The Tavern

A brief explanation of the philosophy behind this change:

The current status of Crawl's mutation game is essentially
solved: if you get malmutations, quaff Cure Mutation. If you find
Beneficial Mutation, quaff it. If you're feeling lucky, or if you
absolutely need to get rid of a certain malmutation and are out of Cure
Mutation, then quaff Mutation. These choices are not very interesting.
Cure Mutation in effect becomes a tax paid for making positioning
mistakes against malmutators, and when they run out of !cmut, then for
some players malmutators become top priorities, with a risk of
'permanently ruining' their character if they become too malmutated.

Since the new potion generates frequently, for now, it ensures that
the player will usually have the option to reroll their mutations if they
get a set that they decide that they don't want to play with. The
decision to reroll is also no longer binary: each mutation set is
evaluated in the context of the character's abilities and strengths, and
the player will decide "Is it worth risking getting something worse
or better?" (Compare the Cure Mutation decision described above.)

It creates a mutation baseline for most characters: at least two
mutations in any given game (unless they were lucky / savvy enough
to never be malmutated, and Zin-ite enough to never succumb to the
purple temptation!), and likely 3+.

The goal is to increase player control and interaction with the mutation
mechanic, and to generate more relevant and interesting decisions that
will differ on a character-by-character (or even mutation-by-mutation)
basis.

svendre wrote:What irks me about mutations is that you can mostly avoid them, but only if you play tediously. For example, order allies to retreat ahead of you, just in case you might step into sight of a malmutator that uses malmutate on you the instant they see you (which is really annoying.) The history of it that I remember is that it's always been a pain to avoid them. Cure mutation potions used to be so extremely rare, sometimes your only option if you wanted to get rid of Teleportitis was to scum abyss and that could take forever and you'd get even more mutations in the process. So, they made the new mutation potions and they were plentiful, then, basically it's the same situation except instead of trying to keep mutations gone, you are instead trying to hold onto those potions to get rid of bad mutations (and usually gaining a few good ones in the process.) So, it's gone pretty much almost nowhere except now characters usually have a few good mutations, or could be badly mutated if they didn't play tediously to avoid malmutate. If the new mutation potions are much harder to find now, then things have really gone full circle, minus amulets of resist mutation.

I don't much understand what the mutation system is trying to accomplish. Are we supposed to be punished with bad mutations for not walking on egg shells every game? More and more I find myself playing Zin through the malmutate portions of the game then switching gods. It's odd to clear most of the game until entering Zot5, slimes and abyss. At least mummies and ghouls used to be able to avoid them, but now with the stupid wretched star things which are so so lame (and unavoidable, LOS isn't even required for their b.s.) that they cause massive stat drain to undead, dying of stat drain is now even worse. Playing with necromutate, you practically have to keep turning it on-off every time you see a wretched star. I guess I just really hate malmutate.