The Tavern

DD gets a big fat heal wounds to make up for their zero regen and this makes no sense to me. All it does it make mistakes easily erased by spamming it, and otherwise tough or risky fights quite safe by HW spam. Meanwhile you could replace it with a temporary bit of health regeneration rate that would end once it heals a similar amount to the current HW ability. It wouldn't be very fast regen, so it probably wouldn't be worth it to risk the permanent mana cost. This will still allow DDs to get to full with no monsters in sight almost exactly the same (except it takes more turns), but makes their combat in line with other melee brutes. Since it would be so much weaker in combat, you could buff the overall healing amount, or have a lower chance to consume mana, and this would also have the effect of making gods other than Makhleb more viable for DDs.

Being shoehorned into certain gods to play a species without being annoyed is exclusive to DDs, and a free mistake eraser on the level of spammable heal wounds is also unheard of. I mean yeah centaurs can just run away from shit to erase mitakes but you can still get pelted with ranged while running or get cut off by a monster or get chased by a high speed monster or something so that's still much more interesting than standing there and gaining your entire health bar back. Replacing it with temporary regen rate that's a little bit buffed in other ways would help mitigate both of these problems.

While I in general agree that your proposed change from instant heal -> slow heal makes sense, the following is a bad idea.

Since it would be so much weaker in combat, you could buff the overall healing amount, or have a lower chance to consume mana,

DD are incredibly powerful still, and buffing them even more is unnessecary.

le_nerd wrote:While I in general agree that your proposed change from instant heal -> slow heal makes sense, the following is a bad idea.

Since it would be so much weaker in combat, you could buff the overall healing amount, or have a lower chance to consume mana,

DD are incredibly powerful still, and buffing them even more is unnessecary.

Well it would still be a massive net nerf compared to the current state of DDs. I think that it makes sense because, as I said, it would make non-Makhleb DDs more bearable.

I could be wrong, but I think that while this proposal does make DD less broken in their get-out-of-jail HW card, it doesn't change in any way their dependence on some gods for their normal healing needs. Unless you give this regen thing a lot more charges, but then why not have DD heal normally since it would be functionally equivalent?

pedritolo wrote:I could be wrong, but I think that while this proposal does make DD less broken in their get-out-of-jail HW card, it doesn't change in any way their dependence on some gods for their normal healing needs. Unless you give this regen thing a lot more charges, but then why not have DD heal normally since it would be functionally equivalent?

What I meant was that it might be possible to buff the regen ability's total healing compared to the current HW so that, though it would be far weaker in a fight still, it would require less uses to rest to full in between fights. But I guess that's second part is true. It did occur to me as well that it would start to make the difference between DD and normal regen too blurred, if the ability was further buffed to encourage other gods.

Reducing the dependence on Makhleb and co. with buffs was more of a side suggestion though. My main proposal is still simply, spread out the HW ability over time, without changing the total healing amount or chance to consume MP.

It sounds like a splendid idea. It's also very simple. I hope it gets integrated.

In my opinion, DD should be a totally no-healing species. So max HP = current HP. The only way to gain HP would be on level-ups. It is left as an exercise to the devs to determine the amount of HP to be gained on level-ups (and the HP at the start, and the role of the Fighting skill in all this, and what about forms that affect HP etc.).

It would be totally fine to give DD normal healing. It would be a buff so what? Some players cannot win crawl in years, we can have a species for them.

Move inhibited regeneration from Ghoul to DD.

VeryAngryFelid wrote:It would be totally fine to give DD normal healing. It would be a buff so what? Some players cannot win crawl in years, we can have a species for them.

Giving DD normal healing while taking away on-demand HW would be a nerf for experienced players but probably a buff for noobs.

Sprucery wrote:In my opinion, DD should be a totally no-healing species. So max HP = current HP.

The problem with this approach is that it means playing DD becomes an exercise in "avoid taking damage at all cost because every single HP you lose is one you've lost forever" and Crawl gives you a lot of ways to do something tedious to avoid the possibility of taking damage. It also changes torment from a strong tactical attack into a strategic cost, which is weird.

But really, it's convenient to be able to walk up to an ogre and hit it with an axe and not worry that it's gonna gank 30 maxhp off you with a lucky roll.

Anyhow! I like the OP's proposal.

