Remove Translocations


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Post Tuesday, 6th November 2018, 08:11

Remove Translocations

By which I mean, remove the spell school, not all the spells in it. The game doesn't benefit from having a school which boils down to "train this for unlimited controlled blinks, otherwise ignore".

I would remove Apportation, it's only for cheating runes and ease of use, like a substitution for flight in a very few minivaults. All of these are bad. Ease of use shouldn't be a skill you need to train.

I would want to remove Controlled Blink, but could be persuaded to make it an Air&Water spell, to keep it just as expensive to get online.

The remaining spells would be split across existing schools, mostly Air, Water, and Earth.
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Post Tuesday, 6th November 2018, 09:41

Re: Remove Translocations

I think this is a pretty good idea. In a normal game, translocations is really about getting blink, maybe passage of golubria, perhaps malign gateway (the ultimate z5 cheese). Controlled blink is for an extended game only.

Blink is not a great spell. It's too cheap, too spammable, and makes combat position too fluid. Passage of golubria has a different set of problems relating to its value outside of combat (in some sense this is really a problem with gametime mp regeneration). Apportation I actually like, but it's too cheap and too spammable. Some of these problems could be addressed by adding a non-mp cost to these spells. The controlled blink approach of using contamination is baffling to me. (Contamination is a ridiculous mechanic.) Clearly, drain, the duct tape of crawl per-use costs, should be used instead. Throwing a drain cost on blink, apportation, passage, and so on would probably mitigate some of their problems.

But I digress. I think removing spell schools (and translocations in particular) is a great idea. Crawl has way too many skills, too many ways to dump otherwise useless skill points into totally new capabilities for the player character. I would tend to favor removing the spells along with the school, but maybe retaining the spells as very rare, higher level treats for characters already committed to certain skills would make sense.
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Post Tuesday, 6th November 2018, 15:39

Re: Remove Translocations

Controlled blink contam made more sense when it was mixed with semicontrolled blink contam and haste spell contam. I mean, it still didn't make a lot of sense, but it made more sense.

If repositioning spells are going to exist then it's good for them to have their own school imo. I'm not at all sold on the idea that always getting damage spells along with your blinks would be an improvement.

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Post Tuesday, 6th November 2018, 17:42

Re: Remove Translocations

Apportation, Blink, PoG, etc levels could just be increased...

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Post Tuesday, 6th November 2018, 17:56

Re: Remove Translocations

Also the Blink spell isn't all that amazing as long as +Blink randarts and scrolls of blinking exist. Apportation at level 1 is ridiculous though.

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Post Tuesday, 6th November 2018, 21:30

Re: Remove Translocations

translocations need damage

Dispersal and Disjunction are bad and redundant to blink / controled blink. Disjunction aura is similar to Tornado.

pure force: lvl 6 spell / translocations only / deals damage only when target collides with wall or other monster - just worse then fire/cold/earth/conjurations but good if you already learn translocations

lvl 8 spell: radius 3, blink monsters, deals damage, instant (no aura)
or
lvl 8 like pure force (as above) but in all nine directions

so u get all these cool damage spells and controlled blink also?
No.
- remove controlled blink (should be scroll only)
- add semi controlled blink

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Post Tuesday, 6th November 2018, 23:01

Re: Remove Translocations

t w i s t

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 00:00

Re: Remove Translocations

Hard to think of a spell school concept worse than direct damage school number 7.

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 02:08

Re: Remove Translocations

Hellmonk wrote:Hard to think of a spell school concept worse than direct damage school number 7.
summoning school number 3



Anyway, serious part: it's worth training translocations just to get Passage of Golubria on a lot of characters, without going all the way to Controlled Blink. Portal Projectile is also really, really strong. It's wildly inaccurate to say you only train Tloc for cblink. It's not even an exaggeration of the truth, it's just flat out wrong. 90% of the time you train Tloc in a 3-rune game it should be for PoG and stop at PoG, and then you get some other good spells with it as a bonus.

