Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 3037
Joined: Sunday, 2nd January 2011, 02:06
simple caster nerf ideas
Cap the hunger reduction from spellcasting + int at a lower level than 100% of the hunger cost of the spell. Even races with dreadfully poor casting stats can easily get 6th-level spells hungerless over the course of a normal 3-Rune game, and staple 4th-level conjurations are easy to get hungerless by Lair. Spell hunger is mostly an early-game speedbump that completely goes away fairly early on, so part of the intended balance mechanism simply stops working regardless of the status of a given character's permafood supply. Invocations- and evocations-oriented characters don't get this kind of reduction, and even melee combat eventually costs a small but irreducible amount of food. On account of their other benefits spellcasting and intelligence would still be worth getting if spell hunger capped at, say, 50% of the original hunger cost.
Staff of energy nerf. It gives a 50% reduction to hunger, rather than eliminating it completely. If this is implemented with the previous idea, they stack multiplicatively for a 75% maximum reduction. Probably hit Necromutation, too.
Shields should retain a trade-off regardless of shield skill. Reducing the casting penalty is fine, but currently you can get SH of 18 or 35 for the early and late game with basically no cost and with no penalty to casting. Cutting the casting penalty in half would keep normal shields completely usable for a 3-Rune game, but would force interesting choices between dragon armour, a shield, and level-9 superspells beyond that point.
Elemental staves are currently spared the shield penalty applied to quarterstaves and latajangs. Elemental staves are really good, and probably worth giving up a shield for, but casters don't have to.
Haste is still the best spell in the game, appropriate for almost all characters. A potential nerf that would hit casters harder than non-casters would be to change it to a combination of (better) Swiftness and (worse) Finesse, which is to say that it applies to movement delay and attack delay, but not other actions. If casting still takes the full normal time due to the precise and unhurried gestures and incantations required, Haste could be reduced to being merely highly desirable for casters, rather than the best possible action for every case. As an additional bonus, it would stop stacking with Swiftness.
- For this message the author KoboldLord has received thanks:
- Blade