Incoming Amulet Reform Discussion

[WalrusKing]

From the git commit log:

  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.

[dynast]

Does amulet of dismissal do anything aside from the 10% chance of annoyance? Because right now it seems even more useless than warding used to be, even though i only used warding when doing crypts/tombs or in the case i did not find rN. Barely reducing the damage from summons is still better than NOT reducing the damage from summons.

I like the removal of rmut.

[rob34]

Especially for unexperienced players like me, rMut is great. Without this, I would probably never tried to go extended and played another game instead. Since mutations are permanent, the 10% probability that rMut fails is still a serious thread. An idea would be that the reliability of rMut improves with time (similar to the Amulet of Gourmand) or even with experience (to prevent that player simply do nothing until the amulet works) to prevent continuous amulet swapping. Then you always have to decide in advance if you want to use rMut or another useful amulet.

[kuniqs]

Having lots of mutations already gives resistance to futher mutation, so I don't know why you get so upset about rMut removal. Give some more Cure Mutation potions instead.

[wheals]

One possibility we were discussing was moving rMut to a ring, with a lower chance of protection (say, 66%). The idea is to move towards amulets that have less incentive to be swapped in and out, hopefully having just the weapon and ring slots as ones you want to fiddle with. Resist mutation, due to having an effect only in well-defined areas, and only on specific monsters, didn't fit in well with the new conception. A lower chance would make the ring less of an "ignore the mutation game" thing, and more of a choice about whether it was worth sacrificing that slot. We could also reduce the number of neqoxecs in Pan, so that more mutators are actually dangerous in and of themselves (other changes to Pan are quite likely before 0.18 comes out).

[lazorexplosion]

I'm not sure what the point of discourage jewellery swapping, it seems like a perfectly healthy thing to allow and most of the amulets are practically designed to be swapped in as needed. You could make the exact same argument about clarity or stasis or resist corrosion, are they to be removed too? I don't understand why this is being done. I like the amulet slot being situational stuff you could swap in. How is that a problem?

I already hate the amulet of dismissal. It's too consistently good not to use what with how it gives free chances to straight up passively get rid of stuff that's dangerous, an insta end to fights with enemies that are beefy (ie ones you can't just shit on), free ez breaking up packs and it helps against everything because of course you want to get rid of stuff that's damaging you, but it's also pretty annoying 'oh I was just about to kill that orb of fire and it teleported away, sigh, better go check it isn't behind me'. But the annoyance doesn't outweigh the upside, so you're stuck wearing it but being annoyed by it. And I hate how cheap it is, when you're like 'oh shit it's X' but next turn you roll the random free get rid of it chance and lmao I thought I might be in trouble, not any more. But worst of all, if you put something that's pretty good against everything and can't be swapped easily in a slot where there are a lot of items that are situational swap ins, well you've just invalidated all the situational swap ins as useful items. Just wear the always-useful-possibly-life-saving one and ignore the rest, duh. So I think it's just a terrible, terrible, terrible item to have in the game. Terrible.

[duvessa]

One possibility we were discussing was moving rMut to a ring, with a lower chance of protection (say, 66%).

Please don't add more equipment micromanagement on purpose.

[lazorexplosion]

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't the whole point of randomized resistance drops to make it so sometimes you have these resistances and X is a threat while Y isn't and then other games you have those resistances and now you have to watch out for Y but X is easy. Saying rMut is 'bad' because in games where you have it mutators have greatly decreased threat is like, yeah, well, isn't the point of randomized drops to add variety between games? The variety of having some games you have X resist and X isn't a threat is a good thing, not a justification for the removal of X resist.

[njvack]

Mod note: I've cleaned a rather unhelpful post (and its followups) from here. Keep comments constructive and on-topic!

And remember, folks, this is trunk -- a place for experimenting. Something like "revamp amulets so there isn't so much swapping" is going to have a lot of followon effects, and it'll take a bit for all the pieces to fall into place and get balanced.

[Hurricos]

FR: Actually check for rRot when removing "regen.

