Lair Larrikin
Posts: 26
Joined: Tuesday, 25th September 2012, 18:43
Balance tweaks for new elemental evokers?
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.