alternatives to permabuff

[Sjohara]

The simplest, most straightforward way of implementing permanent buffs would be to have them reduce your maximum mana by their level while active.

Unless you're using conjurations, as long as you have enough MP to cast your buffs (maybe with some reserve if you're a transmuter or want to blink), you don't care about reserve maxMP very much.

42 (I think) MP would let you simultaneously cast (I'm ignoring conflicts here):

[a lot of spells]

... so having a cBlink or two in the clutch is totally reasonable for most endgame characters, even with every buff you could possibly have running at once.

Yes, getting all of those castable would be a chore, but you don't really want all of them, anyhow.

Well, for what it's worth, a heavy armor character learning a wide variety of buffs is probably spending a pretty serious amount of skill points in the process, and a light armor character who avoids useful combat magic in order to pay for buffs is still making a strategic choice. That said, if the benefit you get per point of mana spent can wind up way out of proportion in edge cases, there are lots of ways of keeping things grounded. For example:

-Hard-cap the number of buff slots (probably at 2 or 3), forcing you to waste a turn dispelling one effect to get a new one.
-Soft-cap the number of buff slots by causing you to quickly accumulate glow if you have more than X active at once.
-Give each buff an additional cost that increases the more buffs you already have active. For example, the first buff costs 1 more mana than its level to maintain, the second costs +2 on top of everything else, the third costs +3, and so on. Or you could do it exponentially instead of additively: +1, +2, +4, +8, etc.

The problem with any any penalty to permabuffing is that it makes using it sub-optimal. Then means the current default (manual recasting) remains the boring, but optimal play.

Yeah, permabuffing would probably need to completely replace the current casting method for any spell it's implemented for for exactly this reason.

[galehar]

So... you want players to cast buffs before each fight instead of keeping them up permanently?

No, I want players to think about which buff to use instead of just activating permanently all the ones they can afford. If you can cast haste hungerless, do you cast it before every easy fight? No, because if a stronger enemy shows up while your still recovering from the glow, you can't haste anymore.

I really don't think it's possible to create a scenario where it's never ever ever in a million years worth the player's effort to have a valuable buff cast preemptively in at least some situations.

Well, I never said that was the goal. I believe you'll buff up preemptively in a number of dangerous places, but you'll have to think about which buffs you use and manage your glow. A permanent system would be useless anyway since you would have to constantly turn it off to rest off the glow.
If you choose to activate a buff (say rmsl) while autoexploring a normal level, just because you can, then it can turn into wasted opportunity for other buffs more useful for the threat that shows up (melee guy). So it's no longer a no brainer.

[snow]

Someone said that forms aren't an issue here but I think they really are. There are areas where it's optimal to stay in a form permanently and this becomes extremely tedious. A good portion of the time when players talk about permanent buffs they are really referring to permanent forms.

[Sjohara]

I really don't think it's possible to create a scenario where it's never ever ever in a million years worth the player's effort to have a valuable buff cast preemptively in at least some situations.

Well, I never said that was the goal. I believe you'll buff up preemptively in a number of dangerous places, but you'll have to think about which buffs you use and manage your glow. A permanent system would be useless anyway since you would have to constantly turn it off to rest off the glow.

So in those dangerous situations, you'll have to constantly recast your buffs and constantly rest off your glow and it'll just be a huge pain in the ass. That's how the whole permabuff discussion started: buff management is a pain in the ass. And people don't like when things are a pain in the ass! You're setting up this glow thing as an alternative to permabuffing, but using buffs appropriately under your new system continues to be a pain in the ass. The original problem is not solved. At best it becomes a problem half of the time instead of all of the time.

And isn't it kind of odd to make that division between "dangerous places" and non-dangerous places? Ideally, shouldn't all places be dangerous and pose a challenge for the player? And if they aren't, and some situations are objectively non-dangerous, then who cares if the player is buffed in them or not? They'd survive easily either way, wouldn't they?

You want there to be a larger amount of strategic decision-making that goes into using buffs then there is now, and that may well be a very good idea. But you're boxing yourself into an implementation which enshrines the current system of demanding that the player suffer under the burden of large numbers of rote keystrokes, casting and recasting and resting all the time to accomplish a very straightforward goal. Everybody's sick of dealing with that. If you can totally eliminate the UI hassle of maintaining buffs when the player chooses to do so and still be capable of making adjustments which increase the amount of player choice that the matter calls for, then why not do it?

[KoboldLord]

Hmm… I've been pondering a new Swiftness for a while, and the premise might be extensible to buffs in general.

The trouble with Swiftness is that the speed system is really too granular to support a simple movement buff. Any reliable bonus, no matter how small, is going to have a large and predictable benefit that's going to be extremely desirable. So, I was thinking that if it was reflavored into a poison/transmutation spell an additional balancing negative effect could be justified. Essentially, Poison Swiftness would be intentionally dosing yourself with some of the stimulant hornet venom they sell over in Japan as a pre-exam studying aid. You overclock your own body with poison so you can run faster, but on the other hand you've just poisoned yourself which is really bad for your health. The poison lasts as long as the speed boost, and if you cure the poison the speed boost ends early. Likewise, if you're poison resistant, you can't get the benefits because they're a consequence of being poisoned. If you're already deep into red poison from monster attacks, you could even get an improved speed boost, but in any case there's only so much time you want to spend running around with red poison no matter how good the speed boost associated with it is.

Perhaps charms needs to have some serious long-term costs associated with it as part of its gimmick. Haste is freaking awesome, but on a long-term basis you can cripple yourself if you're constantly running around juiced, and eventually the hit point rot is going to catch up to you unless you can compensate with consumables to restore yourself. Small exposures are worth it, running around 24/7 not so much. Lower-level charms could have minor penalties, like stat damage, hit point damage, exhaustion, slowing, etc. with a small chance of a point or two of rot or a single -stat malmutation. Higher-level charms could have more severe penalties, like a few points of rot per use, a near-guaranteed -stat malmutation, a decent chance of a miscellaneous malmutation, plus a small chance per use of a really severe and mostly permanent penalty such as the hp malus from Revivification.