FR: Mutations are partially resistable by means other than having mutations already or being undead. These may include:

* MR

* HD (XL)

* Having never been mutated before

Better yet, just make source of mutation cause contam instead, because we already have ways to manage that BEFORE the mutations happen.

[Haifisch]

The idea is to move towards amulets that have less incentive to be swapped in and out

If you don't want people swapping amulets in and out tactically(for whatever reason), make them like armor and have them take multiple turns to swap. The new penalties go too far in the "discouraging players from swapping" direction.

-The Amulet of Nothing means that artifact amulets with that base type got a lot better, since you can swap them out without penalty. Which may have been the intended result, but...
-Nothing-base artifacts, Regen, and Clarity are the only amulets people are going to bother using now. In practice, it'd be "swapping between nothing-base artifacts and Clarity as needed" or "nothing but Regen all game". Unless you add some incredibly compelling new amulets, you've reduced interesting choices. I'm sure that new base types are coming, but more compelling than Clarity/Regen is a high bar to clear.
-Dismissal is trash for the same reason Distortion is trash for 99% of characters. Teleports away enemies you were about to kill, and has a notable penalty for removal. Warding was much more useful - the actual warding effect was better than most people gave it credit for, and a pip of rN is always handy.
-Removal of rMut doesn't make sense unless you make malmutators easier to deal with or make curemut more common. Unless you're playing a blaster caster, you're going to have trouble killing every malmutator quickly enough to avoid mutations. Making it a ring is okay, although I don't get why you'd make it even less reliable.
-The Regen change is attacking something that's not important for anyone but speedrunners(its use for most players is in-battle healing). At least its penalty is small enough that you can reasonably remove it at some point.
-I'm slightly amused that Gourmand didn't get cut before Warding and rMut, since it's the definition of "amulet you wear until you find literally anything else". Maybe it's so boring that everyone forgot it existed?

[Floodkiller]

I'm mixed for the most part on the amulet changes so far. For the overall direction, I can get behind amulets being intended to not be swapped, but having more powerful effects in order to bring about new and cooler ideas than the current amulet selection. However, I feel that the anti-swapping mechanic hits a little too close to the "amulet of strangulation" style identify trap. It encourages players to be overly paranoid and not wear amulets until identified, lest they be an early game melee character who puts on an amulet of dismissal by accident and must now deal with being annoyed by enemies teleporting away randomly (without the benefit of potential extra damage or banishing that distortion weapons have).

Speaking of amulets of dismissal, I'm also mixed on them. I rather appreciated warding for its benefits at times (such as God wrath when swapping, or worshipping Xom), and rN+ on a different slot was always convenient if I wanted to do Crypt but couldn't surrender a ring slot for it. Amulets of dismissal seem situationally good proportional to how often/long you expect to be in melee combt, but I can even see melee-focused characters willing to equip it as an alternate way of dealing with Pan/Hell lords, so I can appreciate it in the same tier as stasis.

Nothing-based amulets are cool sounding, and I'm interested in seeing them in action. No other comment on them at this time.

I am completely against the removal of rMut, however, for the reasoning that Malmutate is a degenerate mechanic in the same tier as item destruction and old corrosion, solely because it is a permanent effect that punishes the player for not actively anticipating it ahead of time, especially in the case of coming into LoS and instantly being hit by it. I do not feel that moving the resist to the ring slot with a lower number will solve the issue with Malmutate being a bad mechanic that also needs to be reformed. However, further discussion on what to do about it/rMut should probably be in a different thread.

[archaeo]

If you don't want people swapping amulets in and out tactically(for whatever reason)

I can think of one excellent reason: having to constantly swap equipment sucks. If I have an amulet of regen in 0.17, I have to swap it on any time I'm going to rest. If I have rMut, Clarity, and rCorr, Slime is a constant dance where you can imagine your character juggling necklaces in between fights. I don't really enjoy finding these items, just like I don't really enjoy finding Spec Weapon or Ozo's Armour, because I know that if I'm going to be playing optimally, I just added a new step to my pre-fight dance of buffing and swapping that I have to do.

