Stalking?

[Kersallus]

Has the stalker class been removed in .11?
I really liked that class.

[Jabberwocky]

yes
fulsom distilation+evaporate was I believe the cause

[Kate]

No. They were removed in 0.12, though (along with Fulsome Distillation and Evaporate).

[varsovie]

Evaporate removed.

The spell was fun even if too strong. It was broken mostly because of Distillation, and the near infinite amount of potions (so now drawback to use, except inventory cluttering).

I would love to see evaporate come back with two changes :

Make it Lvl 4 and make miscast USE the potion and may create the cloud (1 to 3 radius) on top of @ instead of the target.

[ebarrett]

I would love to see evaporate come back with two changes :

Make it Lvl 4 and make miscast USE the potion and may create the cloud (1 to 3 radius) on top of @ instead of the target.

Yes, lets bring back extremely unfun things so we can make them exponentially more unfun.

edit: also, that's not how miscasts work

[danr]

Good riddance, I say, never liked that class or those spells. Now the least fun thing left in the game is eating (unless you are a spriggan or a kobold).

[Jabberwocky]

Eating as a mummy is kind of fun.

[nicolae]

IIRC, weren't a couple Earth spells changed to Earth/Tmut to make them fit better for Stalkers?

[Davion Fuxa]

Kind of makes you wonder if this is the harbinger of Doom for the entire Transmutation School; and note I say school and not necessarily spells.

[ebarrett]

Kind of makes you wonder if this is the harbinger of Doom for the entire Transmutation School; and note I say school and not necessarily spells.

Surprisingly, the transmutation school is more of a transmuter thing than it was a stalker thing. Shocking innit!

[BlackSheep]

Tmut is still a good school with pretty well defined abilities. I don't see a need for it to change.

[Tiber]

IIRC, weren't a couple Earth spells changed to Earth/Tmut to make them fit better for Stalkers?

I dunno, but I've always thought that petrify makes more sense thematically as a Hexes/Earth spell than a Earth/Transmutation spell. I do understand why it is the way it is though.

[njvack]

Trying to think of Hexes as thematic only leads to more confusion.

[Baldu]

I`m so not gonna miss evaporate. Whenever i play a wanderer and get that book i do real well but the annoyance is so high i dont enjoy it much. I am really gonna miss fulsome though since I love playing with mutations once I have more than one cure muts. Thats really a fun thing i`m going to miss

[Tiber]

You can still eat the corpses directly, though that's more risky than having a stash of 20 where you can keep trying to get rid of bad muts.

That reminds me: Mutagenic corpse drops were reduced to make that strategy harder, but now that fulsome is gone is the corpse drop rate going to be restored? Of course, maybe you did that already and I just missed it, but it doesn't seem like it.

[Galefury]

As you said people can still just eat the corpses. It is more risky, so I think it would be okay to restore them. Not sure it would actually be better than the status quo, though. Probably not worse, but better? Hmm.

[Baldu]

The problem with eating mutation food is that it`s usually better to wait to have more than one cure muts in stock so there`s one left for emergencies, but that generally only happens when mutation corpses stop becoming available. Fulsome is a way to store mutating corpses until later, therefore, rather than playing with mutations in most games that go to extended, I'll probably only take chances if I get an early bad mutation or if I find multiple cure muts early.

Oh well, too bad!

[JeffQyzt]

This is pretty far OT...

...but if for some reason we want to allow more chances at mutation roulette then it could be accomplished via

1) Increasing frequency of mutation potions (this would have a side effect of making them even more likely to be mistaken for curing potions in the early game, which is maybe a good thing?)
2) Reinstating normal frequency of mutagenic corpse drops - as pointed out above, fulsome can no longer be used for stockpiling, so it becomes an immediate decision
3) Modifying the behavior of mutation potions and/or corpses, e.g. by changing how often multiple effects happen, and/or changing the odds for good/bad/neutral mutations to occur.
4) Adding additional mutation sources

I suspect, however, that the devteam does not, in keeping with the "protect users from their own tedious behavior" goal. For support, see the removal of the "Alter Self" spell and the original mutagenic corpse frequency change (though that was also done for Nemelex mutation potion sacrifice reasons.)

[dpeg]

JeffQyzt: It is not necessary to prevent all kinds of tedium -- in fact, that's impossible. What is important is to avoid tedium which actually yields gameplay benefits, or where players reasonably think it does. If someone wants to play a strange conduct game which then leads to bizarre actions, that's not much of a concern.

[galehar]

You can just worship Jiyva if you like mutations.

[Galefury]

Actually adding a potion is some work even if the effect is simple to code. There are a bunch of places it has to be added to. Price list, spawning weight list, possibly zig or other vault loot, good/bad/useless/chaotic/dangerous item lists, description, tile, etc. I had to edit like 10 files to add a potion.

[galehar]

I started making a patch for potions of beneficial mutation then realized that it would actually be faster for a dev to code it than it would be for them to merge a patch. Just sayin'

Why? Is your code so bad?
I'd say most of the work in adding a potion of beneficial mutation would be balance, not code (weighting the mutations, spawn rate, price, vault loot, ...)

[Jabberwocky]

I was a bit disappointed about the removal of Fulsome Distillation. I liked using it to make water rations for Spriggans.

[gloorx]

What is important is to avoid tedium which actually yields gameplay benefits, or where players reasonably think it does. If someone wants to play a strange conduct game which then leads to bizarre actions, that's not much of a concern.

Ah, so this is the reason why eating is not going to be removed? It is boring but has no gameplay benefits?

[JeffQyzt]

JeffQyzt: It is not necessary to prevent all kinds of tedium -- in fact, that's impossible. What is important is to avoid tedium which actually yields gameplay benefits, or where players reasonably think it does. If someone wants to play a strange conduct game which then leads to bizarre actions, that's not much of a concern.

