New Poison Spell Suggestions

[HousePet]

A few suggestions for making Poison school more diverse and functional.

Sprinkle Salt:
Pois/Earth level 1.
Touch range single target spell.
Damages slugs/oozes/jellies/leeches and prevents enemy healing/regen/regrowing heads.

Salt Storm:
Pois/Earth level 7.
Storm targeted storm spell.
As per Sprinkle Salt, but applies to multiple dishes... Multiple enemies at once.

Holy Water:
Pois/Charm level 3.
Medium range bolt spell.
Hurts undead and poisons demons (ignoring rPois). Is blocked by and destroys fire clouds.
Why is this Pois/Charm?
Charm as its enchanted watery stuff, Poison because it is poisonous to demons.

Holy Water Rain:
Pois/Charm level 8.
Storm targetted storm spell.
Damages undead and demons, poisons demons, destroys most offensive clouds, and can leave shallow water.

Boiling Blood:
Pois/Fire leve 4.
Makes you go berserk.
Fire for flavour, poison for how you feel after.

Weaken Resist:
Pois/Hex level 5.
Target looses 1 point of resist against all.
Or maybe just 1 point of resist against fire/cold/elec/pois?

[Tiber]

Sprinkle Salt: A spell effective against jellies...that you have to be standing right next to to use. Why wouldn't I just stay far away and pelt with ranged? And sickness as a secondary effect is too strong.
Salt Storm: Not worth the investment for such a specialized level 7 spell.
Holy Water: Not gonna happen because spells especially effective to demons are restricted to god-related items and abilities. And poisoning poison resistant enemies on a level 3 spell is incredibly overpowered.
Holy Water Rain: See above.
Boiling Blood: The berserk spell was specifically removed to make trog and the amulet more attractive.
Weaken Resist: There's no reason for poison in the spell. Poison does not mean "anything that does something bad to the body." The devs specifically try to avoid spells that just affect a resistance without any gimmicks. Insulation (which gives rElec) is an exception because rElec is rare and it fits the air elementalist playstyle. Anyway, maybe if it randomly affected one resistance, it might be interesting enough because you'd then have to try and adapt and hit that weakness. And by the way, it's loses, not looses.

[Patashu]

They're not bad ideas, but don't thematically work. A 'poison' spell in crawl doesn't mean 'can be associated with poison metaphorically', it means 'literally creates, transmutes or removes poison'.

-Salt isn't poison, and its use is a bit tenuous - Why cast a spell that turns off regen, when you can poison your foe and make them not regen and take damage? Making it pure earth removes the above issues - but on the other hand, it's early game VMs that need help dispatching jellies, not early game EEs. Hmm...
-It doesn't make sense to be able to create holy water except through worship of one of the good gods (or maybe Fedhas) - which would make it a god invocation, not a spell. (Also, apparently, there used to be a 'Holy' spell school in ancient crawl that got taken out).
-Making yourself berserk was a spell that skalds used to get. It was taken out because... Not sure if it was redundancy with zerkers/trog or because it was too powerful otherwise, but it no longer exists regardless.
-Weaken resist seems quite powerful... Unless it's resisted by MR. It's not really related to poison, anyway - unless you can think of a way. Some kind of poison that stimulates the nerves and senses? Would it only work on things that are living?

[Galefury]

I don't like them.

[Jabberwocky]

I think poison is fine as it is. It has good diversity in what its spells do. I feel that all of these ideas are either highly overpowered, as holy water, or extremely underpowered, salt storm. They also don't feel thematic and I can't think of any way to improve either flavour or effect.

[Eji1700]

I think poison is fine as it is. It has good diversity in what its spells do. I feel that all of these ideas are either highly overpowered, as holy water, or extremely underpowered, salt storm. They also don't feel thematic and I can't think of any way to improve either flavour or effect.