(That said, rings have always been worse than amulets, but we've piled a ton of swappable stuff onto rings, and I doubt there's any good way to dial that stuff back short of redesigning resistances altogether.)

I think if we want to discourage amulet swapping, we need to make the effects a lot more impactful. Regen needs a boost, dismissal needs to dismiss more, etc. And I'm going to just assume that Gourmand didn't get the axe along with rMut because the devs are planning to remove food, and by "assume" I mean "pray fervently to the Crawl gods while burning incense daily at my in-home shrine to MPA."

[lazorexplosion]

Swapping amulets is like two keystrokes each time and realistically they're situational enough that you're going to do it maybe twice per floor in places, often zero times. If maybe eight keystrokes extra per floor 'is too much effort, needs removal'.... that's taking catering to simplification way too far for my taste.

Being able to collect multiple useful amulets in my inventory feels good to me. Considering which of those amulets is most suitable to wear as a default in this area feels good to me. Considering whether spending a turn swapping away from that is a worthwhile payoff for this encounter feels good to me.

Losing all of that because someone decided there needed to be arbitrary punishments for amulet swapping feels duller, dumber and more annoying.

I strongly disagree that amulet swapping is a negative thing, I strongly disagree that arbitrary punishments for amulet swapping improve the game in any way.

[ydeve]

Funny that there's all this rage about amulet reform now, but it wasn't there when this was all discussed a month ago.

FR: make amulet of dismissal toggleable. Then you don't have the annoyance of tracking monsters down for fights where you don't need the effect.

[ontoclasm]

Considering whether spending a turn swapping away from that is a worthwhile payoff for this encounter feels good to me.

The point is that the answer to this question is literally always "yes." It costs you half a turn and nothing else. Unless you can kill it one turn -- in which case it doesn't matter if the amulet exists or not -- why on earth would you do literally anything on seeing a neqozec other than put on your rMut amulet?

[Hurricos]

Fix to amulet swapping:

You can wear as many mundane amulets as you want at one time. Yes: Clar, rMut, Warding, Stasis, Gourm, Faith, Rage and Regen all at the same time. However, when putting on an artifact amulet, you will get the message "The power of this artifact rejects your attempt to wear it alongside other, lesser jewelry."

As for Dismissal: It's REALLY bad. You have to take a lot of damage before its effect matters. Some fixes:
* Make it work 1/3 of the time on taking damage
* Make it always work when a monster attacks you (magic or melee) whether or not they do damage
* Make it evocable, giving the Ward status (which will make monsters that attack you "go away")
* Make it have a chance of causing things to disappear based on tension

[archaeo]

Losing all of that because someone decided there needed to be arbitrary punishments for amulet swapping feels duller, dumber and more annoying.

Just as a point of order, nobody's trying to add "arbitrary" anything to Crawl. These amulet changes, along with what I imagine will be a bunch of follow-up changes, are being done because the devs think it's an avenue worth exploring. Sometimes the devs like what happens, like they did with runelock or poisonous chunk removal; sometimes the devs end up just removing it in the end, like they did with shadow traps and they'll hopefully do with Death Cobs/AF_HUNGER. Either way, it's not arbitrary; the devs aren't trying to make a game that isn't fun to play, after all!

But if you're still unhappy, feel free to forward your bank account information to me and I'll be more than happy to ensure the devs give you a full refund.

Please do not send me bank account information.

[lazorexplosion]

Considering whether spending a turn swapping away from that is a worthwhile payoff for this encounter feels good to me.

The point is that the answer to this question is literally always "yes." It costs you half a turn and nothing else. Unless you can kill it one turn -- in which case it doesn't matter if the amulet exists or not -- why on earth would you do literally anything on seeing a neqozec other than put on your rMut amulet?

