Searing Ray Targeting


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Slime Squisher

Posts: 392

Joined: Sunday, 11th September 2016, 17:21

Post Thursday, 9th February 2023, 01:32

Searing Ray Targeting

The Searing Ray spell has 2 different modes:

1) Target a location and repeatedly hit the same squares, regardless of whether anything is in them.
2) Target an enemy and adjust aim to focus on it each turn, ignoring other units (defaults to mode 1 if the target enemy dies).

However, there are a few issues with the current behavior, including:

1) Sometimes the player will want to target a square under an enemy, but cannot do so because the spell will target the enemy instead. (UI)
2) If the player can adjust the aim to focus on an enemy, then one would expect it to be possible to adjust the aim to change the target to a different enemy. (consistency)
3) Players are incentivized to lure groups of enemies to long, straight hallways where all of the enemy movement will not cause them to slip out of the spell's AoE. (grind)
4) Inexperienced players may not know the relevant consequences to a targeted enemy's movement before deciding whether or not to maintain the ray. (clarity)

There are quite a few potential behavior modifications that could be made to address these issues, but I recommend the following: while under Ray, Ray+, or Ray++, automatically reenter targeting mode, whereupon escaping out of targeting mode would cancel the spell. This approach effectively solves all the above-listed issues without adding to the player's burden in cases where targeting adjustment is not desired. To the contrary, it actually simplifies that use case slightly because the player can press the same key for each time (s)he wants the ray to fire. It also has the added benefit of making it more immediately obvious whether or not Ray status is still active, which can prevent accidentally skipped turns in cases where the spell is disrupted by enemy action (e.g., in case of confusion under the current behavior, the player can easily pass a turn they would have rather used to drink a potion of curing if they don't take a moment to glance at their status effect list each turn).

This suggestion does technically qualify as a buff to the spell, however, I think in practice it would be a very minor one. In prolonged fights, spending an extra MP to interrupt and recast the spell rarely makes the difference between a player running dry mid-combat or not, at least in my experience. If a player is playing in a way where this scenario would occur frequently, then I think they're not going to survive very long regardless.

For this message the author Nekoatl has received thanks:
andrew

Zot Zealot

Posts: 1004

Joined: Thursday, 16th August 2018, 21:19

Post Thursday, 2nd March 2023, 11:29

Re: Searing Ray Targeting

I think the UI you suggest could work well. Having a line of yellow to pay attention to in addition to the 'Ray' token would probably be nice.

I actually consider point (3) to be a feature. It makes it feel more satisfying. Besides, lining up enemies is optimal with almost all ranged attacks.
Also, if you can retarget Ray every turn, it'll probably interrupt the flow of combat. I'm not certain.

Slime Squisher

Posts: 392

Joined: Sunday, 11th September 2016, 17:21

Post Sunday, 12th March 2023, 04:15

Re: Searing Ray Targeting

With single-turn ranged attacks, your have an incentive to line up enemies to hit more than one or to hit a secondary target after missing the primary target, but they only need to be lined up at the time you perform the ranged attack, so there's more flexibility in how they can be lined up, i.e. they don't need to be strictly funneled into a cardinal direction and preferably in a single-tile wide corridor. With Searing Ray, even if they're lined up initially, they can move and not be lined up anymore, so to use MP efficiently, it's often necessary to go the extra effort of luring a group of enemies over a significant distance to exploitable terrain. This makes using the spell feel considerably more grindy and tedious than its single-turn equivalents to me, but I can see how patient players might enjoy getting rewarded by improved efficiency for putting in extra effort.

I'm not sure what you mean by "interrupt the flow of combat", but I would expect the proposed change to improve efficiency on average. My intention is that the targeter should default to whatever was previously selected, meaning the player wouldn't need to do anything other than repress the key they just pressed if they wanted to simply sustain the ray without retargeting, and if they do want to retarget, they would need to press fewer keys than if they were to interrupt the spell and recast it using the current UI. The only case where an extra keystroke would be required is if the player wanted to interrupt the ray (by pressing escape) in order to perform an unrelated action, but that's still at most one extra keystroke per cast which I expect to be outweighed by the various efficiency improvements.

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