Simplify/Rework Shroud of Golubria
Posted: Friday, 6th April 2018, 01:40
The current Shroud of Golubria spell is fairly complicated, with the wiki page including a handy graph to try to explain how your chances work. Reference to current version: http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Shroud_of_Golubria. As a reminder, it only applies to melee attacks - it won't block (or expire from) magic or ranged attacks.
I'm not going to get into it, but it's unintuitive, and of somewhat limited power due to being level 2 (although it's strong for level 2). My proposal to simplify it is to change it to trigger on 100% of attacks above a damage threshold. It then fully negates that attack, and consumes a 'charge'. When the spell is out of charges, it expires. The shroud does not expire based on time passed. The minimum damage threshold is to prevent it from 'wasting' charges on attacks that would only deal 1-2 damage. The threshold could either be static (say, 10 damage), or based on the player's max hp (10% of max hp). The number of charges should be low - I'm thinking 1 or 2.
That said, my dream version would probably bump this up to level 3 or 4 and give it 3 charges, but that might be a bit too powerful. Alternatively, the amount of charges you get could be based on spellpower; always at least 1, 2 at medium spellpower, and require significant investment for 3. If it does give 3, even conditionally on spellpower, you might want to hit the player with a -Shroud status for a few turns to prevent people from just recasting the spell immediately and keeping charges up at all times.
It would be a very helpful spell for high EV characters to avoid damage spikes, and might make light armor melee more viable; it would be less useful for heavy armor characters, but even so more damage reduction is always a good thing. By going for it not timing out I'm trying to avoid the "keep recasting it out of combat" charms problem, but you do still have the "cast it once out of combat" charms problem. Still I think this version is less tedious then the current version which has a timed duration and unpredictable removal upon taking damage. I think it gets rarely used because it's not obvious how good it is, and due to the tediousness of using it; I'm hoping this rework would fix both of those things.
I'm not going to get into it, but it's unintuitive, and of somewhat limited power due to being level 2 (although it's strong for level 2). My proposal to simplify it is to change it to trigger on 100% of attacks above a damage threshold. It then fully negates that attack, and consumes a 'charge'. When the spell is out of charges, it expires. The shroud does not expire based on time passed. The minimum damage threshold is to prevent it from 'wasting' charges on attacks that would only deal 1-2 damage. The threshold could either be static (say, 10 damage), or based on the player's max hp (10% of max hp). The number of charges should be low - I'm thinking 1 or 2.
That said, my dream version would probably bump this up to level 3 or 4 and give it 3 charges, but that might be a bit too powerful. Alternatively, the amount of charges you get could be based on spellpower; always at least 1, 2 at medium spellpower, and require significant investment for 3. If it does give 3, even conditionally on spellpower, you might want to hit the player with a -Shroud status for a few turns to prevent people from just recasting the spell immediately and keeping charges up at all times.
It would be a very helpful spell for high EV characters to avoid damage spikes, and might make light armor melee more viable; it would be less useful for heavy armor characters, but even so more damage reduction is always a good thing. By going for it not timing out I'm trying to avoid the "keep recasting it out of combat" charms problem, but you do still have the "cast it once out of combat" charms problem. Still I think this version is less tedious then the current version which has a timed duration and unpredictable removal upon taking damage. I think it gets rarely used because it's not obvious how good it is, and due to the tediousness of using it; I'm hoping this rework would fix both of those things.