The answer is not always 'yes'. If there is anything else around that can actually hurt you, spending a whole turn swapping amulets is a tradeoff between taking extra damage this fight against the slim chance of become weaker by mutation. Are you saying if a hellion and a neqoxec walk around the corner you spend a turn swapping to your resist mutation amulet, no thought required? A brimstone fiend and a neqoxec? Because I find that hard to believe everyone is going to literally say 'yes, swap, no thought required'. And yes, it's a full turn because presumably you aren't walking around with no amulet on.

And do you think it's an improvement if instead the answer is always 'no'?

[ydeve]

After finding an amulet of dispersal on D2, I'll say that I've found it quite powerful. It trivialized Dowan/Duvessa and has made a lot of encounters easier overall. It's a great get out of trouble card; 10% chance on taking damage triggers very often.

Considering whether spending a turn swapping away from that is a worthwhile payoff for this encounter feels good to me.

The point is that the answer to this question is literally always "yes." It costs you half a turn and nothing else. Unless you can kill it one turn -- in which case it doesn't matter if the amulet exists or not -- why on earth would you do literally anything on seeing a neqozec other than put on your rMut amulet?

The answer is not always 'yes'. If there is anything else around that can actually hurt you, spending a whole turn swapping amulets is a tradeoff between taking extra damage this fight against the slim chance of become weaker by mutation. Are you saying if a hellion and a neqoxec walk around the corner you spend a turn swapping to your resist mutation amulet, no thought required? A brimstone fiend and a neqoxec? Because I find that hard to believe everyone is going to literally say 'yes, swap, no thought required'. And yes, it's a full turn because presumably you aren't walking around with no amulet on.

Yes, I'd take the turn required to swap on the rMut amulet. But then I tend to see the brimstone fiend at range and there's no way it can kill me if I just walk away. If I'm more worried about dying than getting on rMut, I'd be using ?blink, which incidentally would also get rid of the neqoxec problem.

[CanOfWorms]

Yes, I'd take the half turn required to swap on the rMut amulet.

He's pointing out that if you're already wearing an amulet, it takes another half turn to take off the one you're currently wearing.

[dynast]

So you do realise there are other ways to avoid getting malmutated.

[ydeve]

ofc, they just take more effort that swapping on an item. Actually, usually I'd just drop a firestorm on the neqoxec, which OHKOs it. And I'd prioritize them over pretty much any non-unique, since I can reset the fight against fiends, but I can't undo mutations. And I agree that removing rMut would be more interesting than the current situation.

[phloomp]

I haven't tried it yet, but dismissal sounds less annoying than distortion sometimes is. Since it's a teleport instead of a blink, you don't really need to look around for the monster, you just need to move away from your current position. If you are at low health that's interesting, and if you are at full health then it's not a burden since you'd go back to exploring/tabbing anyway.

(That last part is assuming monsters try to return to where they last saw you after being teleported. Is this correct?)

[lazorexplosion]

I mean if you want to discourage amulet swapping, why not make it take 1 aut per step instead of 0.5? That sounds good to me.

Having a common, blue, generally useful amulet that punishes trying to swap with yellow glow and with no rMut in the game is going to an unhealthy extreme where it's a no brainer not to swap. Why does it have to go that far?

[ydeve]

For those asking about why the change, there was a long discussion about it in October. Try looking at this thread: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18080

[lazorexplosion]

And why remove amulet swapping over ring swapping? Amulet swapping is significantly faster and smoother and less annoying than ring swapping because you're only wearing one so there's no pause and extra keystrokes to swap the new ring with the right ring. Especially with autoinscribing set up, amulet swapping is so not at all a hassle.

If you wanted to do a reform to reduce equipment swapping, surely the logical thing to do would be to consolidate swapping into the amulet slot instead of the clunker ring slots seeing all the swapping.

I don't understand the logic of these changes at all.

[Pollen_Golem]

Amulet swapping is smoother than ring swapping, but it's more because of how amulets and rings have been designed up to this point. The list of properties that rings (tend to) have makes them more swappable, and amulets have been generally designed so you wear one most of the time with several amulets being situational swaps. To make it the other way around calls for a major re-design of all jewellery.

