Djinn Species

[snow]

berserkers seem like one of the better backgrounds for them... not getting hungry from zerking is nice. the caster backgrounds don't seem that great: 2 hp per 1 mp seems too harsh. I don't think 1 for 1 would be too good. i get the idea that curing potions now = magic potions, but you also lose mp with every hit you take so it's like EVERY monster has an mp draining weapon.

i like how they don't need food, but the whole contam thing seems pointless if you can just wait off any mutations.

[Wahaha]

To remove mutations they need to gain exp. 2 hp per 1 mp is a pretty good balance from what I've seen. Picking Vehumet/Makh/TSO helps. What I'm most worried about is Ely and a few other potentially too good interactions. Most items/gods + djinn seem to be reasonably balanced though.

[Blade]

djhe is literally the most broken thing in crawl right now, so there's that

[Annonith]

So far I'm having a blast with DjBe. At this point I don't know which is more broken - LoBe or DjBe

[Mankeli]

djhe is literally the most broken thing in crawl right now, so there's that

...and before Djinn it was DDHe or HOHe so not much has changed.

[reaver]

Kilobyte (a dev) just nerfed DjHe. Commit 4786dc52d32 halves the essence they gain from Elyvillion's self-healing. He's holding back on changing Sif Muna/Makhleb/Vehument essence gain though. This is a temporary measure, and a more elegant solution will be added eventually.

[jejorda2]

I don't think it's the self healing, so much as the hungerless pacification. Maybe I'm wrong, though. I got tired of healing things, so started casting Bolt of Magma at melee range and died to a komodo.

Maybe Djinn shouldn't lose glow by resting, but by pushing the glow onto enemies through melee combat or something. Or maybe they need their own private hell effects that occur during decontamination.

[crate]

Dj seems really badly designed to me for a few reasons

1) combined hp + mp doesn't really work in crawl very well
2) this is made worse by the fact that in addition to one really huge gimmick, djinn also are reverse mummies so some of the things that make combined hp+mp not a good idea are not mitigated by hunger costs (at least sif channeling and ely healing, also would include staff of energy channeling except I don't think dj are allowed to use that for some reason)
3) their replacement for hunger is really silly because there is basically no drawback to actually getting glow since the mutations are temporary
4) they're bad if they don't abuse the really abusive things made possible by a combination of 1, 2, and 3
5) they end up having a ton of weird special-cased stuff

[jejorda2]

Staff of energy worked in wizmode, but not staff of wucad mu. Self-sublimation didn't work.

[twelwe]

if you are a djinni look for this item: ring of regeneration and look for this spell: switfness & haste. this is advice

[dpeg]

Dj seems really badly designed to me for a few reasons

1) combined hp + mp doesn't really work in crawl very well
2) this is made worse by the fact that in addition to one really huge gimmick, djinn also are reverse mummies so some of the things that make combined hp+mp not a good idea are not mitigated by hunger costs (at least sif channeling and ely healing, also would include staff of energy channeling except I don't think dj are allowed to use that for some reason)
3) their replacement for hunger is really silly because there is basically no drawback to actually getting glow since the mutations are temporary
4) they're bad if they don't abuse the really abusive things made possible by a combination of 1, 2, and 3
5) they end up having a ton of weird special-cased stuff

That's really good feedback and hits valid points but I feel they can be addressed:

1) How do you know? Before I proposed DD, most people seemed to think that no-healing doesn't work in Crawl either. (Of course, you may think it doesn't and that DD is a mess, and there's no problem with that.)

2) As I see it, what you see really amounts to being extra careful with all outside sources of MP and HP regeneration.

3) If the mutations are (a) high level enough to matter in actual play, and (b) demand sufficiently high experience to get away, then they would definitely matter. In other words, there are several parameters to balance the glow cost, and I am certain there is a good solution.

[crate]

I do think that DD doesn't really work in crawl, so there is that. They are probably my least favourite race that exists in 0.12 to play for several reasons.

Adjusting djinn temp muts to behave differently from other temp muts is more special casing (unless you adjust it for everyone, which I guess is an option, but then wretched stars will absolutely wreck characters that run into them for a significant period of time) which I don't like at all. Just giving them permanent mutations from glow like everyone else is ok but then you're forcing them to rest off glow which takes an eternity.

