The Undead and Sif Spell Spam

[njvack]

Two things have gotten me thinking about spell hunger and the noneating: the permabuff thread and the rash of MuSu/Sif covering the game in dragons. The lack of a food clock is fine for most aspects of the game, but hunger-free channeling combined with hunger-free highlevel casting and miscast protection makes for a really absurdly powerful build.

So, what to do? I don't think mummies need to start hungering, but maybe there are some other solutions. When the noneating do things that would make the living hunger, maybe they could:

* have a chance to take damage or even rot
* have a chance to suffer statloss
* have a chance at some magical contamination

The chance for these things would need to very-closely approach 0 for things like melee, but if a mummy is casting Summon Dragon with a 20% chance of success and gawd multi-ration hunger cost, a 5% chance of a couple HP of rot or a point of statloss seems seems reasonable to me. A 0.1% chance of one of those things on channeling would mean it's still very powerful, but that you can't just macro "." to "aa" anymore.

Thoughts?

[njvack]

And if channeling is to contaminate, it's reasonable that it do so for everyone, as it sounds like Light is doing...

[crate]

I don't really see the problem. If you want to play a mummy and use Sif channeling infinitely I think that is fine, since you pay for it with awful stats and aptitudes and no potions. MuSu might be easy but so what? That's just a combination of summoning being probably overpowered to begin with (and being "balanced" by the interface annoyances involved in killing everything with allies) and channeling making summoning even more absurd.

[One-Eyed Jack]

I've never liked sif's channeling in the first place. It might be too drastic, but I would give it a small piety cost (2?) and make it scale with spellcasting instead of invocations, and maybe faster. This makes it more of a panic-button thing, which I don't think is unreasonable. Once you have the spells you want, sif piety isn't going to mean much, so you can use it pretty frequently (although probably not as an alternative to pressing 5 as it is now) which means it'll still be reasonable late-game.

I do think that there would need to be some other ability to make sif more attractive, maybe a passive (piety/200)% mana regen bonus (which also lowers time spent resting). Sif is a pretty lame god before the first book gift for most builds, in my experience (except mummies who can now summon ice beasts at 35% with no cost whatsoever.) So it's nice to have something for that period, even if it's largely a trivial effect.

I don't know what to do about staves of energy and the like. I think glow would work well for those (for everyone).

[rebthor]

I've never liked sif's channeling in the first place. It might be too drastic, but I would give it a small piety cost (2?) and make it scale with spellcasting instead of invocations, and maybe faster. This makes it more of a panic-button thing, which I don't think is unreasonable. Once you have the spells you want, sif piety isn't going to mean much, so you can use it pretty frequently (although probably not as an alternative to pressing 5 as it is now) which means it'll still be reasonable late-game.

I do think that there would need to be some other ability to make sif more attractive, maybe a passive (piety/200)% mana regen bonus (which also lowers time spent resting). Sif is a pretty lame god before the first book gift for most builds, in my experience (except mummies who can now summon ice beasts at 35% with no cost whatsoever.) So it's nice to have something for that period, even if it's largely a trivial effect.

I don't know what to do about staves of energy and the like. I think glow would work well for those (for everyone).

I think Sif is a pretty lame god in general for the books. Sure, you're likely to get something good, but you're just as likely to get crap book gifts too and have to wait hundreds more turns. Anyone who is joining Sif solely for the books would probably be better off with Kiku or Vehumet instead.

[TehDruid]

Sif is the god I've played the least in DC:SS, along with Vehumet. It's natural since I'm mostly a warmonger, not a fan of casters. So I haven't seen her in action at all, pretty much. I don't really like the idea of picking her on the rare occasion that I do play a caster, I prefer Ashenzari/Cheibriados much more. Sure you may get unlucky with spellbooks, but you'll eventually run into quite a number of them and Sif wrath is bad for any heavy-caster character when you want to leave her later on. I just think that in contrast to the guaranteed books and passive perks that Kiku and Veh give, she feels weak.

[crate]

"when you want to leave her later on" ... Sif channeling is exceptionally strong for lategame (in fact it is strong all game), especially since you probably have put some xp into invocations by that point (and getting 3-4 mp back per turn is very strong). There are not really many gods (any gods?) for whom I would consider leaving Sif on a character who wanted to go Sif in the first place. Maybe Nemelex I guess.

[Mattchew]

Two things have gotten me thinking about spell hunger and the noneating: the permabuff thread and the rash of MuSu/Sif covering the game in dragons. The lack of a food clock is fine for most aspects of the game, but hunger-free channeling combined with hunger-free highlevel casting and miscast protection makes for a really absurdly powerful build.

As one of the guys who tried out the mummy summoner, let me say, it's not that interesting of a build. It was fun to see all the extended game with reasonable confidence that I was going to finish it all (which is perhaps somewhat un-Crawl-y, at least for a player at my level) but it's not something I'm tempted to go back to over and over.