[dpeg]

Part of the problem is that glow can be waited out. Suppose we had a system where each buff can be casted at most once per level. Buffs would still be good; using them would be non-trivial; nobody in their right mind would use buffs for traveling.
This rule is a bit simplistic and I feel that glow goes in the right direction. However, forcing players to wait out glow after every use of Haste would indeed lead to tedium. So perhaps a more radical idea is required: (a) dispense with buff spells and have them only come from consumables (potions); (b) relate glow to a consumable (e.g. food or potion); (c) relate glow reduction to incoming xp (could be made sensible if one really wants).

By the way, I think that permanent forms are actually okay. What I am talking about here are tactical buffs like Haste, Invisibility, Flight etc.

[Parcae]

I switched to Tome 4 a while back, and the reason was permabuffs. Crawl is an incredible game, but the amount of pointless recasting required is insane.

I think that the idea that you can only have a finite number of buffs active at a given time is a good one. It should make casting buffs a real choice without adding yet another layer of pointless micromanagement. If you must use glow, here's a radical suggestion: get rid of mana altogether, and use glow as a resource instead! There's no reason to have one resource for attack spells and another for buffs.

[TehDruid]

By the way, I think that permanent forms are actually okay. What I am talking about here are tactical buffs like Haste, Invisibility, Flight etc.

Exactly, but I suspect nobody has an issue with making forms permanent, anyway. As I mentioned here in an earlier reply, each and one of them has drawbacks anyway, primarily the lost equipment slots and impeding spell casting, and then the other inconveniences that each one might bring under specific situations.

[Danakh]

I am for perma buff but i can (i think) understand Galehar. So I would do something like that:
- Implement permabuff using reduction in max mana and mana regenaration as per silent casting, as suggested
- Keep form as it (making perma form effective)
- Keep charms like weapon brand as it (making perma brand effective). Regeneration should also be perma casted
- Most of other charms should be reworked cost higher, be more effective and last fewer. And some may induce glow as an optionnal balance. Or may be reworked to be used with perma casting

So we end with some low level buff perma-casted, form that have other side-effect perma-casted too
And all other buff should be align with Haste : high mana cost, High spell slot cost, can't be perma cast because of mana drain would be higher than regen and because of glow.

Exemple of reworked swiftness :
level 5
casting time of half a turn (even reduce by spell power down to 25% of a standard turn)
increase speed by 50%
last 5 to 10 turns
Perfect to flee from a sudden threat, not as safe as cBlink but very efficient anyway.

Repel missile :
level 4
As now (maybe a little more efficient). Permacastable
Only repel 2-4 arrows (based on charm only), but is silent recasted if number of arrow is reached (if perma casted)
=> You may either choose to cast it or perma cast it depending on the mana drain you want to have during combat


Etc ...
I think perma-casting should be implemented early to really see which spells are over powered and should be modified.
Some spell like form and weapon brand should really perma-casted, even if it is only for them, it should be implemented (as we still don't want to see people remove armor, cast the spell and put back armor, long duration buff should be taken out any way)

[Jeremiah]

I like the idea of Poison Swiftness... except for making it a poison spell which seems a bit obscure for something that makes you move faster.

How about if all buffs prevented natural healing/regeneration and caused you to lose a few HP per turn (with more HP loss for higher level buffs.)
That way, buffs would be useful for a fight, as the HP loss would (hopefully) be less than the amount of damage you avoided by being more powerful through the buff, but would become impractical for exploring and moving around. Having more buffs in effect would make you lose more HP, so you would have to decide how many you were willing to risk.

The spell Regeneration would obviously have to be an exception to this, but it would have no effect if cast at the same time as another buff.

I guess this would probably have the same problem as some of the other solutions - that players would still use buffs for exploring but keep canceling them and stopping to rest to recover HP. Maybe it could work if instead of being like normal damage, it worked a bit like rot, eg a semi-permanent HP reduction that could only be restored by gaining XP or maybe by entering a previously unexplored level.


Another off topic but related suggestion: if Repel Missiles is too powerful, how about making it work like Shroud of Golubria but for missiles, so a strong attack could cancel it and it would become much less useful in the late game.

[sanka]

I think there are two ways to introduce choices for buffs. Either change ALL buff spells to give them significant disatwantage also. So for every buff spell the player needs to decide if in the current situation the buff overweights the penalty. The penalties for swiftness is not a bad example, but I feel that the penalties are not big enough. Giving good drawbacks for every buff can be tricky and a LOT of work.

The other way is to set up some upkeep cost, so the number of active buffs are severly limited. This way you will get a choice by choosing which buffs to activate: repel missile OR ozucubu's armor OR regeneration ? Hopefully the "upkeep cost" and the power of the buff can be set up in a way that gives good choices. (Hint: raise Haste's level if its too dominating...).

Both ways has little to do with permanent or non-permanent buffs - it's either beneficial to upkeep a charm all the time, then permanent buffs are a nice interface adjustment, or not (or not possible), when permanent buffs can be still a nice interface adjustment, just not so important.

I have a weird idea to combine both in a "simple" change. Give every buff spell an additional feature: -LEVEL penalty to INT for the duration of the buff. (Either give a warning or do not allow casting when INT would go to negative). I would also like to see permanent buffs (and no alternative method, only the permanent one, with one turn to deactivate a buff).

I think this has several advantages:
- The skald playstyle is mostly preserved. If the only thing you want to cast is buffs, then you are likely to able to cast them.
- Many buff at the same time can be dangerous
- If your int is high, then you can cast more buffs, but getting penalties to your other (conjuration/summoning) spells means that you lose the benefit of "full range spellcasting" build. If your int is low, you cannot cast too many buffs at once.
- no need to came up and implent and playtest a LOT of different penalties for different spells.