Assuming you are not opposed to the existence of a defensive spell school like Translocations (and I will assume that at least the OP is not, since they left all the other defensive schools alone), the main issues with Translocations are that the individual spells are badly balanced with respect to each other, and that a bunch of them don't work in Zot/orbrun for no good reason.

  • Apportation is level 1. It shouldn't be.
  • Shroud of Golubria has the same problem as other buffs with letting you maintain it while exploring, and the same problem as Infusion where it's designed to be bad later in the game but actually isn't. Granted, it isn't really relevant to the Translocations school anyway since spell power does nothing for it.
  • Lesser Beckoning should never have been nerfed. Its original version was already weak. It feels like it was nerfed because someone didn't want the effect in the game at all - and if that's the case, remove it instead of making it garbage.
  • You cannot get enough spell power for Gell's for it to get a large enough radius to be useful for moving monsters. By the time you have lots of spell power, moving around monsters that are in LOS isn't good anymore no matter how far it moves them. It needs to be better at low power. The main use of it right now is to do damage by colliding monsters with your own summoned butterflies/rats, which is stupid.
  • If you haven't guessed from the rest of this post, I think PoG is way too good. It acts a lot like semicontrolled blink now, with the bonus of letting you recover from bad teleports. Hard to get this effect right, since the original version of it was way too weak, but man, for now you could at least increase its spell level.
  • Force Lance's power level is fine but it's only useful for the damage because the knockback isn't strong enough (unless a lich casts it at you, in which case you fly halfway across the level, or take collision damage if you forgot to lure them somewhere with lots of floor tiles behind you, monsters shouldn't cast this spell btw), so it just ends up being a generic IMB/Icicle substitute.
  • Disjunction is supposed to be a bigger and "better" version of Dispersal, but it's the same level as Controlled Blink for some reason so it's just strictly worse than Controlled Blink outside zot/orbrun/formicid which is super dumb. This should be at least one level below Controlled Blink.

I find Controlled Blink relatively inoffensive because it's in a similar position to Fire Storm or whatever: the rest of the game is free when you have it, but there's a big gap in time between starting to invest xp in it and actually getting any return on that xp. It's too good in extended but every time you do extended, it seems less like a part of the real game, same for ziggurats.

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 05:48

Re: Remove Translocations

If we're providing our opinions on transloc, there's totally some cool transloc spells but it'd be neat if Warper actually felt like an interesting start instead of "I picked this because I really wanted Blink/PoG for a movement gimped race/god". Teleport Other is really lame because it's resistible and slow AND random, and Beckoning/Gell's were covered by duvessa.

Gell's would be cool if it's gravity pull just locked a monster in place for a few turns instead of making the monsters play bumper cars, even if that means a level increase. Is there anyone who actually likes using the current form of Gell's?

Transloc has enough fun stuff I think it'd be ridiculous to just drop the school, and crazy unbalanced to disperse any of it's good skills to other schools. However, the school is currently a weird mix of underwhelming utility spells next to "this single spell is worth learning the school for!".

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 05:59

Re: Remove Translocations

oh yeah the fact that Wr isn't allowed to train Tloc at XL1 is bonkers

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 09:00

Re: Remove Translocations

Indeed. As Tumalu said, picking warper is just "I wanna get blink and PoG". That background needs some adjustments. Duvessa covered most of why this spell school is wacky, I'll just add my 5 cents:

