Three cheers for tomahawks

[minstrel]

I have to say, the new tomahawk missile in Trunk is splendid. It's alleviating the usual spear, spear, spear, spear, spear, spear, spear inventory spam syndrome my Throwing-centric characters run into in the early dungeon, while still preserving javelins/rocks as the hard-hitting, but heavy, ammo type.

The only downside so far is that darts feel marginalized. I can't see any use for them outside of d:1-2 before you find a few tomahawks. If it's considered desirable for them to be anything other than something annoying that kobolds throw at you, perhaps some interesting dart-only brands might be nice (elec, or reaping maybe? or improve exploding dart damage?), or darts could have a faster speed than usual?

You'd have to make sure kobolds couldn't generate with some of those brands.

[XuaXua]

Give darts stabbing; the ability to do a critical hit.

[johlstei]

I'm imagining carefully lining up and throwing a dart at a sleeping monster's eye.

[minstrel]

I'm imagining carefully lining up and throwing a dart at a sleeping monster's eye.

As a play on that, darts could have a chance, (scaling with throwing skill to prevent kobolds from being too deadly), of inflicting blindness.

  Code:

You throw a dart.  The dart hits the orc wizard in the eye!  The orc wizard is blinded!

It would give the stabbing playstyle a source of single-target "invisibility" and still be generally useful for anyone else using throwing. Since it requires throwing skill, it might make pure physical stabbers a little more fun vs. the hybrid invisi-stabbing game, which is a lot of bursts of mass killing followed by hitting '5' to wait off contamination.

I really don't see the point of adding tomahawks. What's wrong with javelins? This is like keeping spiked flails and also adding spiked maces.

I think the idea is that, unless you start as a Hunter, using throwing in the early game often involves picking up 10 inventory slots worth of spears and tediously picking through them until you find some javelins (IME that's often quite late in the dungeon). Stackable spear replacements, basically.

[dck]

Did throwing clubs and daggers really do more damage than stones and darts with no throwing or was it all in my head all along? Because regardless I used to do it in early D with no-ranged backgrounds and always found it a decent boost to survival, a boost which is gone now because you don't have guaranteed ranged options anymore, unless you run into dart or stones stacks.
I have however been throwing darts at things as a Wr and they do more damage than I remembered so maybe not that much is lost by not being able to throw daggers and clubs. It was immensely annoying to pick them up when you started a game, truth to be said.

[Sandman25]

It's hard to estimate damage without accurate numbers. Bats can have 5 HP, Orcs can have 4HP, Orc Wizards can have 9 HP etc

[dck]

That was actually more of a complaint about how a relatively poor but sometimes useful guaranteed option to do damage from range in early D is now gone to basically solve an interface issue.
Yeah it's good that the interface issue is gone but I don't think this is the best course of action.

[Azrael]

[quote="minstrel"]

  Code:

You throw a javelin.  The javelin hits the orc wizard in the eye!  The orc wizard dies!

How about that instead? (just messing with you here)

[Klown]

The dart in the eye stuff is hilarious & makes sense as well.

[XuaXua]

I had not checked, but were damage estimates added to thrown weapon descriptions in a manner similar to the descriptions for non-thrown weapons?