Of course this mechanism does not need to replace other possible penalties (like glow for Haste or the ones for swiftness), and overpowered charms can be nerfed one-by-one with other drawbacks. But a common drawback opens up design space for new charms - becasue they won't be simply "one more buff" anymore.

Just not to confuse some readers more: I think that the forms are ok, and simply allowing permanent cast (without the INT drawback) is fine.

[Galefury]

re Jeremiah:

Note that while the food clock is currently barely functional the piety clock is working quite well. Walking around at 3/4 HP (or with a glow level that might turn yellow during a fight) and doubling your turn count to rest the damage (or glow) off would almost certainly not be optimal. I think glow is better than damage for this, because malmutating the player for having too many buffs is much better than killing him. It gives players the option to "overbuff", especially if they have some cmut stashed.

I think I would prefer a "one buff at a time" system to something glow-based, though. One non-consumable non-form buff, one form, and as many consumable buffs as you want, to be a little more specific. And permabuffing for the ones you actually can cast. Having to wait for the old buff to run out to cast a new one sounds like it could work quite well (new consumable: wand of dispelling, if we want to be nice). Why would permabuffs still be needed? Because it would be great for forms, and because when I'm in shoals I want to fly all the time. The one buff at a time suggestion has the huge advantage of not encouraging people to rest the glow off all the time (which would almost certainly not be optimal play, but it's the natural response).

Drawbacks should be added to many buffs even with the one buff at a time system. Buffs should let you shift your power around dynamically, not simply increase it. Exhaustion and Slow after Haste (shorter than for berserk), less to hit for your own projectiles while under RMsl, that kind of stuff. Glow could work for some buffs (it already does with Haste), I just think not every buff should get it.

Edit: very quick accumulation of glow (or a large one-time glow) could be used as a penalty for having multiple buffs up at a time. Hard caps are not good in crawl IMO, this would be a good way of avoiding a hard cap on the number of buffs.

[XuaXua]

I agree with YASN regarding the point.

I think, much like the auto-eating facility (that doesn't always work because it seems to only eat when your hunger status changes instead of analyzing your hunger and ability to eat on a per turn basis; then-again, let's screw over the spellcasters who use their meat chunks for other purposes), the point of perma-buff is to re-cast the spell when it diminishes, which can easily be done manually, but is a grinding-style pain in the butt.

As I've read this thread, others apparently view it as perpetual, when all the "perma-buff" really should do is, at the point where the user gets the "you are losing your ability to fly" or "you feel slower" warning message, if a flag is set somewhere (which evaluates nearby danger level and resources to recast), recast the spell.

HECK, at the point of "you are losing your ability to fly", why not change it to "You are losing your ability to fly; recast flight (y/n)?" and put in a prompt on/off flag in the init.txt and the ability to change flags from init.txt in-game BECAUSE THAT IS THE ESSENCE OF PERMABUFF.

...offtopic my ass...

[rebthor]

One of the spell schools, namely enchantments, is currently useless after about 10 levels aka Haste is castable. Why not tie the number of permabuffs able to be cast to enchantments in some way. I believe this was mentioned already, but I don't know why it didn't get any traction. Give a permabuff increased mana use or hunger which can be partly mitigated through enchantment training. For all the talk about how the hunger clock is broken in Crawl for all but Tr and maybe Sp, this might be a way to make it more relevant.

This is on top of some of the other discussions that have gone on about giving drawbacks to existing spells. I think that something like swiftness would be neat if it gave you normal LOS is the direction you are travelling, but reduced YOUR LOS to 1-2 squares in every other direction, i.e. you're moving fast and have to focus on what's in front of you. Making repel missiles like shroud of golubria where each repel can cause it to fray, have stoneskin increase movement and/or attack delay by a bit, ice armor to work like shroud or make you take a little irresistible cold damage when up, flight lasts really long unless you are carrying more than your normal carry weight, things like that so that keeping up buffs also has a drawback which may be suboptimal.

With all that said, it will have to be a significant interface and useability improvement or else people will just see it as an enchantment nerf. As annoying at is it to constantly recast things, no one is going to want to get rid of the ability to cast haste, swiftness, invisibility, repel missiles and whatever other buffs they have when going down Vaults:8 or that next pan portal and giving yellow glow for that doesn't seem that fair to me.

[TwilightPhoenix]

I actually like the suggested idea of decreasing Int for each, likely non-form, perma buff you have up. Personally, I'd tie it into the spell level. Repel Missiles and Swiftness take off 2 int each for having them on perma, Flight takes 3, Warp Weapon takes 5, and so forth. It would be an effective limit and penalty on maintaining buffs without recasting them but at the same time wouldn't make them pointless to keep up.

Also, XuaXua's prompt wouldn't be a bad idea either, though it would cause a bit of annoyance having to hit "Y" every few seconds while auto-exploring/traveling.

[galehar]

You want there to be a larger amount of strategic decision-making that goes into using buffs then there is now, and that may well be a very good idea.

No, I want more tactical decisions. With permabuffs, 95% of the time you learn a spell, activate it, end of story. Amount of tactical decision: 0.

Really, I think permabuff go against the basic philosophy of the game. It's a permanent gain with almost no downside, not unlike NH's intrinsics.

However, forcing players to wait out glow after every use of Haste would indeed lead to tedium.

I'm pretty sure most players do that already. It's risky to go back exploring with some leftover glow. Note that the proposal also includes faster glow dissipation when resting, so the glow would probably dissipate while your resting for your MP/HP. By the way, I think it should only be the case for grey glow (and maybe dark grey faster than light grey). Once you hit yellow, you can't reduce the bad effects by resting.

HECK, at the point of "you are losing your ability to fly", why not change it to "You are losing your ability to fly; recast flight (y/n)?" and put in a prompt on/off flag in the init.txt and the ability to change flags from init.txt in-game BECAUSE THAT IS THE ESSENCE OF PERMABUFF.

Yes, of course we could do that, it would just be a bad way to fix a real problem. The problem is not that recasting buffs is tedious, the problem is that you bore yourself into constantly recasting flight even though it has almost no gameplay advantage, just because you can.