If you make a slot hard to swap, it becomes 'major' - see the other thread, it buffs most amulets considerably - with the implication that you have to choose just one piece of jewellery, a bit like choosing a god. And that's harder to make work if you allow two.

[dpeg]

The idea is to move towards amulets that have less incentive to be swapped in and out

If you don't want people swapping amulets in and out tactically(for whatever reason), make them like armor and have them take multiple turns to swap. The new penalties go too far in the "discouraging players from swapping" direction.

While that would be one way to go about it, closer inspection reveals that these are *different* ways of penalising swaps:
* additional aut cost: cannot swap at a whim during combat, can swap otherwise, e.g. to prepare for a fight
* amulet effects: you swap rarely and consciously.

These are different kinds of decisions. Both address sudden, quick, tactical changes, but the former is a much less strategic choice than the latter. Nobody can force you find the latter interesting, or the distinction interesting, but I feel that there is some good design space to explore.

Regarding Dismissal: it does sound a lot more useful than warding. I can immediately think of characters that would have benefitted from it (and by this I mean "could have survived"). It might be too strong, or it might play too boring, but I bet that most of the attacks happen without any actual gameplay experience. To those who dismiss Dismissal based on Distortion: I believe you drastically undervalue the Distortion brand. It's a kicker!

(Bellum se ipsum alet.)

[Ceann]

My suggestion would be to change Malmutate to give you temporary mutations like Wretched Star, but increase the number of mutations onMalmutate to like 2-3 per time you are hit with it. This would make them tactically more dangerous in a given fight and bring all monsters inline with giving temporary debuff effects, as every single other debuff effect goes away with time, except for Rot but there is an abundance of ways to remove Rot. This will help not have the loss of rMut making Potions of Beneficial Mutation have less value late game because you then always clear your positive mutations. You could then leave permanent mutations in the domain of... contam, potions, mutagenic clouds, eating purple non creature sources etc.

[pubby]

One step forward, two steps back.

[Ramc]

Haif is pretty spot on. Dismissal is honestly a giant hassle in concept. Amulet of Teleport Away 10% of my XP. You would want it to be toggleable or invocable for some some sort of cost (hunger, MP, evoc change, whatever). You do not want 10% of hits teleporting dudes away from you in practice because that spreads landmines out all over the level and will proc when you least want it to because that is how RNG works.

I read part of the linked amulet discussion thread before and saw (emphasis mine)

Amulet of Resist Mutation
Reason: Switch to a ring, and make all blocked mutations still occur as temporary, wretched-star-esque mutations. Keep the block percentages the same.

This is loads more interesting than just removing it. Why didn't they 'just' do that? If you're going to make it into a ring, why not turn it into a ring when you are removing the amulet version in trunk? Why not just do your amulet reform in one fell swoop?

Regen is sort of a weird pick, because it isn't really something I'd think to swap to when healing between fights because between fights you are safe normally and I am not a speed runner. Regen is good IN fights because it give you effective bonus hp as the fight progresses, which you need to not die.

[archaeo]

Why didn't they 'just' do that? If you're going to make it into a ring, why not turn it into a ring when you are removing the amulet version in trunk? Why not just do your amulet reform in one fell swoop?

I don't want to put words in the devs mouths here, but I think the intent is to just see how the game plays with no rmut at all. While it seems manifestly obvious to a lot of people in this thread that the answer is, "It doesn't play very well," it's still worth testing out, to see if it maybe creates some kind of interesting emergent gameplay. Plus, it gets the community all riled up and throwing out ideas!

To those who dismiss Dismissal based on Distortion: I believe you drastically undervalue the Distortion brand. It's a kicker!

Nobody's undervaluing distortion, dpeg. All the good players I know consider it very strong, yet nearly no one uses it for the simple reason that it prevents all weapon swapping (except with Lucy) and has a nasty habit of causing fights to be longer because enemies have been teleported or blinked away. People typically train weapons to end fights faster, not prolong them. I don't mind distortion personally, but I think it's fair to say that most players find it obnoxious even if it is powerful.

