Post Tuesday, 14th December 2021, 21:59

Remove the STR+DEX check for auxiliary attacks

Auxiliary attacks already benefit from DEX in terms of accuracy and in terms of STR in terms of damage. Players who understand the general concept of STR and DEX would expect this behavior; it's intuitive and consistent with how STR and DEX are generally conceptualized in similar games and with how other physical attacks work in crawl.

However, the same can't be said for the STR+DEX proc chance that most auxiliary attacks use. It's unintutitve, spoilery, inconsistent, redundant, and unnecessary. Players need to look through the source code or online spoiler resources to know which auxiliary attacks are affected by this check. It disincentivizes hybrid melee/spellcasting builds. Unspoiled players likely won't even notice the behavior, given that proc rates are already randomized with a separate fixed percentage roll which obscures the STR+DEX check, so they might never even realize that their choice to invest in INT reduces the effectiveness of their auxiliary attacks. If there's any upside to this mechanic, it has to be that there's a strategic choice between investing in STR and/or DEX to increase the proc chance and investing in INT at the expense of auxiliary attack effectiveness (for whatever little that's worth), but even this doesn't apply if player's aren't aware that the choice exists.