With all that said, it will have to be a significant interface and useability improvement or else people will just see it as an enchantment nerf. As annoying at is it to constantly recast things, no one is going to want to get rid of the ability to cast haste, swiftness, invisibility, repel missiles and whatever other buffs they have when going down Vaults:8 or that next pan portal and giving yellow glow for that doesn't seem that fair to me.

Well, you will certainly buff up before going down to V:8 or taking a Pan portal, but you'll have to choose which ones to use instead of casting all the ones you have.

On the other hand, if you keep one buff active when exploring, it might be expiring when you run into a threat. So your buff is going away and your potential for more buffing is already reduced. You don't see players hasting themselves before exploring, do you?

To the people that say permabuffs is needed because constant recasting is very tedious, I say it's tedious because it's dumb. You try to keep them active all the time because there's no downside. If that's too much for you, then you cast them all at the beginning of each fight, because why not? If they give glow, then you start each fight by choosing which buff to activate (if any). Summoners also start each fight by casting a few spells. I guess some find it tedious, but nobody's forced to play them. If buffing yourself before a fight seems tedious to you, you can choose another playstyle.

Regarding the various proposals to add drawbacks to buff spells, I just have one thing to say: keep it simple. We don't need another food reform. Glow is a simple mechanism and if we tune it properly, it can be an effective drawback. We can say that each spell increase your glow by its spell level for example. Then it's just a matter of setting the threshold values for the various glow levels.

[XuaXua]

Yes, of course we could do that, it would just be a bad way to fix a real problem. The problem is not that recasting buffs is tedious, the problem is that you bore yourself into constantly recasting flight even though it has almost no gameplay advantage, just because you can.

Replace all mentions of "Flight" with "Switfness" in my text.

[KoboldLord]

Regarding the various proposals to add drawbacks to buff spells, I just have one thing to say: keep it simple. We don't need another food reform. Glow is a simple mechanism and if we tune it properly, it can be an effective drawback. We can say that each spell increase your glow by its spell level for example. Then it's just a matter of setting the threshold values for the various glow levels.

I'm sorry to say that I'm skeptical that adjusting glow is going to turn out to be a silver bullet that fixes the buff-recasting issue. Buffs being too unambiguously good is fundamentally different than buffs being annoying to manage, and while I think that adjusting glow is likely to help with the first issue I don't think it's going to do anything at all for the second issue. Which is fine, if you want to deal with the first issue first, but the second issue probably isn't going to go away on its own.

[galehar]

Regarding the various proposals to add drawbacks to buff spells, I just have one thing to say: keep it simple. We don't need another food reform. Glow is a simple mechanism and if we tune it properly, it can be an effective drawback. We can say that each spell increase your glow by its spell level for example. Then it's just a matter of setting the threshold values for the various glow levels.

I'm sorry to say that I'm skeptical that adjusting glow is going to turn out to be a silver bullet that fixes the buff-recasting issue. Buffs being too unambiguously good is fundamentally different than buffs being annoying to manage, and while I think that adjusting glow is likely to help with the first issue I don't think it's going to do anything at all for the second issue. Which is fine, if you want to deal with the first issue first, but the second issue probably isn't going to go away on its own.

Sure, I don't pretend this would solve all buff related problems, just the tedious recasting that comes when trying to keep them on permanently.
Some nerfing would still be needed, but you can't address everything at once or you end up doing nothing. Although with glow, reducing duration becomes a more effective nerf (swiftness, I'm thinking about you here).

[sanka]

My problem with the glow proposal is that it's rely on the fact that moving forward is optimal (instead of resting off the glow). And I think this has big problems in crawl, so (if this is an aim) it should be fixed first. Otherwise the new mechanism just will be more annoying then the current one.

The food system does not accomplishe this: there are mummies, gourmand, etc., and there are plenty of food anyway. Not easy to "fix" this also (if the current state is bad).

The OOD monsters push you forward in the beginning, but I think they won't matter as much in the end game and post end game - where upkeeping buffs is the most annoying, because you have many of them.

Piety also not very good for this: there are demigods, challenge godless plays, and gods that do not care about piety too much. Even with gods where piety matters a lot, like okawaru, the situation is not as clear as some suggested: is much less gifts and fever used abilities outweight the benefit of always start the battle with all the charms? Maybe, but it's not so clear, and many beginners will encounter tedium even in these situations.

What I'd like to state is to make a glow system working well requires much more than simply implementing it. Ways to push forward the player are needed - for mummies and demigods and others, and in the extend end game. Otherwise it's easy to make to current system more annoying in many circumstances (while maybe solving some other situations). So maybe we should evaluate when resting everything is an acceptable strategy, and when not.

[galehar]

My problem with the glow proposal is that it's rely on the fact that moving forward is optimal (instead of resting off the glow).

What? No it doesn't. The drawback isn't the lost food and piety from resting off the glow. It relies on the fact that it makes buffing for exploring suboptimal. If you do, then when your buff expires you're exposed in unexplored territory and with the glow you have less potential for buffing up. The risk is not worth the turn gained casting it at the beginning of the fight. Which is why you don't haste yourself before exploring.

What I'd like to state is to make a glow system working well requires much more than simply implementing it.

Also balancing and playtesting. Unlike permabuffs, it's simple to implement.

[qululu123]

How about permabuffs continually cost mana to keep up? Say i cast a lv9 buff, it would cost 9 mana and then 1 mana every turn, while a lv1 buff would cost 1 mana and then 1 mana ever 9 turns, a lv5 buff would cost 5mana and then 1 mana every 5 turns, and so on. Then buffs fall off when not enough mana to sustain them. That way more than a few buffs would kinda guarantee running out of mana quick, while keeping up 1-2 buffs would be reasonable and not annoying.

edit: there could also be "more" buffs, like say mini swiftness at lv2 (gives +1), swiftness at lv5 (+2) and super swiftness at lv8 (+3), and similarly with haste and other buffs.