  • I really, really like PoG and always learn it on every character as it is my ultimate tactical tool. But it needs to get some adjustments as it is way too good. PoG needs to punish harder on bad teleports. Right now you can create a chain of passages and just continually jump until you get out of danger. A cooldown of sorts would be nice after you take a gate. Not much, not to make it complete garbage but like 3-4 turns, so that you cannot just spam it and zap back-and-forth. While under cooldown you cannot take another passage. That would make it so you have to think if it is too dangerous to take that passage and suffer a possibility of landing and being stuck somewhere unsafe.
  • Someone offered a solution to Vile Cluth, since it's way too OP: Remove it and give some of it's properties to Gell's Gravitas. That would require for Gravitas to be atleast a spell school higher or even a level 5 spell. Make it so it does damage on cast instead of continuous damage and so it holds the targets as Vile Clutch does, but maybe add more monster types that can resist this (honestly I don't know why flying monsters are affected by VC).
  • Make lesser beckoning's starting range 4 as at low spellpower it's total garbage.
  • Teleport other is nice when it works, but usually it doesn't. I suggest to make so that if it does not pass targets MR it will at least randomly blink an enemy and maybe increase it's spell power a bit, so it's not impossible to land on a high MR monster. Other suggestion would be to make it "Blink other". If it passes MR it blinks the target directly away from you, if it does not passes MR it will randomly blink a monster in a x tile radius.
  • Make Shroud of Golubria like Ozocubu's, where if you move, the buff disappears.

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 09:26

Re: Remove Translocations

People complain about teleport other a lot, but I think it is pretty strong for a level 3 spell. It makes the monster go away, it's the most important spell in Wr's early game and it's well worth casting throughout Lair. It's obviously not as strong as the hexes in the Hexes skill, but that's the price you pay for getting a hex in a non-Hexes school.

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 09:54

Re: Remove Translocations

Hellmonk wrote:Hard to think of a spell school concept worse than direct damage school number 7.

I assume you don't count Necromancy (3 damage spells) and Hexes (2 damage spells) as direct damage schools.

Necromancy has it all: damage, buffs, utility and summoning. Hexes have utility, good summoning (mana vipers, tukima's dance), good damage (fuliminant prism). Bad concept?

I don't think it's wrong to add to Transocations one or two, tricky to use damage spells.
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 12:13

Re: Remove Translocations

Teleport other is not a good fit for a game where you need to exterminate every monster on a level. You better be prepared to reexplore any level where you plan to use it. The delay on the teleportation is an example of foolish consistency, since the player can just kite the monster in any sensible use-case. So in addition to (probably) spamming the spell to get it to affect the target, you devote further actions to avoid getting hit after the effect lands. Using teleport other is annoying on every possible level, yet it's part of an activity people do for fun.
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 13:57

Re: Remove Translocations

tealizard wrote:Teleport other is not a good fit for a game where you need to exterminate every monster on a level.

What game is that? There's no need to exterminate every monster on a level in Crawl.
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 14:46

radzia wrote:translocations need damage

I'm not sure if we need damage for tLoc - but do you know that we already had a lev-9 tLoc spell which did a lot of damage? It was kind of a (small) black hole you could create.

But for some reason, singularity, added in 0.16, was already removed in 0.17.


Slightly off topic:
I personally didn't use it, so I don't know much about it. What is the reason that devs threw this spell into a black hole?
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 14:51

Re: Remove Translocations

Sprucery wrote:
tealizard wrote:Teleport other is not a good fit for a game where you need to exterminate every monster on a level.

What game is that? There's no need to exterminate every monster on a level in Crawl.


You certainly should kill every monster that is a plausible target for teleport other. Are you going to claim that you don't bother to hunt down monsters you teleport?

edit: We could go back and forth on this, but let me cut to the chase here. Teleport other is a spell that has basic mechanical problems as I outline above. I put it in maximal terms because it is better to err on the side of being more critical than less when it comes to standards for game mechanics. You suggest that actually the player can get away with being sloppy and not track down teleported monsters. Sure, this is true, but behind this outrage is a defense of a lower standard of design. I don't see the point.
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 15:01

Re: Remove Translocations

tealizard wrote:Are you going to claim that you don't bother to hunt down monsters you teleport?

Why... why would I do that? If I'm teleporting it, I probably didn't want to fight it. The only case when I can imagine tracking down a teleported monster would be if someone had an item I really wanted, and I wanted to reset the fight.

Not fighting monsters is really, really strong.
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 15:08

Re: Remove Translocations

It is extremely common in crawl to delay a fight only to come back and finish later. Sometimes reengaging is the next thing you do. Disengaging and reengaging is like the bread and butter of crawl tactics.

