The Tavern

It seems strange that the new elemental evokers (phial of floods etc.) have no entry level cost in terms of evocations skill. Is there a reason for this?

I found that in their current state they are extremely useful items requiring absolutely no investment apart from the inventory slots required to carry them. This is perhaps a marginal problem and a minor one. It might be objected that the summons are not especially powerful and that without pumping evocations you are essentially wasting an inventory slot and a turn in evoking the item that could be used more usefully. This is probably true for a lot of builds (eg. anyone with a customary ranged attack or their own summons).

However, I tried these items out with a few melee characters and found that I could routinely stack somewhere between 5 and 9 of these in my inventory by the time I had finished the Vaults. Considering that the secondary effects of these items are also extremely useful [fan of gales' pushback for stair dancing and if you get cornered; phial of floods' pushback and shallow water tiles for any melee fight; combining pof's water and a fire elemental for instant steam clouds] and that they recharge surprisingly quickly, it was quite easy to chain their effects to render any moderately difficult fights trivial. In particular they had a surprisingly large effect on fights with challenging groups of human sized non-flying monsters (Vault 5 entry was ridiculously easy) and on powerful single targets with normal speed actions (Uniques such as Boris, Louise, Harold, Donald etc.).

It is possible that I am overestimating their impact on my games. Playing melee does tend to make you imagine yourself invincible. However, I would say that it definitely reduced my need to begin to diversify until late in the game (several runes collected and anywhere between D20-26 cleared).
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TLDR: Previously elemental evokers required a large investment for virtually no gain taking up a "trash" slot in loot lists. Now they require no investment for a moderate gain (with a pure/mid-game melee build).

Possible tweaking:
1. Make the items less common for loot lists in mid game branches so that it is less common to be able to carry multiple evokers.
2. Have some form of evocations training required so that the effect of the item is at least partly represented in EXP investment. (ie. up to Evo 5 has a scaling chance of success, after scales as it currently does for multiple summons).

Possible objections: Trivial/sub-optimal strategy, therefore doesn't need a nerf.
Response: It seems bizarre that Crawl allows even a moderate power buff to characters without exacting some form of cost.

because finding a wand of hasting or heal wounds doesnt do that at all right

They seem fine to me power-wise in my experience.

Allies vs. Okawru

Fair point. Though those wands are rarer and the charges are finite. But conceded anyway, they certainly make evocations a slightly more interesting option, which I suppose was the point.

I am not sure if that's ok or i were just lucky or it's because some training in Evocations (Nemelex characters), but is it ok to kill some decent unique like Gastronok or Rupert in Lair with one single use of water evoker?


Allowing your allies to die (except nonliving allies). (Piety loss)

They are? Does that mean that there is a hard cap on the XP they recharge with (ie. you can't use them past 27?) or do you mean that they are limited by the time it takes them to recharge?

well elemental evoker charges are finite in the same sense that wand charges are, since you can generate as many ?recharge as you want in a game just as you can generate as much xp as you want in a game

Ok that makes sense, although xp is a much more consistent resource. Having said that I do tend to end up with recharge scrolls left when I reach an ignominious death, so I probably don't use wands as liberally as I should.

You mean in the sense that they are infinite?

in the sense that they are finite because eventually the world ends presumably (wow what a pointless discussion)

if you think about it what is infinity anyway, just a human word, and if you think about it what are human words even anyway? hit it & pass the toke bro, i smoke weed invariably

Nooow I know where twelwe got his color…

I really really love these new items. They are a ton of fun.

What I like:
-they are useful at 0 evocation, but substantially better if you have skill
-the effects are all distinct from each other, but all similar in that they summon elementals. It makes them feel like a nice themed set.
-the slow recharge gives an incentive to use them sparingly, at least until you have multiples.
-the slow recharge provides an interesting limitation, in that you have to commit to carrying a temporarily useless item in your inventory in order to make it useful again. This seems like a reasonably good check on having people amass too many of them. At some point, if you lug around tons of them, you're giving up some other resource.

To me, they seem very good, but not necessarily too good. There's just one exception: now that water elementals can engulf things, phial of floods seems sometimes too good against spellcasting uniques. My elementals engulfed Arachne and Nicola, making them very easy kills.

Regardless of metaphysical discussion, they are awesome.

However, although recharge scrolls are plentiful yadadada, you still have to make a choice with them and if you have haste, tele and heal wands, you're going to have to choose which one to use the scroll/s on. Therefore, I would perhaps like to see evocables base usability level raised so that they have a bit more of trade off for their power/use.

I'm puzzled. Are you talking about using scrolls of recharging on the new elemental items? They recharge themselves as you gain xp. I don't think you can use scrolls on them, though I've never tried.

Sorry if it wasn't clear, I meant that you have a choice/trade off of which wands to use recharging scrolls on. Yeah you might find enough to keep all 3 plentifully recharged, but it's probably not too likely (at least it shouldn't be). However, elemental items just charge up naturally over time, there isn't any downside to them recharging/you're not losing anything by doing so and using them. It's essentially a free boost to everyone, which I don't think is needed.

Therefore, having a evocable limit (not necessarily that high) would mean some investment would be needed to use them. I disagree that having an item slot taken up is enough of a trade off, because if you're really carrying around that much stuff, it's completely not needed.