[Eji1700]

Repost from the other topic-
Various thought's i've had on buffs and things like blink-

1. Blink- Make uncontrolled blink just that, uncontrolled. Maybe lower it's level but make it so usage near deep water or lava gives you a warning because it will very much so drop your ass in it and kill you. This is good for the game because blink is less of a "roll dice to live" spell and now supports comboing with other spells in some situations. It'll still be useful in normal dugeon situations but it's less godly on it's own.

2. Levitation- bring it back and make it a lvl 1 and throw it in party tricks and a few other books. I'm mainly saying to do this so 1, you have an easy combo with blink, and 2 I plan on making fly different. Terrain navigation is very very valuable. Levitation is just underclassed because things like fly are so easy to obtain, and they shouldn't be. Adds glow to prevent too much recasting(needs some because of things like hive vault...even though that's gone)

3. Fly- Change it. Obviously terrain passing and whatnot but put some penalties on it for just having it up. Maybe keep it's current level or up it but I do think it should do significantly more, and be more of a burst spell than something you just auto/permacast. Ideally i want a few small downsides, higher level, a few more upsides.

4. Swiftness- Builds glow quickly. Wouldn't honestly mind if you just removed it though.

5. Control teleport- Needs to be NOT AT ALL ON ANY FORM OF JEWELRY. This should be the shining moment for a warper. Super powerful defensive options. A lvl 9 fighter shouldn't be able to do the same thing. That said it should have an extremely large mana cost.

6. Repel Missiles- I'd almost say just remove the damn thing or make it harder to use.

7. Deflect missiles- Ok first of call, change the name of one of these to REFLECT missiles. I can never remember which one is better just by looking at the names and that's super super poor design. If you must keep it make this one a much higher level spell with a very high chance of reflecting projectiles back at their source. Make it short duration and high cost. Idea being it'd be a neat way to wipe out a room of casters. Run in, REFLECT, watch them thin their own numbers when they attack you.

8. Necromutation- I'd honestly suggest a rework. I love the spell thematically but i think there's some more fun stuff that can be done with it, and barring that it's just going to need a lot of tweaks.

9. Haste(and all of the above)- said it before i'll say it again, WE NEED MONSTER SPELLS THAT ATTACK BUFFS. Devour magic, monster consumes buffs and becomes stronger. Slouch, monster hurts you based on how fast you move. Curse, All buffs applied to you suddenly do the opposite(maybe it shouldn't affect TM spells, but other than that Haste slows, Flight grounds and slows, Ctele stops tele, Repel missile attracts them, etc.) The biggest way to prevent permabuffing is if you know there's a chance you'll walk around the corner into an enemy who will then DESTROY you for having them up.

10- armor's and skins- Give them downsides and again see #9.

Honestly the way I see it a caster has 3 major resources to manage.
1. Mana
2. Glow
3. Distance from the thing that wants to tear him in half

If you allow permabuffing you're basically obsoleting number 3. The most interesting moments to me as a caster are when i've gotten stuck in a dead end with 3 or for mosters a few steps away from tearing into me. Do i cast a buff or two in those turns? Do i risk something higher level that might fail and give them a free turn to close? Do I just try and nuke them down? Buffs are boring because you completely remove the best decision making aspect of casting and turn it into a non issue or a chore.

[umrain]

What if Deflect/Repel Missiles had a chance of costing 1MP for each missile reflected? The chance could be 100% at low power. Maybe high damage projectiles could even cost more than one MP. This would make it risky to use (especially for casters with low MP) and very desirable to invest extra in skill levels.

Or maybe make it lower EV or DEX. (Don't let it stack with Phase Shift) The deflection field makes it hard to move about. So it would be bad to have up if you let monsters get in melee range.

[KoboldLord]

The trouble with most problematic buffs nowadays is that there's really no way to scale them with spell power. Nobody considers Ozocubu's Armor or Stoneskin to be problematic, because you've got to pay through the nose on your elemental skill to keep them at their peak. On the other hand, Swiftness and Repel Missiles only scale by duration, which is essentially meaningless because you can recast it whenever. There's no design space to work with there, so they need a rework rather than just a nerf.

Or maybe make it lower EV or DEX. (Don't let it stack with Phase Shift) The deflection field makes it hard to move about. So it would be bad to have up if you let monsters get in melee range.

The spell's effect is mathematically equivalent to doubling your EV. If it also reduced your EV, it would effectively do nothing.

[galehar]

On the other hand, Swiftness and Repel Missiles only scale by duration, which is essentially meaningless because you can recast it whenever.

If recasting isn't possible because of glow, then the duration becomes much more relevant. Still, it would be nice if the effectiveness of some of those spell were dependent on the spell power.
Anyway, balance should be tuned after we find a way to discourage recasting or implement permabuff. Or both (glow for buffs and permacast for forms).

[umrain]

Or maybe make it lower EV or DEX. (Don't let it stack with Phase Shift) The deflection field makes it hard to move about. So it would be bad to have up if you let monsters get in melee range.

The spell's effect is mathematically equivalent to doubling your EV. If it also reduced your EV, it would effectively do nothing.

That's only for ranged attacks. The spell could still have the same effect on missiles while reducing EV for incoming melee attacks. But, yeah, you are right that there's not really a lot of range to scale something like that.

[njvack]

Swiftness and Repel Missiles only scale by duration, which is essentially meaningless because you can recast it whenever. There's no design space to work with there, so they need a rework rather than just a nerf.

Maybe not major reworkings, though.

For Swiftness, I could imagine the spell imposting a malus on more skills (Dodging, in particular -- makes the spell more dangerous to have on while exploring, and very painful for escaping ranged attackers) instead of just Stealth and T&D, and high power lessening those.

Crawl could probably also get away with only one of RMsl/DMsl, with the missile-reflection spell getting "better" as the spell got more powerful. "Better" could be as simple as "increased deflection probability" but it might be more fun to have a mechanic like low power deflecting weak projectiles (needles and arrows come to mind) with high power needed for crossbow bolts and dragon breath.