To me, this line of argument about how you don't have to chase down teleported monsters or even that it's somehow a bad idea to do that suggests that in a lot of people's experience these things are vacuously true because they don't use teleport other at all.
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 16:10

I'd rather move a monster away from me than get killed by it, so I'm not really sure what this argument is about. If you don't want to have to hunt the monster down again then just don't learn a spell whose entire purpose is making it go away. Are you suggesting Teleport Other should be reworked to NOT teleport others???

The real problem is just that it's power is somewhat questionable even for that purpose. Apart from being highly resistable after earlygame, it takes several turns to work even if it hits, and the monster's liable to still tele somewhere in LoS. But duvessa's correct that it's probably okay through Lair, which I guess is OK for a lv3 starter book spell.

Turukano wrote:I'm not sure if we need damage for tLoc - but do you know that we already had a lev-9 tLoc spell which did a lot of damage? It was kind of a (small) black hole you could create.

I personally didn't use it, so I don't know much about it. What is the reason that devs threw this spell into a black hole?

I've seen it talked about, pretty sure the conclusion was the spell was too ridiculously good and transloc is already powerful enough at high levels with stuff like C.Blink and Malign Gateway.

Not only did it deal major non-elemental AoE damage, but it also pulled monsters off of you and hard-blocked-off corridors for a really long time.
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 16:27

Tumalu wrote:Are you suggesting Teleport Other should be reworked to NOT teleport others???


I am suggesting that the spell should be removed because using it is annoying. I agree with previous posters that the spell is useful and reasonably powerful. The problem is that using it to its potential is tedious.
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 16:38

Re: Remove Translocations

Hmm. On the other hand, maybe it really COULD be reworked to... not teleport others.

Rename it slightly and make it phase the monster out of this dimension for a little while, then it reappears right where it was (or in the closest empty space). Same function; monster go byebye. Except without the randomness. No worries it'll teleport right next to you in a brutal twist of RNG, and you know exactly where it's gonna be later. Arguably worse if the duration isn't super long (spellpower based, of course), but much more -consistent-.

Bonus points if monster MR/HD just significantly reduces duration instead of making the spell completely fail. At that point the spell sounds potentially compelling and I start liking Warper background. That would probably need to come with a level increase.
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 20:24

Re: Remove Translocations

I only said that there's no need to kill every monster on a level in Crawl. That was my only point. Do you kill every monster on Zot:5 usually?

If I would use Teleport Other, I would use it in a situation where I currently don't want to fight a certain monster. For example, it's faster than me and I want to retreat upstairs. In practice, I almost never use it.

So I'm not defending the spell, and would not feel sad if it would be removed. (On a related note, disto weapons teleporting monsters is mostly just annoying.)
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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 21:20

Re: Remove Translocations

Tumalu wrote:crazy unbalanced to disperse any of it's good skills to other schools.


Why? I'm not suggesting dispersing them all to the same school.

duvessa wrote:People complain about teleport other a lot, but I think it is pretty strong for a level 3 spell. It makes the monster go away, it's the most important spell in Wr's early game.


Disagree. I think blink is stronger. It certainly comes online sooner and for less investment, and remains online longer if you transition to heavier armor.

The Warper starting book is a mess anyway in my opinion. I consider the class to essentially be: mediocre weapon of choice, blink spell, two free scrolls of blink. You are on your own when it comes to killing monsters.

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 21:43

Re: Remove Translocations

Rast wrote:Why? I'm not suggesting dispersing them all to the same school.

Sure, Summon Forest wouldn't be that bad if it became Summoning/Earth, I guess P.Proj could be Hexes/Charms and Recall just becomes Summoning, but adding, say, C.Blink to a different spell school drastically powers up said other school(s) even if it's expensive. Hexes gaining Malign Gateway turns enchanters into potential damage blasters lategame without needing to invest in real damage schools like conjurations, which they're often terrible at. Sure, you could just remove most of the Transloc skillset entirely, but then it comes down to... why?

