Hat of the High Council.

[dck]

So, I don't understand something about this hat.
If you want to use this thing it's normally because you want to kill things with spells and being unable to kill things with spells is bad for you.
But this has -wiz, so you have to try it on to see how it fuck up your casting, it may do very little or it may do a lot.
But it also has contam, so trying it on means you're risking muts (which admittedly don't matter a lot but still) for the privilege of trying it on and possibly having your main killing tools get all screwed up.
So why does it have contam?

Mind you this is particularly unfair to people who see it for the first time and have no other source of negative wiz to compare it to, thus making it optimal for them to dig into the game to see how exactly it'll affect them instead of putting it on and risking mutations.

[Sandman25]

That's why I believe it is impossible to play crawl optimally without having another character in wizmode for tests. Trying different body armour is similar (you can be killed because of that).

[dck]

But that is a ridiculous exaggeration and to some extent even borderline retarded, this is not.

[Sandman25]

But that is a ridiculous exaggeration and to some extent even borderline retarded, this is not.

I agree. I would be happy if your thread made developers change the way crawl displays important data.

[johlstei]

Autocursing seems like a more reasonable way to do it than contam, though that would be less flavorful.

vvvvvv I figured the intent was to prevent the player from removing it/putting it on tactically. Scrolls of vulnerability aren't THAT rare, are they?

[Sandman25]

Autocursing seems like a more reasonable way to do it than contam, though that would be less flavorful.

I think autocursing would not help here, it is not that hard to have some scrolls of remove curse and I think the intent is to completely prevent player from removing the hat.

[Siegurt]

Scrolls of vulnerability aren't THAT rare, are they?

I've gone through several games without getting any at all, they seem about as rare as cure mutation. I don't recall ever having more than one in my inventory.

[dck]

My complaint is more that there is nothing else to compare it in the game and wizardry doesn't work in obvious ways like armor or MR, having an effect as negative as contam on an item like this seems a bit much of a punishment for not looking up how Wiz- works exactly and how it'll affect you.
?vuln is a bit rare but nothing crazy.

[Sar]

I would not say how MR works is very obvious. It takes some time (or advice) to figure out that "very resistant" is actually not very good.

[dck]

Oh no, but its status is. You put on a MR item, the MR indicator goes up; you see the Robe of Folly has MR-- you know what to expect and even then, you can just try it on without any problem.
Wizardry generally only exists in a positive way and its effects aren't something you can easily guess at, so it doesn't make sense to me to put a contam price tag on just trying it on to see if you can still cast your spells.

[Sar]

Well at least most sources of MR don't have Contam, yeah.

[and into]

Easy fix: Take away contam. Make -wiz apply at full effect, immediately upon putting wearing it, and also have the -wiz effect linger for a while even after you take it off. Make the archmage effect take a while (turn-wise) to kick in, like gourmand. Mention that this is how it works in the item description. ("While the increased power this hat bestows takes time to achieve its effect, the greater difficulty you will have casting spells while wearing it is immediately felt and will linger temporarily even after removing it.")

Having contam on the hat is indeed terrible for the reasons dck points out.

[XuaXua]

But that is a ridiculous exaggeration and to some extent even borderline retarded, this is not.

I agree. I would be happy if your thread made developers change the way crawl displays important data.

The Shilleleigh artefact is 100% not descriptive enough about itself.

[and into]

But that is a ridiculous exaggeration and to some extent even borderline retarded, this is not.

I agree. I would be happy if your thread made developers change the way crawl displays important data.

The Shilleleigh artefact is 100% not descriptive enough about itself.

I'm having a hard time following the logic here, each of these responses sounds like a non-sequitor to what preceded it (except dck's, which was not illogical, but was mean).

Anyway: Devastator can be more or less safely experimented with, while the hat of the high council cannot, due to contam property. That's the problem.

[skyspire]

I don't see the problem with one rare item having this contamination effect. Adds more variety and makes the game more interesting and challenging (in a small way)

[reaver]

I don't see the problem with one rare item having this contamination effect. Adds more variety and makes the game more interesting and challenging (in a small way)

The point is this: the Wiz- property is unique to the High Council Hat, so it's impossible to tell how much effect it has without trying it on. Contaim (which btw is a random artifact property any artifact can have) stops this experimentation, preventing you from just trying on the hat to see what it does. The only way to tell what effect it has without hurting your character is to look it up.

It seems to me the best solution to this is just make Wiz- a standard artifact property, since it seems like it would make a fine one. People would then know what it meant from previous artifacts that don't have Contaim.

[duvessa]

I don't see why it needs contam/curse at all. It's not like you're going to be taking it off or putting it on in combat, it takes twice as long as a full ring swap. Yes, you could swap it to cast haste upstairs, but that's also the case for every other wizardry and intelligence item in the game (all the way down to the other shitty unrand hat) and it probably isn't a great idea to give the Contam property to those.

Also wiz- as a randart property sounds awful, I'm not even convinced it isn't awful as a fixedart property. We already have AEVP!

[Lasty]

So many Crawl players are really upset about doing something with known parameters (your spells will be harder to cast) but to an uncertain degree (how much harder). I think it's okay to force players to make decisions that they may regret but can't necessarily immediately back out of without cost.

I mean, we all accept distortion weapons, and they don't even auto-ID like the hat does.

[Tenaya]

So many Crawl players are really upset about doing something with known parameters (your spells will be harder to cast) but to an uncertain degree (how much harder). I think it's okay to force players to make decisions that they may regret but can't necessarily immediately back out of without cost.

I mean, we all accept distortion weapons, and they don't even auto-ID like the hat does.

Your comparison is not appropriate. Wielding a distortion weapon is used to ID the weapon; the Hat is auto-ID and is worn (at least initially) to determine the effect on spell success rates. A clue that there is a problem is that the problem can be circumvented by running a wiz-mode game in parallel. In fact, the optimal play for this encounter is to boot up a wiz-mode game. Wiz-mode won't tell you that the new weapon is distortion branded.

Forcing players to commit to certain decisions is fine, in general. What is not fine is providing the details of the decision behind out-of-game actions.

[and into]

I'm pretty sure contam was added to the hat in order to prevent tactical swapping; that might not be necessary (probably isn't really) but if you do want to continue preventing that, contam is a bad way to do so *in this particular case*, due to the -wiz property. I like when Crawl confronts you with difficult decisions. I don't like when Crawl presents you with decisions that require something (number crunching, etc.) other than being good at Crawl. That's what is at issue here.

If you wanted to have this hat use some distortion-like mechanism, just replace contam with one guaranteed bad, randomly generated property that is not identified initially and cannot be determined through ID scrolls—only by wearing.

(In general, actually, I think semi-random unrandarts (like faerie dragon armor) are a really cool and under-used idea.)

[dck]

I don't think the hat would be used in any sort of "tactical switch" that made sense without contam tbh.

[rchandra]

and MarvinPA agrees, dck:

http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... a292f8fe68

[dck]

Excellent.

[sgrunt]

As the creator of the unrand in question, I feel like chiming in and saying the Contam was there as a relic of the hat's original design, and getting right of it is fine by me.