Abyss Ambulator
Posts: 1194
Joined: Friday, 18th April 2014, 01:41
Pain/Disto/Holy brands
1. Distortion Brand
In the early game there is enough danger from non-distortion glowing brands, so that you still must act carefully around them. After Lair or so it is almost always irrelevant what the glowing brand is, since the chance of distortion is very low and the chance of being banished on first hit is even lower, so it is a waste of real life time to behave cautiously around every glowing weapon by the midgame for a vanishingly small chance of being annoyed by an abyss trip.
Have I gotten banished on first hit from an enemy with distortion? Yes, a few times.
Was the resulting abyss trip extremely tedious and unfun? Of course, it's the abyss.
Was it preferable to carefully avoiding or using ranged against every enemy with a glowing weapon that I could otherwise easily kill? Definitely.
With that said, my understanding is this:
Design decisions are to be made by considering idealized games where the player always acts optimally.
In such a game, a player should act very cautiously around every enemy with a glowing weapon, using ranged attacks, etc. to avoid the vanishingly small chance of being banished on the first hit from a distortion weapon, even if the player could win the encounter no matter what the brand the enemy is using is. If this is not tedious I don't know what is.
2. Holy Brand
A hypothetical player in an optimal game playing a race with vulnerability to holy would be encouraged to act very cautiously around glowing brands, for fear of taking large amounts of damage from a holy weapon unexpectedly (due to the swingy nature of the damage formula), dealing with them in the same way as in part 1. It is tedious for the same reason - it's a pain to avoid engaging any enemy that may have a holy branded weapon in melee on the small chance that they actually have one.
However, the consequences are somewhat different, because holy damage can actually kill player characters later into the game, whereas an abyss trip will only annoy most characters at that time. For weaker characters, there is some upside, though, because at least if it kills you, it kills you quickly, rather than being a delayed death ray like banishment often is at low levels.
Regarding the pain brand, I don't think there are any problems with it (that I can conceive of), but it makes sense to make all the god gifted brands only appear on artes and from gifts or acquirement if you do it for two of them. Also, I think that if this is done, it is reasonable to buff the holy brand a bit by giving it some increased damage vs. non-evil enemies, so that the player at least has a reason to take TSO's final gift even if they don't plan to enter the branches where it is currently useful.
Edit: Since people keep missing the point I must not have been clear enough. I can whittle it down to one sentence:
An optimal player trying to maximize win probability would necessarily act in tedious ways around all glowing weapons, long past the point at which their effects are likely to pose a danger, despite very low probabilities of anything bad actually happening.
- For this message the author tabstorm has received thanks:
- nilsbloodaxe