And yes, Warper is currently the start of "Has Blink", which is really lame. If the spell school is too centered around Controlled Blink, buff the other lame spells, as the bulk of the conversation in the thread suggests. If that makes the school too good, nerf C.Blink, it's a sort of crazy spell anyway. What if casting C.Blink inflicted -Tele like dimension anchor? It's still an amazing spell with a single castings worth, and the status only needs to last a few turns to make a big impact. More spellpower=less cooldown.

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 23:43

Re: Remove Translocations

radzia wrote:
Hellmonk wrote:Hard to think of a spell school concept worse than direct damage school number 7.

I assume you don't count Necromancy (3 damage spells) and Hexes (2 damage spells) as direct damage schools.

Necromancy has it all: damage, buffs, utility and summoning. Hexes have utility, good summoning (mana vipers, tukima's dance), good damage (fuliminant prism). Bad concept?

I don't think it's wrong to add to Transocations one or two, tricky to use damage spells.

Necromancy's ability to do everything well is indeed major criticism of the school. Plenty of people have brought it up before, tho usually from a powerlevel context. Fulminant prism is a conjuration that has hexes school attached for no discernible reason - it could certainly be a pure conjuration or an elemental spell instead. If we're counting dual school stuff then translocations already has two damaging spells (gell's and force lance) and the best highlevel summon in the game (malign gateway). There's absolutely not a good reason to add more damaging effects in translocations if each spell school is meant to have a particular functional role.

Of course there are other ways to approach the spell school paradigm, like the sort of variety of effects "themed" school thing some of the elementalist starts seem to hint at. In that case mixing tloc effects into the other schools or vice versa makes some sense. I think either way DCSS should be looking to cut two schools' worth of spells minimum; there's an extreme amount of redundancy esp. among damaging conjuration-like effects. Adding more damage spells is not a good way to go.

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 23:56

Re: Remove Translocations

Tumalu wrote:
Rast wrote:Why? I'm not suggesting dispersing them all to the same school.

adding, say, C.Blink to a different spell school drastically powers up said other school(s) even if it's expensive.

Make it level 9 and tri-class, then. Or remove it from Crawl, whatever.

I am not sure why unlimited blinks is considered less broken than unlimited hastes was, except that level 8 translocations is a lot less accessible than level 6 charms.

Hexes gaining Malign Gateway

Nobody suggested this.

Malign Gateway should be Summoning only or monsters only. If you keep it as a player spell, you could bump it up to level 8 to make up for being single-class.

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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 23:57

Re: Remove Translocations

Hellmonk wrote:I think either way DCSS should be looking to cut two schools' worth of spells minimum; there's an extreme amount of redundancy esp. among damaging conjuration-like effects. Adding more damage spells is not a good way to go.


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Post Wednesday, 7th November 2018, 23:58

Re: Remove Translocations

Tumalu wrote:And yes, Warper is currently the start of "Has Blink", which is really lame.

I'm not convinced that "Warper is a lame start" and "The translocation school is bad" are equivalent, if warpers are bad, just remove warpers.

Warper's bad-ness or not bad-ness is really irrelevant as to whether the translocation school is good or bad.
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Post Thursday, 8th November 2018, 01:00

Re: Remove Translocations

Siegurt wrote:if warpers are bad, just remove warpers.


Warper is a fine start if you don't fall for the trap of training translocations heavily, as if it was the main skill of most book starts.

If Translocations school was removed, I would still want to keep Warper as a background.

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Post Thursday, 8th November 2018, 07:22

Re: Remove Translocations

The reward for training a spell school to a high level is a strong spell. That's kind of the whole point. You train a skill. You get a good thing in exchange. I don't get the "controlled blink is too good" thing. Like yeah, it's good, and that's why you have to train a (mostly) non-damage spell school high enough to be able to cast a level 8 spell and you better not be wearing heavy armor and decent int helps.