Of course, but since the aforementioned methods for self-mutation were removed for just that reason (e.g. just cast Alter Self until you get a nice set), it seems reasonable to assume that adding additional methods would not be looked upon favorably unless there's some additional limiting factor involved - such as dieties, the recent "evolution" mutation, mutagenic chunks expire, etc.

[dpeg]

JeffQyzt: As I understand the Alter Self situation, the problem there was that you *would* wind up with a very positive mutation situation eventually. And that's to be prevented: the (random) walk until you're there can be bone-shattering long. Really best not to offer it -- at least not as a spell. Alter Self is one of those things that would make sense in limited form but not as spell.

[Tiber]

You can just worship Jiyva if you like mutations.

I actually do play Xom a lot. But does it do any harm to restore the mutagenic corpse drops, since the scumminess factor has been removed? Besides, not everyone likes mutations enough to take up a valuable god slot, and demigods can't in the first place.

[Sporkman]

No. They were removed in 0.12, though (along with Fulsome Distillation and Evaporate).

The only thing I'm going to miss about Evaporate is how much fun it was to throw around potions like molotovs. It was stupidly overpowered - a pair of spells that could let you throw miasma around, not to mention throw around poison clouds like nobody's business, with the only downside being that they use potions that had no other use anyway and it couldn't smite-target? Ye gads!

[Jeremiah]

I don't really see why they couldn't have just removed Fulsome but kept Evaporate as a still powerful, but much more limited, way to do something useful with bad potions.

[Galefury]

Bad potions are not frequent enough for that, and making them more frequent just spams everyone who doesn't learn evaporate with useless items. I'm glad it's gone.

[dpeg]

I believe that Evaporate+FD could make a comeback with a god... at least I have listed these as tentative minor power for random gods. The point is that for a god, the brokenness can be counteracted by a conduct.

[Eji1700]

I believe that Evaporate+FD could make a comeback with a god... at least I have listed these as tentative minor power for random gods. The point is that for a god, the brokenness can be counteracted by a conduct.

I really don't think the spell combo had to be broken. Giving FD a result based on corpse+spell power could've helped a lot along with raising it's level. That way you could give it some use other than "making water and evaporate ammo". As for evap, again, higher level and more varied effects depending on potions, but smaller results. A 3x3 cloud should really only have been possible at max spell power and that should've been much harder to achieve.

[Eji1700]

Permanent effects from corpses are bad.

Then don't make it permanent or every corpse.

[Roderic]

I believe that Evaporate+FD could make a comeback with a god... at least I have listed these as tentative minor power for random gods. The point is that for a god, the brokenness can be counteracted by a conduct.

I posted this idea to be one of the random blessings of Xom to happen sometimes; nobody would complain if Xom decides that you have to throw a exploding potion.. Xomish things are so bizarre that the god can be used as a grab bag for many effects, indeed.

[Jeremiah]

Permanent effects from corpses are bad.

Then don't make it permanent or every corpse.

How very like minmay to come up with a post like "xxx is bad," not even attempting an explanation or justification for this assertion.

But maybe Eji1700 has hit on something interesting here... what if the potions created by Fulsome were not permanent, but decayed/disappeared a certain number of turns after they were created (maybe related to when the corpse would have decayed if it was left.) Then there would be fewer situations in which they could be used and players would be encouraged to rush to explore and meet more monsters so they could use them, possibly without waiting to heal.

It could cause the problem that if there were temporary and permanent versions of the same potion, how would they be distinguished? Maybe a reduced range of potions should be distillable and they could get different names, or they could even be called something other than "potions," eg "essences."

Yes, I know, it would probably be bad.

[Jeremiah]

Ok, that's a good reason why temporary potions are bad. And I must have read it before and forgotten about it since I commented in that other thread.

Still don't really get the "permanent effects from corpses are (always) bad" thing though.

[KoboldLord]

Still don't really get the "permanent effects from corpses are (always) bad" thing though.

The devteam in an earlier incarnation of Crawl were specifically observing the effect permanent effects from corpses has on Nethack, and they deemed it a bad thing. More recent members of the devteam have seen fit to uphold that design decision.

When it comes right down to it, every game of Nethack has a non-trivial gourmand side quest wherein the player character attempts to devour a wide variety of monsters in order to gather all of the collectibles that can be gotten this way. While possible, it is generally a bad idea to opt out of this silly-seeming side quest because the intrinsics from gourmet eating provide perfect immunity to several major attack modes and large stackable combat bonuses, all of which would be as good as any other source of their effects even if they weren't slotless to boot. Since sufficient monster-hunting is virtually guaranteed to yield all the intrinsics you want from this side quest, there are large swathes of defensive items and large swathes of monsters that simply don't have any meaning beyond the very early game. Frickin' Asmodeus is completely emasculated before you even get close to seeing him; his signature elemental attack is going to be reduced to 0 damage by your intrinsic resistances before you could ever hope to encounter him in a normal game.

Nethack's gourmand sidequest can probably be fixed if the Nethack devteam resumes releasing updates ever again, but the early Crawl devteam decided to take the alternate path of making intrinsics hard to find and generally mutually incompatible, but less necessary. As Crawl development has continued, it has only become more harder to brute-force it over to the Nethack-style design philosophy, and there is less reason to try. In fact, at least one of the notable Nethack forks addresses the issues with the gourmand sidequest by borrowing the idea of incremental resistance from Crawl, so the player can gain some fire resistance without completely invalidating the threat of fire elemental monsters, and so forth.

[XuaXua]

Good riddance, I say, never liked that class or those spells. Now the least fun thing left in the game is managing allies.

Fixed that for you.