[Jeremiah]

Re spell power for Repel Missiles: what if each incoming missile reduced the remaining duration, so at low power it would end after only 1 or 2 missiles had been fired at you? Then total duration and therefore spell power would matter more if you wanted it to last the whole fight.

[galehar]

Someone created another thread specifically about buff balance. Can we keep the discussion in this thread about mechanisms to discourage or prevent recasting?

[sardonica]

IMO allowing permabuff but requiring a certain value of MP to be drained per x number of turns, would be the simplest solution.

Spell "foo" costs 5mp and lasts 50 turns. Every 10 turns, deduct one MP and add a bit of hunger.

Im sure this has been mentioned a million times, just putting my vote in.

[galehar]

IMO allowing permabuff but requiring a certain value of MP to be drained per x number of turns, would be the simplest solution.

Spell "foo" costs 5mp and lasts 50 turns. Every 10 turns, deduct one MP and add a bit of hunger.

Im sure this has been mentioned a million times, just putting my vote in.

It would make permabuff worse than recasting. We certainly don't want that, we don't want putting up with tediousness to give a gameplay advantage. Anyway, the way to implement permabuffs has already been discussed a lot, and I even wrote a detailed and fair design for it. The problem is that I think it makes the game less interesting, so I'm now looking for ways to prevent or discourage recasting buffs instead. I think permabuff might still be implemented but only for forms, since I'm not sure how to handle necromutation otherwise.

[njvack]

It would make permabuff worse than recasting. We certainly don't want that, we don't want putting up with tediousness to give a gameplay advantage. Anyway, the way to implement permabuffs has already been discussed a lot, and I even wrote a detailed and fair design for it. The problem is that I think it makes the game less interesting, so I'm now looking for ways to prevent or discourage recasting buffs instead. I think permabuff might still be implemented but only for forms, since I'm not sure how to handle necromutation otherwise.

Well, in your design doc, you mention that in some cases, MP regeneration might wind up net-negative. That seems like a pretty useful way to get people to not keep too many buffs up at once; you simply cannot maintain it. You even get two knobs to tweak, in how much X spell levels of buff reduce your max MP, and in how much spell power affects duration.

Actually, it might be worth considering a slight adjustment, if you haven't already -- instead of decreasing maxMP, just directly reduce MP recovery by (formula pulled from ass), say:

4/(4+SUM(spell levels of active buff))

Running with Swiftness means you're regenerating at 2/3 speed; a bunch of buffs easily drop you to 1/4 speed or less. Forms could either be part of this, or not, or have less of an effect.

Then, you can run a deficit when you're heading to V:8 or through a Pan portal (and extend it with !magic or channeling), but not keep it up. And increasing spell power also increases the number of buffs you can have online before you go net-negative.

Interface-wise, it might be good to color-code the MP meter to show when you're running negative.

[galehar]

You're missing the point. The point of the permabuff proposal was to address the tediousness of recasting buffs while preserving balance as much as possible. Yes, there's a limit to how many ones you can keep up, just like there is in the current system. However, it encourages players to keep buffs active all the time since it removes the tediousness of recasting. And I don't like it, because it also removes all tactical decisions about buffs. That's why I'm looking for an alternate system that discourage buffing up for exploring.

[Yet Another Stupid Noob]

It would make permabuff worse than recasting. We certainly don't want that, we don't want putting up with tediousness to give a gameplay advantage. Anyway, the way to implement permabuffs has already been discussed a lot, and I even wrote a detailed and fair design for it. The problem is that I think it makes the game less interesting, so I'm now looking for ways to prevent or discourage recasting buffs instead. I think permabuff might still be implemented but only for forms, since I'm not sure how to handle necromutation otherwise.

Well if you have perma-buffs you still have four knobs. Spell power, maintenance, glow, and “other”.

Spellpower is pretty simple. If, for example, swiftness only increased speed by 0.2 at minimum power and scaled up to 2.0 at max power then "just castable" then it has much less utility at low power. Of course, because it falls into the category of "strictly beneficial", one assumes that you will keep it always up regardless of how effective it is. However, this brings up the second knob.

The second knob to turn is spell maintenance. When you have perma-buffs, you no longer have to "waste" a turn in combat to recast. The implication is that, continuing the example, you can make the "duration" of swiftness be a little as 10-15 turns. This means that every 10-15 turns you have to “spend” another 2 mp to maintain the spell. Although this number is highly adjustable, that level of maintenance will mean that just keeping swiftness up will essentially negate your mana regen. This certainly brings up the question of the worth of maintaining the spell . Especially if you adjusted the first knob so you are only getting 0.5 speed increase, for example. This also means that hybrids (skalds) who don't use spells for damage have little problems, but if you are also a blaster, you have to think about what you really need.

The next knob is glow. Unless I am wrong, you cannot dissipate glow when you adding to your glow. This adds not only is the possibility of adding glow when casting (and “recasting” when maintaining), but also if every (any) buff adds even a trivial amount of glow, then you cannot remove it with your buffs up. I understand you can still drop all buffs and rest to remove glow, but this is still a real cost (piety, food, hell effects, being un-protected if you get caught, etc.).

The final knob is “other”. I can easily see adding to your metabolism while using swiftness; you are running around faster after all. Flight could cause unsteady balance (sans draconian, tengu) giving a slight penalty to hit and/or damage, the glow from repel/deflect missiles could make you easier to spot, thus reducing stealth. Really the sky is the limit on this factor.

My opinion is that strictly beneficial buffs with a duration are a bad idea because it rewards a player for obsessively recasting a spell(s). I personally hate it when I lose track and drown, or drop out of a form without noticing until I am (almost) dead. Buffing adds a lot of flavor to me and represents a nice way to increase survivability without having to hide behind summons or heavy armor. If you want to scale charms to require an investment similar to the investment put into dodging/armor/shield, or add negative effects to buffing, please do that. However, please implement perma-buffs because the only thing they do is remove the grind of buffing; the relative strength of buffing remains unchanged.