As far as 2) goes I can think of a few things but I don't like any of the solutions I've thought about other than just "make them eat food". I guess making them evil to prevent worshipping elyvilon altogether is one option (after playing a DjHe I am certain that hungerless Ely worship is not at all a good thing to allow in Ely's current state, even if you special-case self-healing like already happens) which probably solves the biggest problem.

[HenryFlower]

I haven't yet heard anyone mention the basic opportunity of a hungerless species that's good at evocations.

[snow]

hungerless channeling? that's the very first thing people tested in wiz mode... and the stronger channeling items are disabled anyway.

realistically it's not like you could just tank + channel to be unkillable. if you're taking that little damage per turn then you might as well just tab dudes.

[HenryFlower]

I was thinking more of the opportunities for Nemelex spam.

[Baldu]

Getting to zot with 220 hp/mp with good defenses, god renewal, and a high level spell made me feel so dirty overpowered, I really had a lot of fun, but I can't help but expect nerfs somewhere as the list of advantages was so incredible compared to the disadvantages that when i went back to playing my old favorites demigods it felt like I was playing a chump by comparison.

edit: webtiles lag is at an all time high from all the players trying the new races, good job in getting more people playing trunk!
edit2: im a bit confused by the relationship between max essence, spellcasting, and fighting, can someone clear up how those things interract?

[reaver]

Spellcasting and Fighting both raise EP by as much as they would raise MP and HP of a "normal" species. I know that Fighting is 0.1125 EP per XP level per Fighting level, rounded down, but to find how spellcasting affects their essence you'd have to brave the MP stepdown functions. Just know that Spellcasting raises EP the same amount it raises the MP of a human with the same class and XP level. Sorry if that's hard to parse but there are so many variables involved in the functions that calculate these things.

[snow]

essence is just hp + mp... fighting/spellcasting still boosts hp/mp... and essence = hp + mp

[nordetsa]

What about evocation?

[rchandra]

I'm not aware of any evocables where hunger is an important cost other than maybe staff of channelling. What are you thinking of?

[nordetsa]

I'm not aware of any evocables where hunger is an important cost other than maybe staff of channelling. What are you thinking of?

Actually I was wondering whether training increases essence as well (as training invocation also raises mp, and from what I gather essence is essentially hp+mp).

[Galefury]

essence = hp + mp

[Blade]

for the record, the djhe nerf probably hasn't stopped them being hideously overpowered. it's just made them hideously unfun *and* hideously overpowered, the Crawl powercombo.

Would it be so bad if Dj had fairly low hp+mp (think maybe a -2 hp apt + mp), mp didn't cost 2 essence points, and hp/mp recovery for them acted pretty much the same as it did for other species (that is to say, wucad mu would still work, ely healing would still work, and so forth)? A low-hp species that never runs out of mp and has a lot of potential ways to restore hp/mp sounds a lot more interesting than a mid-hp species that is discouraged from casting spells (especially early-game, the double EP loss is pretty brutal). This would also partially mitigate one of the problems mentioned by crate above--there wouldn't be a need for as much weird special-casing (guardian spirit and cboe instakills would still be bad, of course, but I could see cboe taking dj down to 1 EP on failure or something).

idk. The main problem that I see right now is that djinn are kinda weak and extraordinarily unfun, and that's a bad combination.

[Baldu]

I guess we see things quite differently. I prefer playing hybrids, and a hybrid start or switch to hybrid around lv10 djinn is probably the most fun i`ve had in crawl recently, the mp from hp thing is very exciting early on. The problem was the dudes i got to level20+ became more or less invincible. One of my djinns who ended up mostly caster managed to cast 14 consecutive firestorms during zot. If i had gone to extended or a ziggurat and skilled up more and found even more favorable situations i might have been able to cast 20 consecutive firestorms.

Anyway, there are rough edges to work on but if we keep reporting all the unbalanced things i`ve no doubt the devs will figure out a way to make this very different species a great new addition to crawl.