While i think that these suggestions are lacking, I do want to see more poison spells. It really starts to lag late game and quickly becomes pointless unless you have poison arrow. Some more poison based spells that aren't shut down late game, and maybe some more spells that don't just apply poison would be neat.

[IronJelly]

I think poison is fine as it is. It has good diversity in what its spells do. I feel that all of these ideas are either highly overpowered, as holy water, or extremely underpowered, salt storm. They also don't feel thematic and I can't think of any way to improve either flavour or effect.

While i think that these suggestions are lacking, I do want to see more poison spells. It really starts to lag late game and quickly becomes pointless unless you have poison arrow. Some more poison based spells that aren't shut down late game, and maybe some more spells that don't just apply poison would be neat.

the issue here is that this is the point of poison. a much easier early game (bugs are vulnerable to poison. most early game enemies are as well), in which you have to branch out before you can handle tougher stuff. Compare a Venom Mage to an Ice Elementalist, and you'll see what I mean. Ice does alright in the early game, but it's best abilities won't be reliable until the midgame.

The only way I could see improving poison past the early to mid game would be to give poison some synergy with another magic, but that would effectively shoehorn poison users into a specific school later on weakening that elementalist starting class. Poison already synergizes with fire to some degree via ignite poison.

Another possibility I thought of is this: If you know poisons, maybe you know toxins and chemicals in general. Maybe what the poison magic category needs is access to some healing or beneficial spells. I remember back in my CoH/CoV days, I was surprised at first that the poison powers for Masterminds had a healing power at the top, but I became more and more used to it. A relatively high (at least level 7) skill spell that does what Trog's regeneration does (good regen + MR, costs hunger besides it's MP) would instantly make poison magic more appealing without the need to improve any of it's spells, and since the averagely spoiled player knows it's not strong magic in the mid to late game, it is an interesting choice to invest in the poison magic to reach effective success rates with it's regen spell.

I'm not actually familiar with our current regen spell, so this might already exist.

[ebarrett]

all of your ideas are terrible. anti-jelly, anti-hydra, anti-demon, anti-resists, berserk - why don't you just use wizard mode? that way when you die to one of these things you don't know how to deal with you can just keep going instead of going through the (pointless) trouble of coming up with a bunch of ridiculous ideas (pois/fire berserk? really?), creating an account, getting ripped in two by some angry forumgoer, etc.

[galehar]

Yes, the ideas are bad. However, it's not a reason to get angry and resort to personal attacks.

[Jabberwocky]

I think poison is fine as it is. It has good diversity in what its spells do. I feel that all of these ideas are either highly overpowered, as holy water, or extremely underpowered, salt storm. They also don't feel thematic and I can't think of any way to improve either flavour or effect.

While i think that these suggestions are lacking, I do want to see more poison spells. It really starts to lag late game and quickly becomes pointless unless you have poison arrow. Some more poison based spells that aren't shut down late game, and maybe some more spells that don't just apply poison would be neat.

Not everything is supposed to be powerful at all stages of the game. Poison already shuts down almost all of the early/midgame, but isn't all that powerful in the late game. This is intentional. It's a little bit like trolls. Trolls are very powerful in the early/middlegame but beyond that they aren't all that powerful. Mummies are the opposite. They are weaker in the early game then many species, but beginning in the late middlegame game they become unstoppable killing machines.

[One-Eyed Jack]

Mummies aren't that strong late-game compared to other species (except mummy summoners, who are obscenely strong after * sif piety). They have bad skills and stats, can't use potions, have intrinsic rF-, and lose access to a bunch of good spells. In exchange they get constant necromutation, which a non-mummy could afford to just cast anyway.

It's ok if poison is mostly good early-game, but all of its early-game spells (sting, mephitic, poison weapon, spider form) are dual-schooled (or triple schooled) in more versatile spell schools so there's really no incentive to raise poison above ~5 unless you're going for cloud/arrow, which themselves both use conjuration. Poison is less an interesting, unique branch of magic than "it's cheaper to get my poison from 0 to 5 than to get my air/conj from 5-10." Not sure whether this is how it is intended to function.