It's already pretty unrealistic to cast controlled blink in a 3 rune game. Even if you get it, it's towards the very end and it's not even that useful and you probably wouldn't even need it if you spent xp on a good skill instead, and you probably have blink scrolls anyway if you really need to blink (and you'd probably have more blink scrolls left if you trained a good skill instead). To be fair, it's good with brilliance, never tried partially training for it and using brilliance to use it.

Anyway, if it's OP in Tomb or whatever (because it sure isn't in a 3 rune game), I like the -tele for a few turns idea. Or increase the contam so that 2 or 3 casts put you in yellow (but who cares about yellow contam when they're doing Tomb? You'd probably want to avoid red though).

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Post Thursday, 8th November 2018, 14:53

Re: Remove Translocations

Wahaha wrote:The reward for training a spell school to a high level is a strong spell. That's kind of the whole point. You train a skill. You get a good thing in exchange.


Normally you get other good things to reward your training along the way. In Earth, Sandblast --> Stone Arrow --> LRD --> Iron Shot --> LCS --> Shatter. (and that's not all the good Earth spells by a long shot).

If C.Blink didn't exist, Translocations would be ignored after Passage of Golubria.

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Post Thursday, 8th November 2018, 16:26

Re: Remove Translocations

I think the only problem with the Translocations school is that it's so weak in the early game.

Apportation, the only level 1 spell, is pure utility which many players will rarely, if ever, want to use.
Blink requires careful positioning and use of terrain to get it from being borderline suicidal to being unreliable at best.
Shroud requires significant AC to be useful against nontrivial threats, and generally early game characters have to choose between AC and spell success.
Beckoning requires extremely high spell power to be able to reach ranged threats, meaning that for most of the game, luring is much preferable.

All of this together makes Warper basically a weak fighter with guaranteed access to a spellbook that's useful in the mid-to-late game, which would often be found in the dungeon anyway. Rather than removing Translocations, I'd recommend improving the early game experience so that using Translocations in the early game is actually viable:

Add a level 1 Conjurations/Translocations with moderate accuracy and damage plus a slight (0.1?) turn delay on impact to distinguish it from other level 1 damage spells.
Make Blink semi-controlled with radius of possible destinations shrinking as spell power increases so that players can at least trust that they won't end up surrounded by the horde they want to escape.
Tie Shroud's chance of collapse to spell power rather than damage magnitude.
Scale Beckoning's range more evenly so that it gradually becomes useful as spell power increases, or rework it so that it has range LoS but have distance pulled increase with spell power and decrease with target size, so that to pull the largest enemies from max range into melee range requires maximum spell power, but medium sized orc priests could be pulled most or all of the way to an early-game player who has been training Translocations.

This should give Warpers the option of focusing on melee, magic, or a balance of both, for a much more interesting, fun, and unique early-game experience.

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Post Thursday, 8th November 2018, 18:02

Re: Remove Translocations

Nekoatl wrote:Apportation, the only level 1 spell, is pure utility which many players will rarely, if ever, want to use.


It's not even in the starting Translocations book, and rightfully so, because It's real main use is grabbing runes/Orb. For a level 20+ character, It hardly matters what school a level one spell is in.

Blink requires careful positioning and use of terrain to get it from being borderline suicidal to being unreliable at best.


Blink is extremely useful, but yes very skill testing.

Rather than removing Translocations, I'd recommend improving the early game experience so that using Translocations in the early game is actually viable:


Again, I want to remove the school, but not the spells.

We can still have a Warper background that gets utility warper stuff and spells, just the spells won't all be in the same spell school. If that made Warper too weak, it could be re balanced to compensate.

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Post Thursday, 8th November 2018, 18:54

Re: Remove Translocations

The way you worded the OP makes it sound like there are only a few decent Translocation spells that should be preserved, which I disagree with. I know there are a number of Translocations spells that some players consider useless, but which spells are deemed useless vary from player to player, whereas other players think they're good. I consider Apportation worthless because I'm more interested in killing things than fiddling with some silly orb that doesn't even make me more powerful, but other players consider Apportation OP because it allows recovery of key items without combat. I think Translocations has a lot of such situational spells that not everyone will be interested in, and that's fine. There's enough utility there to justify the existence of the skill, it just needs a few tweaks to make the experience of training it more palatable.

