Monday, 26th January 2015, 19:35 by mps
Agreed that evocables are too powerful in aggregate. Skilling evocations is a no-brainer. So many powerful evocables generate in a typical game, you're just leaving combat effectiveness on the ground if you don't skill evocations. Most races have good evocations aptitudes, so the skill is cheap too.
There are a number of different variables that control the power of evocables and the evocations skill, including the type and amount of skill needed to use items effectively, but critically, since they're items, the question of how many of them and what types you can get plays a huge role as does how many times you can use the ones you get. If the expectation in a three rune game is that you're going to get a total of at least 6 elemental evokers and so many bags of spiders and boxes of beasts you leave most behind, it's crazy not to use them. But if you can expect to find only 1 or 2 elemental evokers (and likely not a fan of gales, which I would say is the most tactically valuable of them) if you're lucky and maybe a bag of spiders or a box of beasts, it becomes less obvious that you need a lot of evocations to realize your character's potential. In other words, it's okay to have powerful items if it's not easy to get as many as you could want.
If you weren't sure to get them, the situation could look very different. This goes to Sandman's point. If supplies of evocables are limited, you're going to see more variety in endgame inventories in the form of gaps. Currently, endgame inventories of elemental evokers all look pretty much the same: You're going to have all you want.
As far as power scaling with number in a stack -- if I thought the premise of discharging in stacks was a good idea, I might like this as a compromise position. It doesn't address the issue that way too many fans/lamps/etc. are generated so that all characters can expect to have a bunch by the end of the game and the sameness that creates. And it's also hard to see how you make this work in a way that is interesting compared to the former situation, but not overpowered. How much can you increase the power of these items without making them even more of a no-brainer than they already are? Increasing the damage and number of summons from these things doesn't seem like a great idea to me. If they're overpowered now, I don't see an interesting future for enhancement based on stacking -- it's just going to be a reason for further nerfing where eventually you need more than one of them to get the effect of one now. At least before you had to expend multiple turns to get more damage and summons out of them, you had to worry about hitting your old summons with them, etc. Moreover, if the charge rates don't change, you're going to be able to use them quite frequently, even if you have a stack of three.
Last edited by
mps on Monday, 26th January 2015, 19:40, edited 2 times in total.
Dungeon Crawling Advice tl;dr: Protect ya neck.