That said, I'd use distortion much more regularly than I'll wear dismissal, which blocks up your amulet slot unless you have rare potion and makes enemies go away that I would usually rather be killing. I'd suggest the following instead:

1) Remove Disjunction, a level 8 spell almost no one ever learns since for the same spell slots you get cblink.
2) Make Amulet of Dismissal into Amulet of Disjunction
3) The amulet has an evocable ability to create the disjunctive aura, size and length of effect determined by evocations
4) rather than contam, removing Amulet of Disjunction gives you a temporary teleportitis 3 mutation.

[bananaken]

^^ I find distortion to be situational, a melee character in Shoals probably doesn't want to use the distortion brand, for example. Not only it prolongs fights, it'll make them more dangerous because almost every merfolk has a ranged option to attack you with.

I think this change blindsided a lot of people, not everyone can stay up to date with forum discussions 100% of the time.

Things I use regeneration amulet for:

• Help me not die in fights
• Less piety decay with piety decay gods, this includes HP regen during fight and post-fight resting I guess

The use-case of swapping in after fights is honestly quite niche because these are major benefits to keeping it on during fights; there's not much else that can rival regeneration in these cases outside of randarts or actual emergencies (paralysis source so you must equip stasis, for example). Also the players that show this behavior can just move on to using the regeneration spell: it's a cheap spell with an even greater interface cost. The real punishment to them isn't the rot, it's using regeneration (the spell). The rot will definitely punish players that need to swap-in stasis to avoid getting paralyzed or something to that effect.

Warding was an useful source of rN+, and the warding effect was great in niche situations (god wrath, Xom, etc.), I don't think it needed removing. If anything, gourmand is the only amulet that could use removing.

As far as dismissal goes, I wouldn't trust dismissal to save my hide when it's a 10% proc upon being hit, it just seems like a last ditch effort to save yourself if the situation is dire enough that you're getting hit and you're relying on such a roundabout way of disengaging the enemy. If you're using it in more normal fights it just teleports XP away from you; it just seems terrible without control over it. The yellow contam upon removal is kind of silly, you're basically replacing the scroll of remove curse to remove a bad amulet with a potion of cancellation or cure mutation. I think evocable dispersal-like spell would be actually useful, at the risk of stealing the limelight of poor players who go through the trouble of training the tloc school and get dispersal and not disjunction or controlled blink.

Removal of rMut is awful with how malmutate currently works. The amulet didn't need removing to remind players to use tactics because rMut is not perfect: it's more of a contingency plan for when you need to risk being zapped by malmutate due to the situation. I still feel like I need to use proper tactics with rMut because a 10% chance to get mutated and receiving teleportitis or even blurry vision can be catastrophic.

[CanOfWorms]

1) Remove Disjunction, a level 8 spell almost no one ever learns since for the same spell slots you get cblink.

Actually, now that CBlink got moved up to level 8 I usually pick up Disjunction at the same time since you'll have the spell levels for it by the time CBlink is castable, and if Cblink is castable, so is Disjunction!

[amaril]

Dismissal might be reasonably powerful on a low EV/high AC character, assuming it can also proc on ranged attacks/smites. It isn't the type of effect that 'saves you' in a dangerous situation, but it instead makes all situations just a bit less dangerous. A teleported enemy is as good as dead a lot of the time. The cost to this, of course, is that now the rest of the floor is slightly more annoying (but probably not as dangerous) to clear. This tedium cost seems not worth the gameplay 'benefit' of including the amulet in the game, but this is only theory--I've not actually played with dismissal.

I agree with bananaken's thoughts on dismissal/rMut, but I've got to agree with Archeo that I much prefer experimentation in trunk to relative stability--even if I don't find that each change improves gameplay.

