reaver wrote:This item destruction reform isn't popular with the dev team at all.
Are they against changing at item destruction at all or just this specific implementation? Because the way I see it, item destruction goes against crawl's design philosophy in several ways:
- "activities that have low risk, take a lot of time, and bring some reward": The optimal way of dealing with item destruction is stashing all non-essential scrolls (enchant weapon, acquirement, etc.) on L:2 and dropping all tactical scrolls (blinking, teleport, etc.) and potions whenever you encounter any of crawl's many fire/cold enemies. Crawl generally tries to reduce the need for the former as much as possible and the latter is just wasting time. In my current game as a midgame HOBe, the damage a red ugly thing or centaur with a bow of flame does to me is largely inconsequential, so there's barely any risk in doing the same drop-everything actions again and again.
- "All tedious, but necessary, chores should be automated". See above re: manually dropping scrolls/potions at each relevant encounter, turning what would have been a two-second, 10-tab fight into a 10-second analysis of what order I should drop my scrolls in, dropping them, killing the monster, picking them back up and dropping the couple arrows that invariably are on the same tile since they were shooting me while I was dropping things.
Given the lack of support for the current alternative, here's a suggestion for a less drastic change: tie potion/scroll destruction to the amount of rC/rF you have, similar to the way damage works, i.e.:
- Code:
rX--- 80% increased chance
rX-- 66% increased chance
rX- 50% increased chance
rX+ 50% reduced chance
rX++ 66% reduced chance
rX+++ 80% reduced chance.
Even at rX+++ there's still a reasonable chance of destruction so an amulet of conservation doesn't become obsolete (as well as offering protection from both fire and cold), but it does help reduce the frequency of destruction. Also, it promotes tactical decisions a little. Currently I wouldn't bother putting on my ring of fire resistance to go from rF+ to rF++ for a fire drake because, as mentioned, the damage is fairly trivial. When it helps keep my consumables safe, I just might. It's not a perfect solution (dropping scrolls would still be the optimal play), but it does reduce the need for it and thus might serve as a stopgap measure until a better proposal is drafted.
Wins: DEWz^Veh (4 runes), DEWz^Veh (15 runes), DEWz^Sif (3 runes), HOBe^Trog (3 runes), MiDK^Yred (3 runes), DECj^Sif (4 runes), GrBe^Trog (3 runes), DECj^Vehu (3 runes), MiFi^Wu Jian (3 runes), DEFE^Veh (3 runes), DEFE^Veh (15 runes)