Pollen_Golem wrote:It's funny: note how easily hecklers could have ridiculed Hyperphase as waaay too powerful defensively... but the first posters nudged at the "it's too weak" route, and that's the direction it snowballed.
Perhaps you should focus on the fact that it's ridiculously complex and nigh-impossible to implement, rather than worrying too much about balance or hecklers or how nobody understands how amazing and visionary it is.
For one thing, I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the extremely basic and fundamentally unsolvable problem with increasing your LoS in any way: everything you can see
has to fit on one screen. Period. End of story. No exceptions, ever. If you can see a single tile that's currently off-screen, you are required to press shift-x every single turn to go look at it -- I mean, what if an ancient lich wandered into it? -- which is unequivocally unacceptable. And I know you're thinking "but there's plenty of space, look at my screen, most of it's dark!" but
console still exists, not to mention ultrabooks and small windows and whatever. In case you don't know, under circlelos the visible area extended right up to the edge of console's viewport; under squarelos there's one tile's worth of extra space, since squarelos is radius 7 instead of 8. So theoretically your LoS could expand by one tile, back to 8. But it's patently clear that you guys expect to have, like, 5-6 extra tiles in various directions, if not more.
For another, you've spent a whole lot of words making effusive statements about hyper-position and phases and stuff, so let's boil down what actually happens in play.
1. You cast the spell. I guess a bunch of random tiles near you are filled with a copy of your player sprite. You seem like you haven't decided whether one is picked out as the central one, or if they are all interchangeable. Apparently you intende that your LoS include all tiles within 7 squares of
any clone. As above this is 100% impossible, period, so I'm going to ignore the (many, many) problems that it would cause even if it were.
2. Clones can be in walls and features, but the central one can't. Okay. What happens when you do the most basic thing ever, i.e. press a direction key? Be
specific, not poetic. Does the central clone move? Do the others? What if a monster is in the way of some clone? You implied at some point that clones can go outside of the level boundary. This is 100% impossible, period; units placed outside of the bounds cause crashes (and for good reason).
3. What can you now do, aside from move? Again, be
specific. Pollen_Golem seems to have sort-of understood the fact that nearly every action is now either a) impossible to implement, or b) requiring of ridiculous special casing, but apparently you mean for the player to still be able to fight effectively in this state. When you want to fire a spell or arrow, does it always originate from the central clone? If not, then from where? Are you seriously suggesting we rewrite every single targeter in the game (and there are dozens) to accommodate picking a clone to fire from? "Any clone that can see that space" is not sufficient, because often the
path of a missile matters. If any clone can make melee attacks, what's the weapon swing based on? Can you use items? If you read a scroll of blinking, what happens (you suggested this would be pointless, but what if I want to go somewhere no clones are?)? If you teleport, what happens? If you cast this spell again, what happens? What happens if you cast Passage or Dispersal or target a clone with teleport other or a clone gets hit with Banishment or the abyss shifts or Xom acts or you use Lucy's Corruption or get constricted or get thrown by an Octopode Crusher or...
4. You get some amount of effective damage reduction. You've made a big fuss about this and how it interacts with AOEs, but the vast, vast majority of attacks hit one target, so for most purposes you just take 1/n times normal damage. How does your AC apply if multiple clones get hit? EV? If a firebolt hits three clones, does that count as three blocks with your shield? If a clone gets hit with malmutate, or confuse, or blink-other-range, what happens? If a clone enters miasma, what happens?
5. You can end the spell with an ability, and when you do you pick a space a clone was in and then you're there. I suppose you can't pick ones that are in walls.
Now, before you quote my post, slice it into tiny chunks, and write pithy answers to every one of my questions, the bottom line here is that
there are all these questions. Every single one of those questions is going to need a special case, regardless of your answer, and each of those special cases needs to be coded and tested. Every single one is going to be at least a little counterintuitive, regardless of your answer. Every single one makes the spell harder to implement, harder to understand, harder to use. And in exchange for all this effort implementing the spell, and the burden of understanding it we place upon the player, the only real
effects of the spell are that you take less damage and get a free weird CBlink (again, increasing LoS by more than one tile is impossible).
Compare to CBlink. Here is how CBlink works: you pick a tile you can see. You are moved there. You get some contam. Period.
I'm not trying to rain on your parade, and it's always good to have people think up new spells, but I think you should go back to the drawing board on this one.