Swamp Slogger
Posts: 135
Joined: Saturday, 21st February 2015, 07:40
Incoming Amulet Reform Discussion
- Code:
Amulet reform: remove amulet of mutation, replace with amulet of nothing
This is the first step in a series of amulet changes. The first aspect of
this specific piece is to remove the amulet of mutation. This amulet had two
problems: first, it almost completely protected from a rare threat, meaning
that it shut down that class of threat almost entirely. Second, because the
threat it protected against was rare, it was almost never useful to wear
this amulet, encouraging players to haul it around until it was useful to
swap in. Hopefully, removing it will force players to use tactics against
mutators more often, encouraging more interesting play overall.
The second piece of this is creating an amulet of nothing. This is important
for the rest of the reform project, as it will allow unique amulets to have
a base type that doesn't carry any special properties; without this, any time
a change was made to our least-interesting amulet (currently warding), all
the unique amulets that use that type would get a big functionality
change. The amulet of nothing will not spawn normally.
- Code:
Turn the amulet of warding into the amulet of dismissal
The amulet of warding was a ring of positive energy 90% of the time, and
only had a minor effect even when summons were present. It was generally a
filler amulet used only when no other amulets were available.
The amulet of dismissal has a 10% chance to teleport randomly any monster
which deals damage to you. It's still effective against summons, given that
a random teleport has a fair chance to effectively kill a summon via
timeout. It also has utility in a variety of other situations and for a
variety of characters. Removing the amulet causes yellow Contam, making
tactical swapping a poor choice.
What do YOU think about the swift change carried on these winds?
Personally, I quite like the changes to warding as it was largely a non-amulet that seemed to be carried around if no other amulets were spawned or until inventory was full if even that, and then promptly dropped.
I'm interested to see if the new null amulet template will make more randart amulets worth it, and wonder if there might also need to be changes made to the current amulet randart generation to adapt to the fact that many amulets now have a base effect of nothing, rather than some base marginal value.
I'm personally worried about rMut removal, as I find that on a lot of my characters, I can not easily avoid staying within LOS of mutators for at least a few turns and often can not kill them immediately either due to other monsters in the way or due to ranged damage output. I hope that if current mutation behavior remains and rMut is removed, curemut rates are adapted at least a little to account for the fact that a larger portion of characters will now run into mutations over the course of their games. Slime in particular seems nasty here, as Shining Eyes are a monster I never want to see without rMut or cureMut available in the game, and cureMut is not available in every game.
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/hyperwalrus.html
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/walrusking.html