The Tavern

Mobs stepping on Zot traps can abyss you.

This needs to be changed. Like now.

Mobs stepping on Zot traps invoke the effect on you. Assuming you think traps are good, there is nothing wrong with that.

Abyss is an awful thing that needs to be removed from Crawl with extreme prejudice.

I never noticed that... then again, I'm not sure I've had monsters step on zot traps that much in my games. Sounds more like a code error though, since it really wouldn't make sense as a design choice.

Volteccer_Jack wrote:Mobs stepping on Zot traps invoke the effect on you. Assuming you think traps are good, there is nothing wrong with that.

... whaaa?

It's always been that way. Zot traps hate you.

So it's like hell effects, which everyone seems to hate.

I guess I'm at a loss as to why this only bothers me so much and not anyone else.

Other than the pressure plate traps that spewed out gas or fire or crap (which I think are now gone), every trap you step on affects you, or a mob steps on affects the mob.
But Zot traps only affect the player, no matter who steps on them.

There's no functional difference, then, between just having the dungeon mete out a random Zot effect at you every 25000 turns or placing a "trap" that you can't avoid because it's mobs stepping on them and not you.

I guess we just accept Zot traps as one of the needlessly cruel facets of Crawl. As soon as you notice one, you'd do well to always keep it out of LOS.

Zot traps only affect you if you're in los.

tcjsavannah wrote:So it's like hell effects, which everyone seems to hate.

Since when does everyone hate hell effects?

Also, Zot traps are totally different. Different set of effects, different mitigation strategies... I guess both do bad things to the player? But so does everything in Crawl, so there's that.

I like Zot traps' behavior because it means that there's at least a rare occasion for you to care about an otherwise harmless monster.

just having the dungeon mete out a random Zot effect at you every 25000 turns

This is what Zot traps do anyway, which is the reason for my "assuming you think traps are good".

I actually like hell effects, because the fact that they're based solely on time actually causes you to adjust your behaviour. Whereas there's nothing you can do about traps short of keeping a written record of every space you or any monster has ever walked on. Even if you could, as with Traps skill, the basic unpredictability of traps means that even Zot traps aren't severe enough to be worth taking significant XP away from your combat skills for the much more consistent threats called monsters. Not to mention the huge variety of Zot trap effects which makes preparing for them entirely futile. So you just pretend they don't exist until you get hit by one. And then you just do damage control. Monsters invoking Zot traps you haven't found is no different (except it makes the aforementioned Traps skill even more useless).

The only time traps do anything interesting (i.e. anything which I can control in any way) is AFTER they are triggered/found. Monsters invoking already revealed Zot traps gives me something to think about in fights, which is good.

crate wrote:Zot traps only affect you if you're in los.

Volteccer_Jack wrote:Abyss is an awful thing that needs to be removed from Crawl with extreme prejudice.

The Abyss just need to be made survivable by lower level, unlucky characters that get banished. Then it'd all be fine.

Personally I'd like to see Lucy worshipers have all extremely dangerous spawns on abyss:1 be neutral instead of hostile, or something along those lines. So a level 1 character can get banished, switch gods and then survive to be unbanished.

Maybe Abyss has gotten worse, but I have characters who survive banishment. I give it 50/50.

it hasn't gotten worse for low-level characters because they just run from everything until they can't run from something and then they die
it hasn't gotten worse for high-level characters because they just steamroll everything they see and maybe read tele if they don't want to fight something
and this is just one reason abyss is stupid

tcjsavannah wrote:pressure plate traps that spewed out ... crap

ew

KennySheep wrote:
Volteccer_Jack wrote:Abyss is an awful thing that needs to be removed from Crawl with extreme prejudice.

The Abyss just need to be made survivable by lower level, unlucky characters that get banished. Then it'd all be fine.

5 level Abyss is a very good step in the right direction. Abyss 1 could be a bit easier - but personally I like the tingling feeling of dread when I encounter Sonia or an early Ogre Mage.

It's the unaviodableness that is the main reason for my frustration. As you point out, nvjack, there's plenty bad stuff that happens to the player, but you can always trace it back to a tactical decision that brought your current bad situation upon you. Rushing into a crowd. Deciding to engage/not engage.

In this situation, I turned a corner, a yaktaur took one step onto a zot trap and blam, I was in the Abyss. I guess tactically I could not have explored that specific dungeon level, but it's not like i went out of my way exploring a normal D floor. Hell Effects are easy to avoid, IMO. Just don't go there. Which I don't anymore.

I just don't like things potentially killing you that you had, in the normal run of play in a game, no reasonable chance to avoid. Listen, I'm already bad enough of a player that the game kills me the majority of the time. It doesn't need any help on that front. Trust me.

I don't know if this is the clustering effect but recently whenever I'm sent to the abyss for the first time I can find an exit really quickly, any time after It the usual experience. Do exits spawn more often for first trips now, if not then maybe this is a solution of sorts.

It'll be even worse when zot traps drain your wands.
What I hate is there's nothing you can do about it. You can't disarm the trap, and not walking over it doesn't do you any good.

You can place an exclusion on the trap and then try to have your fights somewhere else.

For some enemies, you can place a cloud on the trap and the enemy will walk a different way.

You can position yourself so that the enemies don't walk over the trap to get to you.

Of course, you sometimes won't detect the trap. Maybe the effects of an enemy walking over an undetected trap should be different from the player walking over a trap or an enemy walking over a detected trap. Different and less severe, as in more tactical and less strategic. Slow/poison/damage as opposed to mutate/banish.

tcjsavannah wrote:In this situation, I turned a corner, a yaktaur took one step onto a zot trap and blam, I was in the Abyss.

You could have step on it yourself for the same result and same "unavoidableness". Once detected, their special effect of lashing out at you when monster step on them make for some interesting tactical effect.

galehar wrote:
tcjsavannah wrote:In this situation, I turned a corner, a yaktaur took one step onto a zot trap and blam, I was in the Abyss.

You could have step on it yourself for the same result and same "unavoidableness". Once detected, their special effect of lashing out at you when monster step on them make for some interesting tactical effect.

How? If you can't disarm it, and you can't make monsters not step on it, then it just means you aren't going to fight in that part of the map. It'd be like having stationary and indestructible fields of silence. The only reason someone would ever go near one is if a vault forced them to do so.

khalil wrote:...and you can't make monsters not step on it...

Often you can.

If we're going to keep the current behavior, it might be nice to note that it specifically attacks you in the description.

The Tavern

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