As for Blink specifically, in certain situations it can be a lifesaver, but even when used skillfully, it's not reliable, so I prefer to avoid those situations as much as possible and use scrolls of Blink as a reliable escape for the remainder. I do tend to memorize Blink when it's available, but I almost never actually cast it outside of orb runs (and even then only because Controlled Blink doesn't work correctly with the orb) or as an inefficient means of crossing water/lava when nothing better's available.

If the Translocations school were removed, though, I'd say Warper should definitely be removed as well, but I still think it's better to just improve the early-game Translocations experience.

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Post Thursday, 8th November 2018, 20:28

Re: Remove Translocations

Rast wrote:
Nekoatl wrote:Apportation, the only level 1 spell, is pure utility which many players will rarely, if ever, want to use.


It's not even in the starting Translocations book, and rightfully so, because It's real main use is grabbing runes/Orb.
If you think this is the main use of Apportation you aren't casting it nearly as much as you should

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Post Thursday, 8th November 2018, 20:47

Re: Remove Translocations

duvessa wrote:
Rast wrote:
Nekoatl wrote:Apportation, the only level 1 spell, is pure utility which many players will rarely, if ever, want to use.


It's not even in the starting Translocations book, and rightfully so, because It's real main use is grabbing runes/Orb.
If you think this is the main use of Apportation you aren't casting it nearly as much as you should


Please enlighten me.

Are you talking about stuff like pulling gold off zot traps? That's miserable and shouldn't be part of the game.
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Post Thursday, 8th November 2018, 21:24

Re: Remove Translocations

I use apportation to grab useful consumables from the edge of LOS so I get them before the monsters outside LOS notice me. It's much better to have the useful item in inventory rather than on the ground a few steps away when you have hostile monsters in view.
DCSS: 97:...MfCj}SpNeBaEEGrFE{HaAKTrCK}DsFESpHu{FoArNaBe}
FeEE{HOIEMiAE}GrGlHuWrGnWrNaAKBaFi{MiDeMfDe}{DrAKTrAMGhEnGnWz}
{PaBeDjFi}OgAKPaCAGnCjOgCKMfAEAtCKSpCjDEEE{HOSu
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Post Thursday, 8th November 2018, 23:12

Re: Remove Translocations

If you have Apportation, you should nearly always apport items instead of walking over to them to pick them up. It's safer and uses fewer turns.

It shouldn't be part of the game, but it is, and there's no point in denying that it is.
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Post Friday, 9th November 2018, 00:16

Re: Remove Translocations

This is why it should have an XP-gated cost, like drain, int loss, or similar.
This is where mechanical excellence and one-thousand four-hundred horsepower pays off.

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Post Friday, 9th November 2018, 03:25

Re: Remove Translocations

Also, apport your ammo back after firing.

Edit: I suppose that's mostly for Throwing.
Last edited by Airwolf on Friday, 9th November 2018, 04:20, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Friday, 9th November 2018, 03:30

Re: Remove Translocations

I just can't get behind that reasoning. I'd say it was worth it back when monsters could take items you'd seen from the ground and use them against you, but now, spending 1 MP to pick up an item a bit earlier just seems wasteful. Grabbing items from within the sight radius of some dangerous enemy I don't want to deal with would be worth it, but every item? No way. I can't remember ever dying and thinking, "Damn, if only I'd been able to grab that item off the ground, I could have lived!".
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Post Friday, 9th November 2018, 04:14

Re: Remove Translocations

Apportation spam saves turns, lets you step on fewer tiles and therefore fewer traps, etc. 1 mp is not a meaningful cost outside of combat. It's barely meaningful in combat for most of the game. If you lost a game as a warper after being shafted, there's actually a reasonable chance that the cause was failure to spam apportation.
This is where mechanical excellence and one-thousand four-hundred horsepower pays off.