[blackcustard]

Most of the spells sound like they wouldn't really work. The regen stopping effect of sprinkle salt sounds like it might be interesting, but like someone else pointed out, it's basically what poison already does. The edge cases uses on slugs are amusing but probably wouldn't have much impact on strategy. The effect on hydras might work, but learning a spell just to kill hydras isn't very cool. Hydra related decisions have enough weight put on them already I think.

Some of the rest of you could be a bit nicer. He was just making some suggestions, you don't need to jump down his throat because you don't like them.

[bobross419]

I've been wanting a high powered poison spell, but unfortunately everything I've ever thought of ends up being Lehudib's Poison Spear, Poison Storm (Like fire storm but with scorpions instead of vortex lol), or Hive (Haunt with bees and wasps). Although I did have a CYC idea for a spell Montezuma's Revenge... which causes the target to yarf uncontrollably... this ends up having the added benefits of a stationary confused state and it creates a "water" tile in front of them lol.

Poison arrow and cloud are are very solid spells that get me through mid and even late game, but once I'm to the point where I'm doing Crypt, Tomb, Hells, Pan, etc. I just amnesia Mephitic, PCloud, and PArrow for things that are a bit more worthwhile. I might keep PArrow around longer because of hungerless against weaker opponents, but LCS seems to fit the bill for most of the nasties.

And 5 Poison is about the highest I ever go and is more than enough to get those three spells online quickly.

I would like to see poison become more worthwhile, but I don't have any suggestions myself that are actually unique and interesting

[ebarrett]

Yes, the ideas are bad. However, it's not a reason to get angry and resort to personal attacks.

you might want to check your definition of "angry" and "personal attack" again - and this guy creating an account to make a not-so-subtle "make the game easier plz" is more offensive than anything I could come up with anyway. I mean, I assume that, as a developer, you are at the very least mildly annoyed when someone unceremoniously stomps all over design principles like this.

Some of the rest of you could be a bit nicer. He was just making some suggestions, you don't need to jump down his throat because you don't like them.

that's how I get my kicks. and besides, I gave him good advice, that's more helpful than pussyfooting around like some of you like to do when there's an elephant in the room. now, are you guys going to play "lets fool him into thinking his ideas aren't going to make it into the game just because of some minor details" much longer? because that is really mean.

[bobross419]

that's how I get my kicks.

Thank god for prison rape.

[tasonir]

Another possibility I thought of is this: If you know poisons, maybe you know toxins and chemicals in general. Maybe what the poison magic category needs is access to some healing or beneficial spells. I remember back in my CoH/CoV days, I was surprised at first that the poison powers for Masterminds had a healing power at the top, but I became more and more used to it. A relatively high (at least level 7) skill spell that does what Trog's regeneration does (good regen + MR, costs hunger besides it's MP) would instantly make poison magic more appealing without the need to improve any of it's spells, and since the averagely spoiled player knows it's not strong magic in the mid to late game, it is an interesting choice to invest in the poison magic to reach effective success rates with it's regen spell.

I'm not actually familiar with our current regen spell, so this might already exist.

Now this could make this thread productive in the long run, I don't think it got enough attention. I don't think the idea as is will be interesting enough, though. The current regen spell gives precisely +1 hp/turn for it's duration. The duration starts out exceptionally short (I recently cast it on a troll at low power - I got the "duration is running low" message the very turn I cast the spell), but at high spell power can be fairly decent, returning maybe 20-30 hp. So if that's what the high level poison spell did, it wouldn't be any different. Adding MR to it could work, but then you're basically copying trog's hand. Maybe a regeneration and immunity (either 90% or even 100%) to poison? You could throw in immunity to nausea, sickness, and now you've got a fairly unique and thematic spell.