[Azrael]

I love djinn. I love the idea, I love the execution, I think they can be awesomely fun.
But they suck for casters, at least early game. I've played perhaps four or five thousand wizards since I started playing Crawl, and it's pretty common to splat a wizard on D:1 or D:2. That's when they're weakest; it's only natural. When you get to the point where you splat 10 djinni wizards, consecutively, not only on D:1 [i]but to the first monster they see[i], usually a cockroach, because magic dart usually bounces off of them and then you have 2 Essence left and get one shotted, is a little much. I agree with Blade: give them a lower HP modifier and just let them have one MP= one Essence.
Sorry for the long post; I just spent 3 hours trying to get a wizard to work only to have my last caster get impaled by a trio of tier 3 demons on D:6

[brendan]

Even with the Ely self-healing nerf, I still think DjHe is overpowered. If I was a slightly better player, I imagine that I could skill robin Invocations and clear out Vestibule without ever entering a branch. As crate mentioned the imbalancing factor of Ely worship isn't self-healing, but the lack of hunger.

[reaver]

Just an idea: What if MP had a one-to-one EP conversion, but hunger costs were turned into EP costs instead of glow costs? This would elegantly nerf Djinn exploitation of hunger costs, and help stop that "overloaded" feeling the race has from so many special cases.

[snow]

Even with the Ely self-healing nerf, I still think DjHe is overpowered. If I was a slightly better player, I imagine that I could skill robin Invocations and clear out Vestibule without ever entering a branch. As crate mentioned the imbalancing factor of Ely worship isn't self-healing, but the lack of hunger.

You lot say healers are overpowered but I always die as soon as I come to an orc priest or wizard and avoiding them just leads diving and hoping not to die. How are they overpowered compared to say ANY other background? Maybe I just suck at the game but if you need to be very good to be able to play a background effectively then maybe that background isn't as overpowered as wizard or berserker.

If djhe is overpowred then what is spen, hobe, dewz? I'm just failing to see how things can be overpowered when they are harder than the easiest combinations ever that even I, with a 99% death rate, can win fairly consistently if I try. What about mfie? ddee? every other good combination ever?

I really like the idea of a hungerless species that's not undead.

[Baldu]

I might be worth it to make a thread about healers in the advice forum if you have a lot of problem with them, but there's a reason the records are set with healers (winning in less than 15k turns happened!!). Djinns have extremely front loaded difficulty, so if you`re not used to healer it can be hard to start, but as general advice for djinn, try to ID curing/heal pots early since they double as MP pots. Basically if you`re used to healers and can get to d5, the biggest challenge of healers (hunger) doesn't apply.

[crate]

just fyi HOHe and DDHe are less likely to die if played well than any other combo mentioned in sky's post above except possibly DDEE

[Azrael]

reaver:

Just an idea: What if MP had a one-to-one EP conversion, but hunger costs were turned into EP costs instead of glow costs? This would elegantly nerf Djinn exploitation of hunger costs, and help stop that "overloaded" feeling the race has from so many special cases.

*bump*

[khalil]

I think that might be interesting, but it would have to lower the hunger cost for things by a lot, as high level spells are very hunger intensive.

[reaver]

I think that might be interesting, but it would have to lower the hunger cost for things by a lot, as high level spells are very hunger intensive.

I think you might have missed that I suggested making MP : EP ratio 1:1 with this proposal.

Right now I'm thinking EP=ceil(hunger_cost/50) would be a good conversion.

Here's the current spell hunger staistics:

(1) 50, (2) 95, (3) 160, (4) 250, (5) 350, (6) 550, (7) 700, (8) 860, (9) 1000.

This may seem like a lot (1000 hunger would mean level 9 spell costs 29 EP) But it ignores that Spellcasting and Intelligence reduce spell hunger. Level 9 spells would cost their current 18 EP for a Djinn with 23 Spellcasting and Intelligence.This might also help Djinn's overly difficult early game, since the Intelligence and Spellcasting mage background start with would be enough to make spells cheaper.

Berserking with Trog would cost 4-8 EP, a nerf which may be good or bad.

Elyvilion would be less attractive because :
A) Paying hunger with EP would mean it would costs 3-5 EP to pacify something. This would make getting piety harder.
B) You would need a couple levels Invocations to overcome the hunger cost EP penalty of lesser self healing, and there would still be randomness in if healing would help. Greater self healing would be less random, but still nerfed.

Obviously we might have to combine this with other tuning, like reducing Djinn MP and HP species modifiers, but I think this would be and elegant way to get prevent the worst abuses.

[Blade]

Maybe I just suck at the game but if you need to be very good to be able to play a background effectively then maybe that background isn't as overpowered as wizard or berserker.

