Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff


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Slime Squisher

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Post Monday, 12th February 2018, 09:45

Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

Inspired by the topic about toggleable nightstalker. From that post I learned tha some players can leave popcorn behind to use it for item recharging. We all know that it is optimal behaviour to learn haste on your MiBe and cast it before every fight (that's why it was removed). But there is a lot more toggleable, grindable, duplicating and boring stuff.
1. XP-gated evocables: fan, phial, lamp and rod. All this items require you to ge some XP to use it again. If you meet a hard point in your progression, you may want to use every item several times, which forces you to use it, then go into easier branch for recharging and repeat. Even more, you can skip some easy floors to preserve XP there for later use.
To remove this extremely boring, but optimal behaviour, all this 4 items could be moved/merged into wands.
Fan -> new wand of dispersal with mix of fan and dispersal effect.
Phial -> let wand of iceblast create water ponds and increase damage in arget tile, or create new wand with phial effect.
Lamp -> merge into wand of clouds.
Rod -> merge into wand of scattershot, maybe split damage into 50% physical 50% elec and increase spread after 1-2 tiles passed.
Also box and sack can be merged into wand of summoning which creates 1 strong werespider and several weaker spiders that may throws webs on high power.
2. Flying: as soon as you acquire flying ability, you tend to always turn it on for unpassable terrain, fighting in the shallow water/or vs Jorgrun, and turn it off against wind drakes, SpAE's and titans. Toggling it is a no-brainer like casting Haste before every fight. You rarely have a hard choice where you fight Jorgrun and SpAM simultaneously, or melee with a titan in shallow water, but I think this situations is a no-brainers too - you just dive the crawl source code, calculate the probabilities of being damaged by any type of ability and pick flying/walking.
Flying shouldn't have any ineraction with spells and abilities and only serve as a "terrain-passing" ability.

For this message the author ololoev has received thanks: 3
Airwolf, duvessa, nago

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 12th February 2018, 16:00

Re: Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

This, but unironically.

Abyss Ambulator

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Post Monday, 12th February 2018, 16:16

Re: Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

Wait was this a joke? Cause this is pretty legit
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Cocytus Succeeder

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Post Monday, 12th February 2018, 17:51

Re: Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

Yeah, I'd also suggest that flight should be just removed as well deep water and just keep lava for unpassable terrain for everyone if some vaults\whatever really needs it.
screw it I hate this character I'm gonna go melee Gastronok

Abyss Ambulator

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Post Monday, 12th February 2018, 20:39

Re: Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

nago wrote:Yeah, I'd also suggest that flight should be just removed as well deep water and just keep lava for unpassable terrain for everyone if some vaults\whatever really needs it.


Tengu nerf!

Tomb Titivator

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Post Tuesday, 13th February 2018, 00:06

Re: Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

Can we work on getting rid of "easy" XP instead? I mean obviously it's a relative term but if a monster poses no threat, it should not give XP.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Tuesday, 13th February 2018, 01:24

Re: Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

johlstei wrote:Can we work on getting rid of "easy" XP instead? I mean obviously it's a relative term but if a monster poses no threat, it should not give XP.

The easier things I can think of are dynamic XP-gating and HD-gating, increasing with level. Maybe, very weak species like felid could have different gates, compared to Mi.
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Slime Squisher

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Post Tuesday, 13th February 2018, 07:33

Re: Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

TeshiAlair wrote:Wait was this a joke? Cause this is pretty legit

Lol, despite my nick and way of telling things, I'm deadly serious in this post.
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Crypt Cleanser

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Post Tuesday, 13th February 2018, 11:10

Re: Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

johlstei wrote:Can we work on getting rid of "easy" XP instead? I mean obviously it's a relative term but if a monster poses no threat, it should not give XP.

That's almost happening already. You get virtually no XP from popcorn, as compared to real-threat monsters. Only in the beginning of the game does popcorn XP matter for skill development, because at that stage there is no popcorn.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Tuesday, 13th February 2018, 23:04

Re: Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

I don't think it makes sense to leave behind popcorn monsters for xp-gated recharging. You'll see this when you find an early lamp of fire and use it in early D, for example. It takes several cleared levels before you can use it again. Add to this the fact that you don't know beforehand how many monsters you need for the recharging.

As to the proposal, removing the evokables would make the game more boring. The sack and the box are still op items, but this is easy to fix by just making them require more Evo skill for good results. The fan, on the other hand, still seems worthless.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Friday, 16th February 2018, 00:57

Re: Toggling, duplication, grinding and other stuff

Some cases would be OK for a toggle button, like Dith's smoke.

Dith is pretty interesting as a god for ranged, because of his shadow mimic. However, the smoke on hit is something of a turn down.
If you are ranged, you will lose line of sight to many targets. If you have a cloud spell, losing the e.g. ice clouds from los will turn them off, and the presence of smoke clouds all around you means that you cannot cast again. Finally, the worst problem is that it can indirectly kill you by cutting off from los an area where you could have blinked with a scroll.
So it would be nice if it were activable another way than being punched.
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