Let's say a level 6 charms/poison spell, or maybe a level 7 pure poison, that gives a slightly longer 1hp/turn regen and poison/nausea/sickness immunity, at high spell power for around 30-40 turns, and 15-20 turns as it becomes castable? Being high level you'll have fairly high spell power by the time you get it online. A level 5 spell with shorter duration could work, but as poison seems to have plenty of low level spells and not many high level spells, I'd rather see it become a high level and powerful spell.

This would combo well with other spells like haunt which can cause sickness to non-undead, or with people having trouble with their food clocks. If it's high enough level (6+) I think it would be reasonable to let it cure existing nausea/sickness/poison (a certain amount of a poison stack, depending on spell power, perhaps not all of your stack) as well as preventing it.

[jaega1]

Here is an idea that I have have not really thought through the ramifications but what about a spell that causes you to regen if you are poisoned? It would give you a reason to save potions of poison for life gain. This would also cause you to spam poison cloud for health which may or may not be a bad thing.

[rebthor]

What poison needs is a spell like miasma or curare but without the need for a corpse in the former or needles in the latter. Either would be sufficient to boost the power of poison in the late game.

[jejorda2]

Make Haste use the Poison and Charms schools, and have it poison the player while she is hasted. It won't work on characters with rPois, like undead. I know this has been suggested for swiftness, but the recent stealth and trap detection changes are probably a big enough nerf to swiftness.

No more hasted bone dragon, greater servant, or daeva allies, and Chei gets an indirect boost.

[smock]

This thread is based on the OP's first post at the Tavern. If I had received such a welcome, I certainly would have left the Tavern and not returned. For shame! Just because you have thick skin doesn't mean that others do.

I think it's much easier come up with bad ideas (say, ideas that will not and should not make it into Crawl) and to "critique" those ideas that it is to come up with good ideas. That's not to say that critiques are unhelpful, just that the apparent chest-beating critiques in this thread might look pretty silly to people who are actually coming up with good ideas. (To be clear, I'm not among those coming up with good ideas.)

I try to just ignore threads that discuss ideas that I think are bad or uninteresting in the hope that the thread will dissipate on its own. Others might consider doing do same. (Happily, this thread seems to have become much more constructive in the last few hours.)

[nicolae]

What poison needs is a spell like miasma or curare but without the need for a corpse in the former or needles in the latter. Either would be sufficient to boost the power of poison in the late game.

I think the devs have said they'd rather limit the ways a player can create miasma, since it's a pretty nasty form of cloud.

I like the idea of more healing spells in the Poison school, along the lines of Cure Poison. Cure Sickness might be handy to have. I'm not sure if nausea really needs its own spell cure - it'd basically become a no-brainer for every caster.

That said, the devs have also said they're pretty okay with Poison being a school which is more useful in the early game than the later game, so unless you've got a Poison spell idea that blows their socks off, probably not a whole lot is going to come of tossing spell ideas around. (Of course, not much comes from tossing any kind of game idea around.)

[crate]

Poison is already very good late game (meaning zot/vault 8) since dracs and orb guardians and very nearly everything in v8 are vulnerable to it, and it already has the best conjuration in the game (poison arrow).

It is less good in extended but I don't really see that as a problem, there are lots of things that are not very good in extended (shields, one handed weapons, poison, yredelmnul, fedhas, etc.).

[nicolae]

I think the complaint is more that high levels of the poison magic skill are useless.

Level 8 spell, Poison Superarrow.

[crate]

I think the complaint is more that high levels of the poison magic skill are useless.

Along with charms, translocations, traps, stabbing, hexes, invocations for most gods....

[bobross419]

I think the complaint is more that high levels of the poison magic skill are useless.

This...

Just because other spell schools don't utilize higher levels doesn't mean that poison shouldn't as well. And the major difference between most of the skills that Crate mentioned and Poison is that poison magic is used similar to Fire, Ice, Earth, Air - its an "attack skill" if you will. Aside from Stabbing, those skills are pretty much just (de)buffs in one form or another...

