Gadrel wrote:I hope that this post will be sufficient so that and into doesn't get his panties in a wad.
Sorry to say this, but you've sort of lost it already here. (I am *very* grateful that and_into is doing what he does, and I think he's doing it very well, too.)
[By the way, as you can probably imagine, this is a topic that comes up every so often. You can increase the "seriousness appeal" of your posting by finding one or two of these previous threads and linking them, ideally also saying why your proposal is different/better than those.]
Why?: The poison school currently has no spells past level 6 and, excepting poison arrow, no spells that work on poison resistant enemies. As a result, poison is undesirable mid-late game and a bit of a waste of skill points.
Why should there be symmetry behind spell schools in the first place? You say that its usefulness is limited and it's true -- but that could be completely alright if the spells deliver enough early on. Now, we can argue whether or not that's the case right now, but the diminishing returns themselves are not a compelling reasons to make Poison like other schools by providing end-game tools.
You can look at it like this: I am very much in favour of diversity in Crawl, and all spell schools allowing you to tackle Zot --just with damage spells of different flavour-- is exactly the opposite of that.
For what it's worth, I really like to play VM: I think they're good early on, and of course I do now that I'll have to branch out soon enough. When and how that'll happen, my guide are dungeon drops etc.
Level 7: Summon Tainted Forest - Poison/Summoning/Translocation
Functions similarly to summon forest, except that the healthy trees of summon forest are replaced with dead or dying ones. The dryad is replaced with a tainted treant and the snaplasher vines with some sort of poison spewing plant creature.
Level 8: Poison Form - Poison/Transmutation
This spell is meant to function as an escape spell with some offensive bite. The caster turns into a swirling cloud of poison. As a result, the caster may not attack in melee or ranged and spell casting becomes much more difficult. In exchange, the caster radiates clouds of poison, receives a significant (75%?) reduction in incoming damage, and gains a 1 aut bonus to move speed.
Level 9: Miasma Storm - Poison/Conjuration
This spell is meant to function as an end game damage dealer. In order to be so it should be smite targeted and deal a portion of its damage as physical. Living creatures slain by it will rise as friendly zombies.
Of these, STF is designed as a parallel to an existing spell (generally not ideal, see above); PF looks interesting but is quite one-dimensional -- it is obviously made for fleeing; MS tries to be the poisonous brother of other storm spells (fun idea with the zombies, though it makes me wonder why is there no Necromancy).
Note that even if I or anyone else would think these are awesome spell concepts and should certainly go into the game, then three *major* roadblock lie ahead: (1) turn your morevague ideas into something with details and numbers (this is far from trivial), (2) code it, document it, test it, (3) finetuning in actual trunk play. This is why the GDD threshold is pretty steep.