Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 6454
Joined: Tuesday, 30th October 2012, 19:06
Removal of low level branding spells.
In case you aren't aware of what I'm talking about:
http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... 169934e826
I also disagree with the commit's contention that they were 'optimal before every fight' (Since you often acquire a branded weapon fairly early) and IMHO, a well designed level 2 spell should be very useful, until it's surpassed by something else, which is exactly what these spells do, in my experience they stop being optimal to use about the same time as level 2 conjurations do, if not slightly earlier.
I also don't see how a spell they are any more annoying to use than conjurations, or corpse animating, or defensive spells, or well, all spells at all, ever. ('za<tab><tab<tab>' isn't worse than 'zafzafzafzaf' nor is it significantly worse than '<tab><tab><tab><tab>' (since in theory 1 'za' knocks 25% of the '<tab>s' you have to do off your total))
Also the whole point about it being 'optimal before using un-id'd scrolls in case it's a brand weapon scroll' is REALLY minor, I mean that's true, *if* you are still using an un-branded weapon, of a sufficiently good base type that you care if it gets a decent brand *and* if you have those spells at the time *and* haven't already gotten a brand weapon scroll. And to boot, the current iteration, where branding scrolls can target any weapon in your inventory and can re-brand weapons make it even less likely to be an issue.
Anyway, I'm in a bad mood after having traveled a bunch, so this may be overly negative, if so I apologize, but this is a change I just can't get behind at all (Although I'm certainly hoping to hear arguments to change my mind, I don't like feeling *this* irritated with a change).
Anyway, I searched the dev wiki, the ##crawl-dev logs and the forums and I couldn't find any discussion of this other than the comment in the commit itself, so I thought I'd take it here to discuss and state my opinion on the matter.