[roctavian]

I think it's also worth pointing out that, as things currently are, most weapon skills past the mid-teens are effectively useless. I think there's room in poison magic for some interesting higher-level spells, but I also think it's good that poison magic loses its punch later on. What about, perhaps, a level 7 or 8 Hexes/Poison spell that attempts to enslave every poisoned creature in sight, for the duration of their poisoning -- or something like that? I'm trying to think of combinations that haven't been used yet. Translocation/Poison seems untenable but who knows.

[nicolae]

I'm trying to think of combinations that haven't been used yet.

I do this a lot as an idle distraction, trying to think of spells for unused two-spell combos. The only one I thought up for Poison was an Earth/Poison one, which uses a metal object as a reagent to inflict heavy metal toxicity (thanks, House, MD), which acts slower and with less damage than regular poison, but isn't resisted by rPois and doesn't go away on its own. (The quality of this spell is why I rarely post my spell ideas.)

[mageykun]

Translocation/Poison seems untenable but who knows.

Irresistible poison attack, works by actually teleporting poisons dirrectly into the bloodstream. Or by swapping some portion of blood for poison (generates a decorative blood splat and does direct damage for the blood loss in addition to the irresistible poison).

The siltiest bit would be the targeting. Do you use (wielded?) potions of poison (and generate potions of blood?). Can you use it to move poison status from one creature to another? Poison yourself, and then swap it?

Okay, yeah, this is silly. Also, since you're interacting directly with enemy biology I'm have a hard time justifying why it's not a hex or necro.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Personally, I'd think it'd be more interesting if every skill was useful enough at 27 that you'd want to seriously consider which skills to max rather than "get X to 12, Y to 15, and then max Z because it provides the best marginal benefit and I have nothing left to do with my XP". Of course, that's far easier said than done and would likely be a long term goal. Every spell school having good spells at the upper levels, 9 in particular, that scales with power would be a good start.


Anyway, a few ideas for spells: Quickening Doom. Inflicts direct damage based on how poisoned the target is. If the target is barely poisoned, they don't get hurt much. Heavily poisoned? Ouch! Bonus points if you know where I'm getting the spell name and concept from. I'd say this should be a level 5 or 6 Poison, Poison/Conj, Poison/Hex, or all three.

Curare Weapon: Upgraded poison brand, as you could guess. I'd say at least level 6 Poison/Charm and/or Hex, possibly 7 and maybe even 8 since Curare is so strong.

Miasmic Cloud: Clouds of miasma, I'd say level 8 or 9 since Miasma is so strong. Could either work like Poisonous/Freezing Cloud or in some other fashion, ideally the latter so as to not tie it to Air and give that school another strong spell.

[bobross419]

Combust Odours:
Pois/Fire.
Causes bad smells to explode with such force that most people affected by the spell are left barefooted.

Combine with Flatulence (L:5 Poison/Necro [because "something must have died in there"]) which causes you to leave behind a trail of gas (causes nausea) wherever you go.

[nicolae]

Self-targeted Poison spells, flavored as creating an elixir that gives some benefit but has harmful side effects. Like a Poison/Transmutations spell which infuses your body with toxic preservatives, giving you temporary resistance to rot and mutation but also poisons you, and can't be used if you've got rPois.

Man, it's hard thinking up Poison spells.

[sardonica]

There should totally be a way to cast curare as a high-level poison spell. Considering how powerful Tornado and the "Storms" are, a smite-targeted, level 9 curare spell that at least partially ignores resistances would be appropriate. It's not as if you could spam it, and it would add a lot of tactical flexibility.

[TwilightPhoenix]

There isn't really a lot of space for high-level poison spells. Almost anything that could reasonably be called a poison spell has to be resisted by rPois, because poison is poison. And if a monster or group of monsters lacks rPois, well, there's no point in casting a level 8 poison spell because the level 6 poison spells will kill them as fast as you could possibly want to anyway. Miasma would fit reasonably well, I guess, though it would still be constrained to living monsters.

