is easily avoided by adding penalty/restrictions on turning ability on/off.

duvessa wrote:Fireball also works fine against adjacent monsters, so what's wrong with the spider reaching melee range?

It bites! As a fragile caster I want to kill enemies from afar, not in melee range.
Basically I don't have anything against demonic guardians since it's projectile-transparent (or os, don't know exactly) and spirit shield mutation (since it increases your MP regen rate).

ololoev wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:So you basically get a free fireball in every fight and you will want to turn nighstalker on and off in every fight.
It is easily avoided by adding penalty/restrictions on turning ability on/off.

That would make it even worse as I would need to rest (in case of turn timer) or keep some popcorn (if XP is needed to be able to toggle again)

If there were a penalty to toggling these, it would be pretty much strictly bad to use the toggle, and we'd remove the toggle to avoid giving players a tedious and strictly bad option.

Regarding darkness, the key benefit is that it's easier to limit LOS to monsters, and monsters that are out of LOS are harmless. That is such a strong benefit that any trade-offs which exist are worth it. However, as duvessa pointed out above, there are actually more collateral benefits in the scenario you describe than trade-offs. You still get to hit the spider as much as before, but with the element of surprise and without as many other monsters being able to interact with you at the same time. You also get significantly more choice about whether to fight the spider at all.

Regarding spirit shield there's more of a trade-off, but as pointed out above it never drains MP before HP, so if it took all your MP the alternative was dying. The mutation also significantly improves MP regen, so you'll generally not run short on mp with that mutation set.

I agree that crawl is about fun, and one thing that makes crawl fun in my view is that we try (and sometimes fail) to avoid giving the players ways to waste their time micromanaging things that they think are important but which are not. Another way that crawl is fun in my view is that if you sign up for the race which has random mutations that change the game in interesting ways (ideally), they will sometimes result in you having to change how you play the game.

Sorry for me being away from duscussion for seveal days. But I still cannot agree with darknes/reduced LOS being beneficaial for every build and situation.
LOS can be split into zones with high and low threat level. Distant tiles have low threat level since enemies can hit you only with ranged ammo, very limited amount off spells and abilities. Most of this spells/abilities require clear LOS which is not always true. Closer circles of tiles have increased threat level because monsters get the ability to hit you with bolt spells, iron shot, etc., and the probability that there will be something between you and the enemy is smaller. Also melee monsters on this tiles will reach you faster and pose more threat. Teleportation don't have enough time to kick in before enemies come close and damage you. Adjacent tiles have the higher threat level because adjacent monster can affect you in almost every way he is able to.
Since fighters should kill monster in melee, enemy will go through all that threat zones and total threat among fight will be the sum of that levels. Thus melee fighters wil surely benefit from the reduced LOS. Otherwise, rangers/casters, esp. with Vehumet, can kill monsters on the edge of LOS, engaging them on the low-threat zones. LOS reduction forces player to perform all ranged fights with enemies being more threatening.
If my explanation is not that clear, you can image playing, say, DEFE^Veh with constant fog across all levels. Most fighters will kill for that ability, but a caster will die from the first ogre he meet.

And there are some spells that suffer from reduced LOS:
1. Bolt spells reduce their range as long as your LOS reduces. With the mechanics where every monster hit reduces range by 1, you can hit less monsters in a row with spell cast. I think this is bad and can be fixed in the way where reduced LOS preserves spell range, but every bolt that goes out of LOS cannot damage anymore (if the code changes won't be very complex for this)
2. IOOD should travel 2-4 tiles (I don't remember exact numbers) for the maximum damage. With reduced LOS it's almost impossible to use this spell with maximum efficiency.

ololoev wrote:But I still cannot agree with darknes/reduced LOS being beneficaial for every build and situation.

You have misunderstood the position. The claim is that reduced LOS of nightstalker is overall beneficial for all builds. It may not be beneficial in every situation.

The point of Ds mutations is (ideally) not to provide pure buffs, but something which is overall beneficial and ideally fun. Making nightstalker toggleable would go against this aim.

bel wrote:You have misunderstood the position. The claim is that reduced LOS of nightstalker is overall beneficial for all builds. It may not be beneficial in every situation.

The point of Ds mutations is (ideally) not to provide pure buffs, but something which is overall beneficial and ideally fun. Making nightstalker toggleable would go against this aim.

Yeah, I didn't clarify it in my previous post, waned to say that there is still a huge amount of builds where nightstalker is bad, not just that there are some.
When it comes to 'overall', it may be 90-95% builds which benefit from the mutation and mutation can be considered good.
But most casters-blasters and rangers will suffer from reduced LOS. And I don't think this is a mere 5-10%.

Ok. What's the argument here beyond "This would make the game easier. It would be nice if the game was easier!" As the first post noted, some Demonspawn mutations are better than others - And I'd further add that some mutations are actively dis-advantageous to some builds.

Counterpoint: Good! That makes for interesting/adaptive gameplay.

The point is that more or less, all Ds mutations are beneficial, not negative. Magic link is so-so for casters (remember that you shouldn't drop to 0MP to be unable to cast spells, even dropping to 7MP will prevent you from casting Fire Storm or Ignition) while nightstalker is directly good only for tabbers, other builds mostly suffer from it.
But I'm sure this mutation will live because it may be beneficial under some circumstances and you to decide where to adapt to it. It's like Dr colors where you can pick DrFE and get white color.

ololoev wrote:The point is that more or less, all Ds mutations are beneficial, not negative.

I'd support introducing more "double-edged sword" mutations for Demonspawn, both to emphasise this aspect of adapting to your mutations and to increase Ds replayability.

ololoev wrote:Spirit shield on: Omg brimestone fiend is in los! Too bad for him, I have bolt-o-cold! Oh no I lost almost all my mana because of torment! I can quaff mana pot, what the... (died from damnation)
Spirit shield off: Omg brimestone fiend is in los! Too bad for him, I have bolt-o-cold! You don't want to die from 1 bolt? Get glaciate on your head (butt)! Yeah, 50% HP pff, but I'm alive!

This was your only good point: The current spirit shield+torment interaction is unfair.

But I don't know of a fix which is also fair.

Mana shield 1 can be a negative especially for spellcasters; I don't see a reason why Mana shield 1 and 2 can't be swopped around, hellcrawl style.

Also...that abbreviation of "bolt of cold" by one key press doesn't really seem worth the bother.

Rast wrote:The current spirit shield+torment interaction is unfair.

But I don't know of a fix which is also fair.

How about 'Spirit shield doesn't protect you from torment at all'

But that's kind of a weird exception, isn't it? Torment is damage. Spirit shield lets some damage, of whatever kind of damage you take, get taken as MP instead of HP.
Why should torment have a special case to ignore spirit shield's MP health?

Also, get rid of the special case for poison damage.

duvessa wrote:Also, get rid of the special case for poison damage.

yes, and then get rid of spirit shield as Ds mutation.

Siegurt wrote:
Rast wrote:The current spirit shield+torment interaction is unfair.

But I don't know of a fix which is also fair.

How about 'Spirit shield doesn't protect you from torment at all'

But then you can get tormented down to 5% and still have max MP to protect you from non-torment attacks.

The Tavern

Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable

Re: Make nightstalker mutation toggleable