[Lasty]

For what it's worth, these changes are the first steps in a large suite of changes that will no doubt include changes to malmutation in general. rMut amulets were a band-aid that covered up the problems with the malmutation minigame, and introduced tedium as a way of dealing with the alternate tedium of making sure you handle each malmutator individually. Removing the rMut amulet means bringing those issues to the forefront. Currently I'm leaning towards dealing with those issues by making malmutators apply temporary mutations, though the overall situation is still something the dev team is discussing.

As for dismissal, I think it's a powerful effect that not every character (or player) will want. I just completed a game that made use of it, and it seemed stronger than faith for -that character-, but certainly not for every character. Guardian spirit probably would have been better for that character, but that character had a hat of gSpirit, so the point was moot.

As for swapability, I'm currently thinking that contam and rot are probably not ideal costs, and inflicting temporary mutations might be a better cost. I think it's important to have costs on some amulets to avoid encouraging players to swap amulets every time a monster comes into view or a fight ends; it'd be nice to do that for rings too, but as several posters have suggested, the way rings have been built makes that a challenging undertaking, and I have no intention of attempting to do it in the foreseeable future.

The 0.18 development plan can be seen here. As you can see, not everything in the dev plan ends up in each version; some things get held over to future versions and others are never done at all.

[lazorexplosion]

The thing with dismissal is, if you're wearing it it's because you're hoping it'll provide a totally passive, random, free resolution to a hard situation. It seems to me that's a very undesirable property, game design wise. And then it also has the undesirable property that it's totally unreliable. And then it has the undesirable property that in regular situations, it's a mild annoyance.

If it's good enough to be worth wearing, it's cheap as hell, if it isn't it's annoying garbage.

If it's good enough to be worth wearing, it renders all the other amulets garbage by virtue of the fact that it applies to every situation (you taking damage) and that you are harshly penalized for removing it for anything else and if it isn't, it's annoying garbage you'd never put on because you're harshly penalized for taking it off.

I think the design of it fundamentally just doesn't work and will never work.

[Siegurt]

I think dismissal would work better as activated than passive.

Currently, If your primary source of damage is ranged then it is excellent, perhaps overpoweringly so, if it is melee then it is still good in many if not most situations, but it is also annoying or in some limited situations potentially risky or downright dangerous.

Making it active rather than passive does a couple things: 1. If it is like most evocable things it requires training, this reduces it's overpowered use 2. If it is active it is still a good amulet for the type of player who would want to use it in some situations and not others.

[archaeo]

I've gone ahead and split off the discussion about GDD, Trunk, and player criticism. Let's stay on topic re: the amulet changes, thanks guys.

[ydeve]

I've been playing OpFE today and found an amulet of dismissal. I agree with Siegurt that it's really strong (at least it feels really strong) with ranged characters, even in this case with almost no AC. Pack of mobs catch me off guard? It gets smaller as I run away. Spamming sticky flame? Then the monster gets tele'd away (practically an instakill). Dangerous fights (namely those with a crowd after me) get their danger level reduced, which smooths out lots of rough spots. And the randomly wandering monsters haven't been a problem as I tend to retreat to the upstairs a lot before continuing autoexplore.

Just my anecdotal experience from a run finding this early on.

[WalkerBoh]

I think the aim of the amulet reform is good overall. If we can reduce the need to carry around items that are used just to swap in for certain (relatively rare) situations, that's a definite plus. Removing rMut (and later rCorr) is a great change. I would prefer to see all malmutations changed to temporary mutations to compensate for this - I really don't see any downside of doing so. Corrosion maluses (especially entropy weavers) would also likely need to be reduced a bit after removing rCorr, I imagine.

I'd also like to throw my vote in favor of amulets that have equip penalties rather than unequip penalties. One of the great things about Crawl is how your characters can adapt to item drops throughout the game. If guardian spirit is the best option for my character when I find it on D:5, I don't want to be punished later for removing it when I find something else I'd rather use instead. I don't mind there being a cost for using an item, but being punished for deciding to no longer use it seems wrong.