Which is partly why I think all resistances should have three-pips instead of just one. It'd make things less binary for stuff like poison and electricity and more workable than "full damage or near immunity".

[crate]

rPois and rElec are actually already three pips for enemies.

[njvack]

Yeah -- with Poisonous Cloud alone, you can clear most of the Drac packs in Zot if you're patient and careful. Then you get to the demonic branches and it's essentially useless.

But! This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Not every skill should need a huge XP investment to be useful, or be something you can rely on as your only damage-dealing option ever. (See minmay's comment about Short Blades). A high-level Poison nuke is kind of a neat idea, but I don't feel like Crawl is lessened by its lack.

[TwilightPhoenix]

rPois and rElec are actually already three pips for enemies.

Which goes vulnerable, almost immune, and fully immune for poison. Still very binary. For elec, seems to be almost immune, almoster immune, and immune.

And regardless, it doesn't solve the player's binariness with these resists, which is a problem. Look at Nikola. Without rElec, you die. With rElec, he dies. No middleground unless he's very OOD.

[One-Eyed Jack]

I don't think curare would actually be very interesting or very powerful as a high level spell. It does a small amount of damage, poisons, and slows, all of which are covered by other spells (in fact, all three effects exist in the book of minor magic.) So if you make it level 7 or 8 or whatever you're basically paying a huge premium for a level 3 spell that's in a wizard starting book (and also doesn't work on rPois monsters) in exchange for merging it with venom bolt.

[HousePet]

The definiton of the Poison school is very narrow, and I think that is limiting its overall usefulness.

The definiton is so narrow that technically none of the existing spells fit the definition. (except Cure Poison in a couple of situations)

[nicolae]

The definiton is so narrow that technically none of the existing spells fit the definition.

When confronted with the choice between "I'm wrong about the design of this game" and "the designers are wrong about the design of the game they designed", it takes a lot of confidence to go with the latter. I salute your chutzpah.

The definition of Poison Magic, from docs/develop/spells:

Poison
======

All spells involving poison of any kind.

This includes: the poisoning of weapons, the creation of poisoned projectiles
(in combination with the Conjuration school), or anything involving poison.

This specifically excludes: acid and acid-related spells.

[Patashu]

I don't think curare would actually be very interesting or very powerful as a high level spell. It does a small amount of damage, poisons, and slows, all of which are covered by other spells (in fact, all three effects exist in the book of minor magic.) So if you make it level 7 or 8 or whatever you're basically paying a huge premium for a level 3 spell that's in a wizard starting book (and also doesn't work on rPois monsters) in exchange for merging it with venom bolt.

Curare will work on Antaeus and TRJ, hexes won't.

[roctavian]

So okay, what about a level 7 Pois/Charms/Hexes spell, which gives a buff that enslaves or confuses all poisoned enemies in sight? Checks vs. HD, perhaps only works within a certain radius if that sounds too strong. Perhaps even level 8 if that sounds more sensible?

[crate]

So okay, what about a level 7 Pois/Charms/Hexes spell, which gives a buff that enslaves or confuses all poisoned enemies in sight? Checks vs. HD, perhaps only works within a certain radius if that sounds too strong. Perhaps even level 8 if that sounds more sensible?

Alternatively since you are presumably poisoning things with a level 6 spell--which means poison arrow or poisonous cloud--you can use the already-in-the-game level 0 spell which will kill anything hit by those two spells: walking away.

[smock]

Poison
======

All spells involving poison of any kind.

This includes: the poisoning of weapons, the creation of poisoned projectiles
(in combination with the Conjuration school), or anything involving poison.

This specifically excludes: acid and acid-related spells.

Odd. Mephitic cloud breaks this rule, strictly speaking.

[Blade]

"anything involving poison"
Noxious fumes are poison.

[HousePet]

And poisons are ingested substances.