Hold on there, mate. You're mixing "overpowered" and "straightforward." Berserkers are very straightforward, very simple to play. You can get by with meleeing everyone you see, and activating berserk whenever there's trouble. When there's more trouble, you can pull in his other abilities. There's more to it than this, of course, but this is a lot of the reason that new players are drawn to berserkers--they don't have a lot of complicated things to figure out. Fire elementalists are the same way--the player can pretty much just blast everything out of their way with powerful offensive fire spells until late-game. So. Both of these classes are both powerful and straightforward.

Other things are less so. As an extreme example, I played a MuCK that, in the end, was absolutely brokenly good. You can observe that here: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/giant ... 005122.txt
MuCK is commonly considered the worst combo in the game, and for good reason. I made my character overpowered by scumming for millions of turns to get Xom to gift me every item I could ever want. This is certainly not something that new players would gravitate to--as of right now, only 10 people have ever won MuCK*Xom, and only I have done it in my silly, broken way (although Ragdoll did similar things). It's among the least simple, obvious ways to create a broken character, but it is still broken, even if most people aren't interested in doing it.

Healer is similar. Your inability to win with them demonstrates a lack of knowledge about the build. It's slightly less straightforward than Be/FE (although not by much), and certainly less straightforward than a spriggan that can run away from 99% of dangerous things in the dungeon. Still, if the player knows what they're doing, it becomes very very brokenly good. DjHe, before the nerf, could not only one-shot virtually every monster in the game at no real cost, but was also virtually invincible thanks to Ely self-heals. It's now almost as powerful--because it can still one-shot everything at no real cost--if less invincible than before. It may not be straightforward enough for you to figure it out, but in the hands of a good player, it's absolutely broken.

tl;dr: easy to learn != strong

[Kate]

Making it much harder to know how much EP your spells are going to cost doesn't sound very elegant to me.

[jejorda2]

EP cost of spells can still be on the I or z? screen. Unless you have the level of every spell memorized, that's where you find out the cost of spells, right>

[reaver]

Making it much harder to know how much EP your spells are going to cost doesn't sound very elegant to me.

1) We could easily use the current hunger section of the spellcasting menu to portray how much EP the spells will cost.
2) Since the EP cost will only go down over time, I'm not sure how big an issue this would be- the consequences of needing to spend one less EP are rarely catastrophic.
3) All spells which have the same MP costs will have the same EP cost too, lessening the load.
4) We would be removing the glow costs. Is this worse than remembering the glow cost conversion, what each level of glow does, and that glow only gives temporary mutation to Djinn?
5) Past the early game, where it would be easy to tell how much EP a spell costs- either with the math, looking at the spells, or just trying casting one- how much do you really analyze your MP consumption? Do you really know your exact number of MP at all times, or do you just have a general idea? I don't think 2-3 EP will make much a difference outside edge cases, where you can look up the EP cost with the spellcasting menu.

This is a probably the least elegant part of the proposal-but I think the cons are outweighed by the benefits.

If you want, I think I can code up a patch implementing this on my own. The change can always be reverted if it doesn't work.

[tasonir]

As a minor technical issue, ep costs could increase if the player has recently lost intelligence in any manner. Regardless, I think incorporating hunger into spell cost for djinns is a great idea. It encourages training spellcasting, and I think that's a good thing. I enjoy lowering hunger costs on my other casters, and lowering mana costs directly is pretty sweet as well.

[Baldu]

I agree that this idea has merit for making the early game of djinns more consistent, but something has to give somewhere for the late game as otherwise, djinn with 10 fighting, 27 spellcasting, and vehumet/tso/makhleb could firestorm 25+ consecutive times.

[mumra]

1) We could easily use the current hunger section of the spellcasting menu to portray how much EP the spells will cost.
2) Since the EP cost will only go down over time, I'm not sure how big an issue this would be- the consequences of needing to spend one less EP are rarely catastrophic.
3) All spells which have the same MP costs will have the same EP cost too, lessening the load.
4) We would be removing the glow costs. Is this worse than remembering the glow cost conversion, what each level of glow does, and that glow only gives temporary mutation to Djinn?
5) Past the early game, where it would be easy to tell how much EP a spell costs- either with the math, looking at the spells, or just trying casting one- how much do you really analyze your MP consumption? Do you really know your exact number of MP at all times, or do you just have a general idea? I don't think 2-3 EP will make much a difference outside edge cases, where you can look up the EP cost with the spellcasting menu.