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Post Friday, 9th November 2018, 04:20

Re: Remove Translocations

I never train Translocations for "unlimited controlled blink", because I almost never learn controlled blink. So the OP is rather mysterious to me.

I think Translocations is fine mostly. Apportation and Blink are a bit OP. Malign Gateway is pretty good but it's lvl 7 dual-school so it's allowed to be good.

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Post Friday, 9th November 2018, 05:42

Re: Remove Translocations

The trap avoidance argument makes sense for those with enough patience to not rely on auto-explore to map levels, but even the idea of preventing an occasional trap-induced death is not enough incentive for me to manually explore. Starvation and piety decay from characters looping around levels several times to get eyes on walls previously ignored by the algorithm almost are, but still not quite.
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Post Friday, 9th November 2018, 07:21

Re: Remove Translocations

I almost constantly use autoexplore, and apportation is still useful, because then autoexplore doesn't have to travel to those items.

Apportation would be interesting as a racial/divine ability. It should be automatic, though: whenever you see an item which is on your autopickup list, it is apported to your location. Of course, you should also be able to use it manually, to get items not on your autopickup list.
DCSS: 97:...MfCj}SpNeBaEEGrFE{HaAKTrCK}DsFESpHu{FoArNaBe}
FeEE{HOIEMiAE}GrGlHuWrGnWrNaAKBaFi{MiDeMfDe}{DrAKTrAMGhEnGnWz}
{PaBeDjFi}OgAKPaCAGnCjOgCKMfAEAtCKSpCjDEEE{HOSu
Bloat: 17: RaRoPrPh{GuStGnCa}{ArEtZoNb}KiPaAnDrBXDBQOApDaMeAGBiOCNKAsFnFlUs{RoBoNeWi
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Post Friday, 9th November 2018, 07:50

Re: Remove Translocations

Nekoatl wrote:The trap avoidance argument makes sense for those with enough patience to not rely on auto-explore to map levels, but even the idea of preventing an occasional trap-induced death is not enough incentive for me to manually explore. Starvation and piety decay from characters looping around levels several times to get eyes on walls previously ignored by the algorithm almost are, but still not quite.


If there is a significant advantage in being an automaton with unlimited patience, that is a design flaw and should be addressed.
This is where mechanical excellence and one-thousand four-hundred horsepower pays off.

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Post Friday, 9th November 2018, 19:34

Re: Remove Translocations

That reminds me of a post I saw here a while back but can't seem to find now. Basically, someone tried playing a game making excessive use of exclusions to minimize the number of unique tiles stepped on as a trap avoidance strategy and after winning reported the strategy to be effective but painfully time consuming. So, even if Apportation were removed from the game, the strategic disadvantages to using autoexplore would still exist. Aside from significantly improving the autoexplore algorithm or removing it entirely, I don't see a way to remove the incentives to refrain from using it... and removing it would seem to be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Improving the algorithm to be competitive with a skilled player's manual choices seems... difficult. But, if I were to make the attempt, I would place a higher priority on fully exploring (at least to the extent that it will ever try to explore) nearby tiles to prevent the long back-and-forth behavior that wastes large numbers of turns, and minimizing the number of unique tiles stepped on by flagging which tiles have been stepped on and preferring those. Maybe also have an options flag to use Apportation to fetch items while the spell is memorized to further reduce tile-step count for players that care about that.
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Post Saturday, 10th November 2018, 01:16

Re: Remove Translocations

So the idea isn't that there has to be a plan to fix everything before anything changes, but there's a critical difference between autoexplore and apportation. Autoexplore is an interface convenience built on top of the mechanics of the game, while apportation is a game mechanic. A game mechanic demands the careful player's consideration and it may be true of some game mechanics that you really have to (or "should" if some people prefer) use them in certain ways.
This is where mechanical excellence and one-thousand four-hundred horsepower pays off.

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