Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 5382
Joined: Friday, 25th November 2011, 07:36
Remove the haste spell
Details: Other forms of haste will still remain in the game, primarily potions of speed and wands of hasting. Any character can expect to find 5-10 potions, and will have a supply of haste for emergencies. A character with a wand of hasting will likely have around 20-50 uses of it, depending on how much they recharge the wand, and it's also non-destructible. This should be enough haste for anyone. So while it's a nerf of players and will make the game harder, I don't think it's going to be as hard as you'd expect, since haste is still around, just not spammable.
The early game won't be any harder, while making the late game more difficult, which will help to even out the difficulty curve.
Haste causes the problem of being obvious for 90% of characters, even melee characters who wear heavy armor still tunnel exp into charms in order to cast haste, and get a few low level charms for free along the way (repel missiles, swiftness, regen). Haste also overshadows nearly all other escape options, with exceptions when you're up close to monsters with ranged attacks.
Removing haste will encourage more use of less versatile consumables such as wands of paralysis, confusion, scrolls of fog/fear, etc.
This will have a negative side effect of making high level charms pointless - it would be best if there was another high level charm to replace haste's position, and this could be delayed until one is added if that's best.
This will have a positive side effect of making Chei less bad indirectly, and I believe it will also open up more design space for new gods/god abilities. I'd love to see a god which had haste like effects, although I don't think that simply giving a god the old haste spell is a good idea. I'd probably model an ability after Finesse, but instead make it a 100% haste for movement actions only - a great escape option which would cost fairly high piety. As it stands, it wouldn't be as useful since you could just learn haste and not pay piety for it.
Please try to keep the thread somewhat serious, I'm aware I have a reputation for playing Chei. I assure you, I have used haste plenty of times and it's as ridiculously powerful as everyone says it is.
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