See how complicated this idea is? If you need five paragraphs to explain most of the details then it's not particularly simple or elegant.

There seems to be an assumption that players are looking up MP costs all the time. This isn't true, I pretty much always know the exact MP costs of my spells, the only exception is perhaps spells I haven't really used before and aren't casting all the time.

Anyway I think it's making the problem worse, not better, railroading the player into lowering spell hunger as quickly as possible. I think it'd make more sense to make glow a more serious deal and make the MP conversion rate less harsh.

[reaver]

See how complicated this idea is? If you need five paragraphs to explain most of the details then it's not particularly simple or elegant.

I'm a bit confused by this comment. This proposal could be summed up as:

Remove Djinn glow costs. Make MP <-> EP conversion 1:1. Hunger costs for djinn are EP=ceil(hunger_cost/50)

Most of which is removing other djinn complexities.

My "five paragraphs" were dedicated to why I though that variable MP costs weren't a problem. Since two developers now have said they would be a problem, I can't say anything except I was probably wrong.

I think it'd make more sense to make glow a more serious deal and make the MP conversion rate less harsh.

This sounds like a reasonable idea.

Thanks for the excellent criticism.

[njvack]

After trying a DjHe pacifist run (cut short by the abrupt immunity of insects to Ely's wiles), I might suggest: make Djinn glow dissipate with gained XP. Say, one point of glow per percent XP needed to get to the next level (number pulled from my butt). The "hunger costs represented as glow costs" thing will be awkward, I think, as long as you can rest it off.

As an aside: was the insect change a result of DjHe, or was the timing of that a fluke?

[tcjsavannah]

I found in my first play as a Djinn that I was resting to heal way, way, way too much than I ever did with any other species. Trying out a FE, am I really supposed to be already into yellow contamination with just two casts of bolt of fire? Really?

Guess I'll just jump on the berserker train and see what all the fuss is about.

[Speleothing]

Instead of just doubling the MP costs, why not assign each spell level an appropriate cost?

1=1
2=2
3=5
4=7
5=10
6=12
7=14
8=16
9=20

[Cinghiale]

Not the world's hugest deal, but can we alter the species description:

"Of the same stock as angels or demons, these spirits have been created from smokeless fire by some deranged god. Unlike regular living beings, they draw their sustenance from magic rather than eating or drinking, although for some reason they can still do the latter - probably due to being unintelligently designed by a creator with no knowledge of evolution."

That's an awkward read and vaguely spiteful. How about something like

"Of the same stock as angels or demons, these spirits have been created from smokeless fire by some deranged god. Unlike regular living beings, they draw their sustenance from magic rather than eating or drinking. They can still use potions by boiling their flasks and inhaling the magical vapors."

You know, like a bong or hookah, hue hue. Which are incidentally of the same vaguely middle eastern/persian flavor as the djinn.

[reaver]

As an aside: was the insect change a result of DjHe, or was the timing of that a fluke?

Timing fluke. Somebody mentioned on IRC that it was weird Elyvilon could pacify bees but not wasps (because they had different intelligence levels under the hood) and it lead to a discussion on several issues surrounding that. I don't think Dj were even mentioned. The results were:

Lowering the differences acceptable for new intelligence levels.
Make I_INSECT seperate from I_REPTILE, when formerly they had been the same thing with different names.
Make I_INSECT unpacifiable for flavor and power level reasons.
Change a couple monsters' intelligences.

[Azrael]

MP cost=2(x)-1 where x is the spell level? That sounds fine to me.

[rebthor]

As an aside: was the insect change a result of DjHe, or was the timing of that a fluke?

Timing fluke. Somebody mentioned on IRC that it was weird Elyvilon could pacify bees but not wasps (because they had different intelligence levels under the hood) and it lead to a discussion on several issues surrounding that. I don't think Dj were even mentioned. The results were:

Lowering the differences acceptable for new intelligence levels.
Make I_INSECT seperate from I_REPTILE, when formerly they had been the same thing with different names.
Make I_INSECT unpacifiable for flavor and power level reasons.
Change a couple monsters' intelligences.

So wait, I'm to blame for this? Oh man...

[njvack]

UNTHANK! UNTHANK!