I don't necessarily think it would be bad to nerf this combo somehow, as long as it didn't mess up other parts of the game. (I thought a max number of dragons or some escalating fail condition on Summon Dragon might make sense.) OTOH, I don't think it's so bad if there are some power combos that work especially well in the later game, like TrBe works well in the early game.

[BlackSheep]

The combo being boring is probably disincentive enough that MuSu doesn't need nerfing. (cf. the nethack devs' response to pudding farming)

[sanka]

I also tried MuSu (actually MuWiz focusing on summoning only), and died because of boredom in the Vaults. I must mention I died with an other such character from Nicola.

I feel that infinite chanelling is the only really strong feature of a Mummy for a long time, but it's not so strong that makes a mummy overpowered compared to other species. In the post-end game torment resistance is nice also. I never had food problems with my other conjurers (not even with spriggan ones) - of course they did not used channelling instead of resting.

The mummy summoner is a very strong combo - but I do not think that channeling is overpowered for a mummy. I've played mummy ice elementalists with chanelling (an other good mummy build), and chanelling was nice, but better aptitudes, potions, no negative fire resistance would help more. Of course, in the late game where these drawbacks do not matter as much, a mummy can be really strong. But you need to get there. Post-end game balance is an entirely different issue.

What was really strong for a mummy is summoning. Summoning is still overpowered, not just for mummy, and still boring most of the time. The mummy build just push this combination to extremes.

I think that a summoning nerf will come some time -that will address this problem also. I think that a hard cap of all summoned monsters should be good, along with making a summons a little more durable to make up for it. Or maybe a "heal allies" summon spell, or something. The hard cap is necessary because simply "outnumbering" the enemies is fun for first, but can be really boring quickly. Much less, but stronger allies makes much more room for tactics.

Other idea is that if a summon goes out of LOS, or even out of a certain range from the caster, it goes hostile. The summons are unable to leave the aura on their own, but the player could leave them - with a possible warning. Or there can be two kind of summoning spells: the demons go hostile, while the "good/neutral" summons simply disappear when leaving the aura.

[Kate]

I think that a summoning nerf will come some time -that will address this problem also. I think that a hard cap of all summoned monsters should be good, along with making a summons a little more durable to make up for it. Or maybe a "heal allies" summon spell, or something. The hard cap is necessary because simply "outnumbering" the enemies is fun for first, but can be really boring quickly. Much less, but stronger allies makes much more room for tactics.

Other idea is that if a summon goes out of LOS, or even out of a certain range from the caster, it goes hostile. The summons are unable to leave the aura on their own, but the player could leave them - with a possible warning. Or there can be two kind of summoning spells: the demons go hostile, while the "good/neutral" summons simply disappear when leaving the aura.

Yeah, something along these lines is definitely needed. The idea I like best so far is to have per-spell caps on summon numbers (so learning lots of different summoning spells is more appealing), and to have summons time out (much) faster when they leave your LOS. More spells or abilities that buff your allies somehow would also be nice along with that.

[njvack]

Yeah, something along these lines is definitely needed. The idea I like best so far is to have per-spell caps on summon numbers (so learning lots of different summoning spells is more appealing), and to have summons time out (much) faster when they leave your LOS. More spells or abilities that buff your allies somehow would also be nice along with that.

As an added bonus, this lets you differentiate summoning spells a bit more -- for example, you might make Summon Horrible Things exempt from the fast timeout, as it already has an anti-spamming limiter built in.

[rebthor]

I think that a summoning nerf will come some time -that will address this problem also. I think that a hard cap of all summoned monsters should be good, along with making a summons a little more durable to make up for it. Or maybe a "heal allies" summon spell, or something. The hard cap is necessary because simply "outnumbering" the enemies is fun for first, but can be really boring quickly. Much less, but stronger allies makes much more room for tactics.

Other idea is that if a summon goes out of LOS, or even out of a certain range from the caster, it goes hostile. The summons are unable to leave the aura on their own, but the player could leave them - with a possible warning. Or there can be two kind of summoning spells: the demons go hostile, while the "good/neutral" summons simply disappear when leaving the aura.

Yeah, something along these lines is definitely needed. The idea I like best so far is to have per-spell caps on summon numbers (so learning lots of different summoning spells is more appealing), and to have summons time out (much) faster when they leave your LOS. More spells or abilities that buff your allies somehow would also be nice along with that.

If a cap is put in, I'd also like to see more "direct" control over them, for example when you have something outside LOS, you'd be able to tell them where to go exactly and not just be stuck summoning 12 ice beasts and telling them to wander around so that a fire drake in the lair doesn't one or two shot a mummy. It would also be very useful to figure out some interface for a summoner, already generally very squishy, to have summons walk in front of them instead of just behind them.