Reagents

[smock]

Just played an MDFi in trunk and I'm reminded how precious consumables are for straight up melee characters. Heal wounds, blinking and speed, all are very helpful. This may be more so with the new Okawaru: the Finesse ability replaced haste and grants combat-haste but not movement-haste, so escaping will take other resourses. They're still amazing for, say, wizards, but between spider from, swiftness, blink and haste spells, many hybrids and casters will depend less on consumables.

Heavy armour = consumables for escape; non-heavy armour (casting) = consumable and spells for escape. And, despite spells for many character designs having tight short-term "budgets", as in how MP limits conjurers, other hybrid-oriented casters are less limited in the short-term by MP, like crusaders and transmuters.

Might the game play better if more spells used consumables as reagents, thereby limiting the number of ways that casters have to escape? Adding reagents to the cost of spell would take much re-balancing work. I have no specific suggestions for what to use as a reagent or which spell could have reagents or how the gane might need to be re-balanced. But I think it'd be fun to brainstorm on this. (If there's been a discuss of this elsewhere, I missed it but I'd like to know what folks were thinking!)

[dpeg]

Spellcasters have usually less Health and the additional burden of Magic as a very limited resource. They have to get up a lot more skills than a fighter.

Spells with reagents are very cool, and perhaps there could be more of them. However, those spells are inevitably heavier on the interface. See https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:magic:reagent_interface.

Personally, I had this idea for a Reverse Alchemy spell which turns gold (coins) into energy (damage).

[smock]

Spells with reagents are very cool, and perhaps there could be more of them. However, those spells are inevitably heavier on the interface. See https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:magic:reagent_interface.

Personally, I had this idea for a Reverse Alchemy spell which turns gold (coins) into energy (damage).

Yes, reagents aren't good until a good reagent interface is added. An idea on this front: Re-imagine the "Q"uiver as an "At the ready" slot. When a melee weapon is wielded, throwing weapons or reagents (arrows, skeletons, chunks, potions of confusion, stones, $$$ or anything new) would be "at the ready". When a missile weapon is wielded, ammo for the appropriate weapon would be in the slot. It would work OK for more classes that don't specialize in both reagent spells and ranged weapons. Sadly, some necromancer builds most need reagents also tend to use missile weapons.

I love the Reverse Alchemy spell idea. Maybe it could poop sling bullets. This is on the idea that alchemists worked on lead + energy -> gold, so the spell would be gold -> energy + lead sling bullets.

[dpeg]

I don't think it's fair to expect all-runing to be as easy (or hard) with fighters as with casters. First, a full game will produce so much experience that should go somewhere, and pure fighters just don't need it. And then, the extended endgame has a lot more places where flexibility is desired... and casters are more flexible.
However, it is possible to fetch runes with pure fighters. Even wins are heard of

[smock]

If L20-27 fighting and weapon skills took more XP but provided more benefits, fighters might be stronger at all-runing without being stronger at 3-runing.

[KoboldLord]

In practice, I have three 15-rune wins to my credit and have yet to see more than one rune with a non-caster. Other people don't seem to have this, so maybe I just suck at playing non-casters.

No, I assure you that my experience is much like yours. If I want to have a melee combatant in the endgame, the easiest start that I can get there seems to be a pure caster.

[MrMisterMonkey]

melee is pretty easy (but the early game is boring so I don't really like starting pure melee) but I find pure casters spammy so I don't play those so I can't compare them

hybrids are probably the most powerful, though

[Bim]

I love the idea of Reagents, but not really to cast spells. I've always loved alchemy in games, and would love to see it implemented in crawl.

My personal opinion is that artificers are pretty weak as a class, and think that they could be great as alchemists instead. So for instance, perhaps 10 stones and a potion of water could create a small golem, whilst two runed swords and a potion of confusion could create a gargoyle or something. Obviously they're just randomly made up ideas but I would love to see some more interesting uses for all the junk lying around the dungeon!

On a side note, I think unless you get some really, really good gear, playing only melee is nearly impossible. I had a 2 rune MDFi win which was pure melee, but I had a control teleport, teleport ring, loads of resistances, and ended up basically teleporting myself around and casting haste a lot. I think its impossible to just go and bash your way through everything, but thats the point of crawl!