[BlackSheep]

I think you're misstating your case, galehar. There aren't presently any tactical decisions about keeping buffs up, only user interface obstacles. People have been proposing options that both remove the interface obstacles and create costs for keeping buffs up all the time. here seems to be general agreement that forms are ok to make permanent. There's also general agreement that certain charms are pointless or even harmful to keep active all the time (flight/lev). Haste and invisibility have a built in deterrent from continued usage. So what are we really talking about? Swiftness, control teleport and the damage mitigators? Maybe a weapon aura?

The case has been made for the necessity of keeping on certain buffs while exploring. Unless you remove the support for those cases, people are still going to want to keep repel/deflect missiles or ozocubu's armor on all the time. Centaur and yaktaur packs exist, do a lot of damage very quickly and can surprise a player coming around a corner, opening a door or heading down stairs. Dispersal ammo ruins careful exploration by dragging you out into the open and preventing retreat. Add to that invisible enemies, teleport traps, shafts, god wrath, etc. and there are a number of ways that a player can find themselves dumped into a very dangerous situation without warning where a turn to buff is a turn too much.

Here's an idea that borrows a bit from Danakh's proposal, add "extended" versions of charms that allow you to keep a buff on indefinitely. Then you not only have the options of playing with glow cost and hunger cost, but also spell level cost.

[Kate]

There aren't presently any tactical decisions about keeping buffs up, only user interface obstacles.

Yes, and the actual problem is the lack of tactical decisions, which is what we're trying to address. The user interface awkwardness is just a consequence of that.

This thread seems to be just repeating itself.

[galehar]

There aren't presently any tactical decisions about keeping buffs up, only user interface obstacles.

Well, yes, that's the problem. And I'd like to bring tactical decisions instead of removing interface obstacles.

People have been proposing options that both remove the interface obstacles and create costs for keeping buffs up all the time.

What cost? Hunger, MP regen and max MP penalties are certainly not enough to create any meaningful tactical choice (except maybe for conjurers and summoners who really need the MP).

The case has been made for the necessity of keeping on certain buffs while exploring.

So, one player said he died once from yaktaurs only because he didn't have rmsl active when they entered LOS, and you call that "case made"? I don't think so. He didn't even bother to provide us with morgue or ttyrec for us to analyse the tactical situation. Berserkers clear vault everyday and they don't use rmsl as far as I know. And even if crawl weren't winnable without exploring with rmsl, then nerfing monster's ranged attack would be a better fix than making rmsl permanent.

[rebthor]

Not to be too difficult, but people have been giving ideas about how to modify specific spells to make them less useful to keep on constantly or to require a real, actual recast which seem to be getting completely ignored. For example, several people have said thing like the boost from swiftness should be variable based on power, it should increase hunger, it should decrease dodging. Repel missiles should work more like shroud of golubria whereby actively repelling missiles causes the spell to actually expire, requiring a recast and that it should perhaps be noisy so that it's suboptimal to run around with 24/7.

I think that perhaps taking each spell and looking at what would be a viable, reasonable drawback to add would mitigate some of your concerns galehar.

[galehar]

Not to be too difficult, but people have been giving ideas about how to modify specific spells to make them less useful to keep on constantly or to require a real, actual recast which seem to be getting completely ignored.

I haven't commented on each one of this proposal individually, but they are all less effective and more complicated than glow regarding the recasting problem. Some of those ideas might be good for balancing those spells, but this is not the problem at hand here (which is why I suggested that they be taken to the other thread).

[njvack]

What cost? Hunger, MP regen and max MP penalties are certainly not enough to create any meaningful tactical choice (except maybe for conjurers and summoners who really need the MP).

Depends on how severe they are. If having a buff up cut MP regen to zero and also imposed a recast cost, you would not (practically) be able to explore with it on. Or, if each buff added 50 to your hunger rate, you'd probably turn them off when you didn't need them. I'm not saying those are reasonable costs, but they all can be meaningful if they're harsh enough.

Is permabuffing always bad, by the way? If you've spend the exp to max Spellcasting, Charms, and Air, is it bad if you can keep your DMsl shield up continuously? This is meant as an actual, non-snarky question. I agree that right now, it's way too easy to have a lot of semi-permanent effects at negligible cost; should it be possible to strategically spend experience so some buffs no longer need to be a tactical choice for your character?

Otherwise, yeah: glow. I do worry about resting glow off, though.

[BlackSheep]

I think, then, that the majority of the dissent here should be taken as disagreement with your base premise. People like having buffs on all the time, but don't like having to recast them. Your solution seems to be to make people not like having buffs on all the time because that's more interesting than balancing the cost of continuous buffs. My feeling is that forcing players into deciding whether or not to buff after they've encountered an enemy is imposing too high a cost; that is, spending a turn in front of an enemy not trying to kill that enemy or run away.

[njvack]

I think, then, that the majority of the dissent here should be taken as disagreement with your base premise. People like having buffs on all the time, but don't like having to recast them. Your solution seems to be to make people not like having buffs on all the time because that's more interesting than balancing the cost of continuous buffs. My feeling is that forcing players into deciding whether or not to buff after they've encountered an enemy is imposing too high a cost; that is, spending a turn in front of an enemy not trying to kill that enemy or run away.

Well, yes, people do like being more powerful for minimal cost

And this doesn't mean you must cast buffs with monsters in sight; there are lots of times when you know (or strongly suspect) a monster is present outside of LOS. Monsters you're luring around corners and in vaults are just two examples.

[BlackSheep]

And folks have provided counter-examples of being surprised by gangs of ranged attackers as reasons they want to buff before spotting enemies because said enemies can frequently kill you or at least wound you to the point of obviating the choice of buffing over escaping. These situations are not fun.

