milski wrote:So it's completely unclear what you want from the spell, even to this point, since you haven't bothered to update the main post with an actual nuts and bolts description of what happens. It's also completely unclear if you know or care about how any mechanics in Crawl work.
The mechanic I have failed to know is Torment. I am not going to work out the nuts and bolts until I work out what it needs in terms of conceptual tuning. LoS issues is a big one here.
With that said:
milski wrote:Again, LoS is reciprocal. Monster Torment works by tormenting everything in your Line of Sight. This means that if a monster casts torment, all your clones will always be hit by it, and since you increased the sight range, more tormentors can be present. You need to understand this.
This is strange, bad, spoilery functionality which should be changed.
milski wrote:Attack flavors are reciprocal. Players have higher defenses, yes, but that is completely irrelevant to the point that if you can make an attack on a monster, the monster can make that same flavor of attack on you. The success rate is different, but your argument is essentially "no, you can attack orcs in melee without orcs attacking back" because most of those attacks are zero damage. But that argument is A: wrong, and B: doesn't even matter for torment or hellfire.
Staff of Dispater, Hurl Hellfire Demonspawn Mutation and Hellfire arbalest in terms of PC hellfire. You can attack monsters out of sight with Fire Storm; !lm hurricos defe uniq=ereshkigal -tv; this is correct functionality. But yes, let's ignore those just for the point of argument. The purpose of this spell is to reduce either the chance of monsters hitting you or the damage that you take by doing something translocatey. The monsters can attack you back all they want - to attack them you need to have at least one of your presences in LoS of them - but they will only be effectively attacking a portion of you, which is what this spell is trying to emulate through self-copying / phasing / multipresence.
milski wrote:It is unclear to this point if ending the spell is supposed to be "pick a current clone, you're at his position now," or what. It is also unclear if you always "move" from your current central location, or if you can choose to "move" from the location of any clone. You make it sound as if the latter is possible, since you say there are repeated Cblinks, but you make it sound as if the former is also the case, since that is the specific example you use for wall hopping. I am not sure which is supposed to be the case. If the latter is the case, there is also the issue of how the game decides which clone attacks, because it would require a massive and obnoxious interface to choose position even for ranged attacks, let alone for bolt spells or fireball.
Ending the spell is to do exactly as you say. You always move from your central location for ease of implementation. Your line of sight is the union of the lines of sights of all of your clones, and the distance to each position is the minimum distance from each clone. Working out how to target beams will be a pain, indeed, and expecting the targeter to do a good job is a little bit far, which is why I am considering disabling the ability for ranged attacks involving beams to be disabled (smite or nothing).
milski wrote:It is unclear if you are meant to have a fractional chance to take full damage when a clone is hit, you always take fractional damage when a clone is hit, or you have a fractional chance to take fractional damage when a clone is hit. It is also unclear whether the net effect of an attack hitting all clones is supposed to be the same as getting hit without this spell, or worse than getting hit without this spell. You act as if Firestorm in a hallway would be worse than usual (despite many clones being inside the walls), which would indicate being hit in multiple places is significantly bad and each clone takes more than proportional damage. But you also act as if Torment would not be a particularly greater threat than normal, despite the fact it will mechanically always hit every single clone, which would indicate that each clone is taking proportional damage.
I mulled through all three. I'm not sure which would be more appropriate - probably the second of the three. I have not decided as each has its own effects - e.g. hellfire (fireball form) would be 'interacted with' and made to explode on the first target, which means that you could avoid its damage to an extreme extent, which may be unbalanced.
I do not act as if FS in a hallway would be worse than usual; you have misread my post. Torment should be changed to act responsibly if it is as you claim; again, the way you describe it is extremely spoilery and is not consistent with the spell description.
milski wrote:The reason people are critiquing the spell is because this is basically the worst case of "we need a 9th level spell" syndrome. It's super flashy, but it is incredibly unclear what the effects are meant to be, there is not an obvious design goal or unique decision aspect added by the spell, it is based on mistaken assumptions on how Crawl works, and it potentially nerfs the player (this is more often the issue with transmutation suggestions).
At best, the spell has a point that's very well flavored: Avoid damage that has to do with where you are by not being in any particular place at all. The implications of that are clear when you think about what forms of damage are generally influenced by where you are, except in spoilery cases like the Torment you described (which makes nothing in the way of sense).
The only people critiquing it are you and duvessa, and that doesn't say much at all.