Rast wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:It would be totally fine to give DD normal healing. It would be a buff so what? Some players cannot win crawl in years, we can have a species for them.

Giving DD normal healing while taking away on-demand HW would be a nerf for experienced players but probably a buff for noobs.

I am not sure. There are no that many fast monsters early game when HW guarantees survival and experienced players are good at estimating danger and retreating from normal speed monsters.

njvack wrote:The problem with this approach is that it means playing DD becomes an exercise in "avoid taking damage at all cost because every single HP you lose is one you've lost forever" and Crawl gives you a lot of ways to do something tedious to avoid the possibility of taking damage.

My proposal (which will never be implemented) would mean that max HP on a DD should be on a completely different scale from other species. 10x? 20x? I don't know.

It also changes torment from a strong tactical attack into a strategic cost, which is weird.

True, immunity to torment should probably be given to DD then.

It does not matter how many hp you have. When a monster has a chance to damage you but otherwise completely non threatening it is still optimal to avoid that damage with DD. For normal races it does not matter, because loosing hp is not a big deal since you can simply rest. But if it is a permanent cost then avoiding the damage becomes a permanent benefit.

That is true. It is also currently the case, because losing max MP for healing is unoptimal. Except if you are with Makhleb etc. And I hate this dependency on gods that give healing.

So, imo, if there must be a species with "no regen", it would be better to really make it "no regen" independent of god choice. If this results in an unplayable species, then just remove it.

It seems like No Regen (outside of Sprucery’s solution) is just a hard concept to work around without god help, since that’s the only way to have constant access to healing.

What if DD regenerated as normal, but had a small chance of permanently losing a point of max HP when they take a hit? Maybe increase damage shaving slightly to compensate, or have the loss only able to trigger on damage above a certain value.

Not really clear on what part of deep dwarf is actually worth keeping. Feels like people just like the word "dwarf." It's a pain in the ass when you can't recover hp via spells or god abilities and it's overpowered when you can. It's not a good idea, it never has been, and every proposal I've ever seen that I thought would be an improvement basically scraps the entire concept.

I feel like it should also be mentioned that there's this weird loophole that lets you get around the whole issue here: Vampiric draining (the spell) still works for DD. I find this completely bizarre. People talk about having to do insane tactics to avoid damage, only being able to get certain gods, etc...But all you really need to do is start as a necromancer background, train about 6 necromancy (and maybe take it up to 10-12 later on) and then just drain things to heal. I've done this and 3 runed a DDNe of Chei, but since I played the game on CDO the morgue seems to be lost to time. I'm not sure if there's any backups of CDO data before it went down. It was basically as you'd expect with a few thousand casts of vamp draining to stay at full life all game long.

Rename DD as something evil and give it a drain life ability (improves with XL). Then make it no healing or regenerating whatsoever, except for this intrinsic drain life.

Sprucery wrote:Rename DD as something evil and give it a drain life ability (improves with XL). Then make it no healing or regenerating whatsoever, except for this intrinsic drain life.

We could call it a vampire!

Wait...

That's what I call hitting two birds with one stone.

My concrete specific suggestion for Deep Dwarves:

- Remove the no regen ability, so they regen HP exactly like everyone else. Remove all the special cases associated with it (spirit shield etc)
- Remove the at-will HW.
- Reduce Invocations apt to -1, Evocations to +2.

This game doesn't have a difficulty setting. You pick your difficulty by picking your race, in some sense.

It's fine if some races are more powerful than others. Nothing needs to be changed about Deep Dwarves IMO.

The problem isn't DD's difficulty, the problem is DD encourages an incredibly tedious play style.

I'm sure this has been suggested before but I forget what the arguments against it were: Give deep dwarves (generous) healing on experience, no other sources of healing besides potions of heal wounds.

Spoiler: show

phloomp wrote:I'm sure this has been suggested before but I forget what the arguments against it were: Give deep dwarves (generous) healing on experience, no other sources of healing besides potions of heal wounds.

Spoiler: show
Bonus: do the same for MP (but really, really generous and fairy dragon-style MP-shaving

The problem with that is twofold:

1) It's an arbitrary breakpoint, one which makes fights occurring at 99% XP significantly different from those occurring at 1% XP.

2) You have the weird issue of "wasted" health, where the player sees no real benefit from playing better.