If you want to drastically increase the cost of these buffs, then they need to be worth their cost. That means I'm not going to spend a turn casting a spell in sight of a fast ranged attacker for a chance at reducing its hit rate or a minor reduction in damage. If you're throwing these things up in reaction to a known threat, they need to do a better job than your other options.

[galehar]

What cost? Hunger, MP regen and max MP penalties are certainly not enough to create any meaningful tactical choice (except maybe for conjurers and summoners who really need the MP).

Depends on how severe they are. If having a buff up cut MP regen to zero and also imposed a recast cost, you would not (practically) be able to explore with it on. Or, if each buff added 50 to your hunger rate, you'd probably turn them off when you didn't need them. I'm not saying those are reasonable costs, but they all can be meaningful if they're harsh enough.

If they are too harsh, then manually recasting becomes better. We don't want that.

Is permabuffing always bad, by the way? If you've spend the exp to max Spellcasting, Charms, and Air, is it bad if you can keep your DMsl shield up continuously? This is meant as an actual, non-snarky question.

Well, it's not that bad, or I wouldn't have spend so much time designing it
It's a perfectly acceptable design, just not one good for crawl IMHO.

I agree that right now, it's way too easy to have a lot of semi-permanent effects at negligible cost; should it be possible to strategically spend experience so some buffs no longer need to be a tactical choice for your character?

Do you mean that if permabuffs have a higher hunger/MP cost than recasting it would balance the turns gained? I have doubts about it. Skalds and other hybrids will always prefer permabuffs even if the cost is high, while conjurers will use tedious recasting to save the MP. Seems hard to balance.

Otherwise, yeah: glow. I do worry about resting glow off, though.

I said grey glow should dissipate faster when resting. Maybe it should just dissipate faster if you're unbuffed, even if moving. And find other ways to nerf (semi) controlled blink. Maybe 2 casts should put you right in yellow glow.

People like having buffs on all the time, but don't like having to recast them. Your solution seems to be to make people not like having buffs on all the time because that's more interesting than balancing the cost of continuous buffs.

Huh, yes, crawl's design is based around creating interesting decisions, not about "what players like".

My feeling is that forcing players into deciding whether or not to buff after they've encountered an enemy is imposing too high a cost; that is, spending a turn in front of an enemy not trying to kill that enemy or run away.

Some playstyles are based around spending turns casting hexes at enemies before trying to kill them. Sometimes the enemy resists and the turn is waisted. Yet, those playstyles work. This isn't a too high cost. And many players already play like that because they don't want to put up with the tediousness of keeping buffs active all the time (and/or because they care about their score and don't want to waste turns).

[njvack]

Depends on how severe they are. If having a buff up cut MP regen to zero and also imposed a recast cost, you would not (practically) be able to explore with it on. Or, if each buff added 50 to your hunger rate, you'd probably turn them off when you didn't need them. I'm not saying those are reasonable costs, but they all can be meaningful if they're harsh enough.

If they are too harsh, then manually recasting becomes better. We don't want that.

I wasn't thinking about them as specifically permabuff costs; they'd just be the costs of having a buff active however it was cast. You'd actually probably want a way to shrug off a buff with these penalties, instead of a way to keep them active longer

In any case: I don't know that we're going to learn much more about how this might work without playing it. The glow-based solution sounds totally reasonable, adjustable, and implementable. I do suspect that it will engender some rather frustrated posts to this here Tavern following the change, but that doesn't mean it'll be a bad change.

Thanks for the discussion so far!

[Blade]

said it before i'll say it again, WE NEED MONSTER SPELLS THAT ATTACK BUFFS. Devour magic, monster consumes buffs and becomes stronger. Slouch, monster hurts you based on how fast you move. Curse, All buffs applied to you suddenly do the opposite(maybe it shouldn't affect TM spells, but other than that Haste slows, Flight grounds and slows, Ctele stops tele, Repel missile attracts them, etc.) The biggest way to prevent permabuffing is if you know there's a chance you'll walk around the corner into an enemy who will then DESTROY you for having them up.

I'd be interested in hearing more discussion around this. If buffs weren't strictly good in every situation, a lot of imbalance would be removed, and it would create unique, dangerous situations. Monster spells that attack buffs seem like a really good idea (maybe something for subtractor snakes?)

[galehar]

said it before i'll say it again, WE NEED MONSTER SPELLS THAT ATTACK BUFFS. Devour magic, monster consumes buffs and becomes stronger. Slouch, monster hurts you based on how fast you move. Curse, All buffs applied to you suddenly do the opposite(maybe it shouldn't affect TM spells, but other than that Haste slows, Flight grounds and slows, Ctele stops tele, Repel missile attracts them, etc.) The biggest way to prevent permabuffing is if you know there's a chance you'll walk around the corner into an enemy who will then DESTROY you for having them up.

I'd be interested in hearing more discussion around this. If buffs weren't strictly good in every situation, a lot of imbalance would be removed, and it would create unique, dangerous situations. Monster spells that attack buffs seem like a really good idea (maybe something for subtractor snakes?)

Well, if buffs give glow, then a monster that gives magical glow would be dangerous to players relying on buffs.

[Eji1700]

I think monster spells that harm buffs is the best solution. I just know that's likely a lot of work and i'm not sure how soon they want to attempt to completely rebalance and rework the monster spellset after creating new toys for them(and of course god knows if any of these should wind up players spells).

That said a slightly faster solution is to treat buffs like you treat zerk. A great buff with a huge downside. Become godly strong, costs food, speed, and CANNOT be recast.

In fact a recast cooldown of some sort(just reuse exhaustion maybe?) on some of the buffs might be more than enough to prevent spamming them. On things like fly it could get you killed at the wrong moment. Ideally just make it a yellow red system. Yellow exhaust means you may recast, but it'll be less effective and not last as long. Red exhaust means you cannot recast and now you'll suffer some penalty. Your not going to run around recasting things that cause exhaustion because you don't want to walk around the corner and have your buff run out and start suffering penalties AND not be able to recast.

Obviously you can just use glow but adding such a system opens the door to another resource for the game to use and the player to manage.