My own solution would be this: give DD a total health pool. As long as there's health in that pool, they regenerate normally, depleting the pool. Once it's empty, they're down to artificial sources. The pool itself could be filled by any of a number of things that are measures of "progress" in the game: experience, squares explored, finding gold, even a form of pseudo-piety. I'd also suggest removing divine healing for them.

This would make DD like any other species tactically, while giving them an easily-balanced form of strategic healing.

ion_frigate wrote:1) It's an arbitrary breakpoint, one which makes fights occurring at 99% XP significantly different from those occurring at 1% XP.

I'm guessing that by "healing on experience" they meant "healing on experience", not "healing on level up".

duvessa wrote:
ion_frigate wrote:1) It's an arbitrary breakpoint, one which makes fights occurring at 99% XP significantly different from those occurring at 1% XP.
I'm guessing that by "healing on experience" they meant "healing on experience", not "healing on level up".

Oh true. The problem of wasted healing is arguably worse with direct heal-on-experience though, since it encourages players to leave unthreatening XP bags alive in case they later need healing.

Easy creatures could actually be worse than hard creatures, since they grant much less xp, so they'd only need to do a little damage to increase the hp deficit.
This could be both interesting and really tedious to work with.

if you're open to having xp-based healing, you could let max mp regenerate as you gain xp?

petercordia wrote:Easy creatures could actually be worse than hard creatures, since they grant much less xp, so they'd only need to do a little damage to increase the hp deficit.

I am not sure what you mean here. If XP aptitude, it should be high for easy species and low for hard species.

ion_frigate wrote:
duvessa wrote:
ion_frigate wrote:1) It's an arbitrary breakpoint, one which makes fights occurring at 99% XP significantly different from those occurring at 1% XP.
I'm guessing that by "healing on experience" they meant "healing on experience", not "healing on level up".

Oh true. The problem of wasted healing is arguably worse with direct heal-on-experience though, since it encourages players to leave unthreatening XP bags alive in case they later need healing.

This is true, though it's exactly what we have with Makhleb healing right or vamp draining right now — and at least DD^Mak has enough healing that stashing monsters for healing is generally not worth the bother. It's probably optimal to do it but isn't practically important.

I think "DD can heals via kills" would be strictly better than the status quo. If it's too strong to have that stack with divine & vamp healing, those could go.

If the stashing problem is serious, monsters' ability to provide healing could eventually time out after you see them. Their... um... souls go stale and only fresh souls will let you heal.

njvack wrote:This is true, though it's exactly what we have with Makhleb healing right or vamp draining right now — and at least DD^Mak has enough healing that stashing monsters for healing is generally not worth the bother. It's probably optimal to do it but isn't practically important.

I think "DD can heals via kills" would be strictly better than the status quo. If it's too strong to have that stack with divine & vamp healing, those could go.

If the stashing problem is serious, monsters' ability to provide healing could eventually time out after you see them. Their... um... souls go stale and only fresh souls will let you heal.

I wouldn't consider "saving up" enemies for later healing in any way interesting. Another way of reducing (or hopefully eliminating) scumming could be an Okawaru-style limitation of eligible enemies: once they're beneath a certain threat rating, their destruction will avail you nothing. This kind of limit could grow more strict with level (or another char aspect), to the point where the endgame would still be challenging because most fodder would provide no healing at all. It would also support progression instead of making gameplay stale, because leaving actual threats around for healing would have plenty of backfire potential.

If the actual *point* of the OP is to remove the tactical heal wounds from the equation, a quick and dirty solution would be to have DD get the ambrosia effect instead of the heal wounds effect (for the same cost), this would give them roughly the same amount of total healing, while making it almost unusable tactically.

I'm not sure if the OP's problem one that needs solving, but if it is, that's one easy way to do it.

Besides, I kind of like the idea of Dwarves only healing when they're drunk.

Siegurt wrote:If the actual *point* of the OP is to remove the tactical heal wounds from the equation, a quick and dirty solution would be to have DD get the ambrosia effect instead of the heal wounds effect (for the same cost), this would give them roughly the same amount of total healing, while making it almost unusable tactically.

I'm not sure if the OP's problem one that needs solving, but if it is, that's one easy way to do it.

Besides, I kind of like the idea of Dwarves only healing when they're drunk.

This is a great idea

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Why isn't DD ability just a regeneration rate?

Why isn't DD ability just a regeneration rate?

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