With that in mind, the penalties for equipping shouldn't be so severe that they discourage you from ever wanting to wear the amulet period (*Contam, for example, seems like too much). The penalties should just be designed purely to discourage people from throwing the amulet on tactically in response to a certain situation. I like Lasty's idea of thematic temporary mutations upon equipping amulets (for example, putting on regen gives you frail on equip).

[ydeve]

With that in mind, the penalties for equipping shouldn't be so severe that they discourage you from ever wanting to wear the amulet period (*Contam, for example, seems like too much).

what if the mutations *Contam gave were more severe but temporary?

[WalkerBoh]

what if the mutations *Contam gave were more severe but temporary?

Sure, that accomplishes basically the same goal. The difference there is that the player can prevent Contam with consumables, which I guess I don't have a strong opinion on.

[duvessa]

The whole point of contam is to permanently penalize you when it goes over the threshold. Otherwise it doesn't work. You can see this already by playing ghouls, where there is no real penalty for spamming haste/cblink/etc.

I do not like that each amulet has a different unequip penalty. They're all supposed to accomplish the same thing, stop you from swapping, right? So why do faith, regeneration, and dismissal all need different penalties? If they all gave contam instead, it would work just as well and be much simpler.

[bcadren]

Two observations:

With nearly all the amulets punishing you for swapping; which amulet you are going to wear is going to be determined by which you put on first rather than player choice...or you'll have no amulet for a long time until you have all your potions identified and feel ready to use ?Identify on your amulets in case it's the wrong one.

Now that the amulet slot doesn't want any switching...Ash's conduct is becoming FAR more trivial. It's almost to the point where curses don't matter (apart from discouraging using floor weapons until you find ?RC).

[Kaelii]

I do not like that each amulet has a different unequip penalty. They're all supposed to accomplish the same thing, stop you from swapping, right? So why do faith, regeneration, and dismissal all need different penalties? If they all gave contam instead, it would work just as well and be much simpler.

If we look at the precedent amulets, Faith and Guardian Spirit, the penalties aren't strictly to prevent swapping for swapping sake, but to juxtapose the benefits granted by the amulets.

Faith allows the player to choose an increased piety gain as long as they wear the amulet. If it granted just increased piety gain and returned contam for removing it, it is less of an interesting choice to remove it for many gods. Other than exceptionally fast piety decay, gifts, and abilities that drain lots of piety, characters would probably wear faith until they reach max piety, then swap out to some other amulet. As it is implemented, the penalty for switching away from piety faith is a chunk of everything it helped you gain.

Guardian Spirit allows the player to have a bigger health pool as long as you don't use all your manapool. A bigger health pool will always help the player survive a fight, which would make Guardian Spirit one of the strongest swap amulets for any difficult fight you find yourself in, if it didn't offer nothing the moment you swap to it.

Regeneration causing rot when removed juxtaposes the increased health pool over extended fights quite reasonably. Stopping regen for a non-aut period might also fit, but mechanically I don't know if such a penalty could be introduced easily, or if it would require some more serious tinkering with the code. Rot is fairly easy to introduce comparatively and lets the effects of the regeneration amulet be increased some.

Dismissal does not follow the same juxtaposition, which makes a contam penalty for swapping feel odd. Dismissal helps prevent the player from being swarmed, and reducing the presence of summoners some because they are one enemy swarms. A juxtaposition of that would be the effects of sentinel's mark -- alerting everything awake on the floor to where you are and encouraging a swarm of enemies to come find you.

Making amulets less-swappable should not mean that you lock yourself into an amulet selection, but rather limits the effectiveness of amulets as items you put on to deal with one particular type of threat you randomly encounter. They can be penalties that focus on playstyle differences rather than straight discouraging the changing of equipment, like attaching contamination to every amulet would.

Edited: Words are hard sometimes.

[bcadren]

If Gourmand's only use was to make it possible to swap in and out of Vampiric Weapons without eating permafood it'd still be pretty worth it. As it stands; it's WAY underrated for all characters that do things with hunger costs and aren't Gh/Tr/Ko. Berserk MORE, use higher level conjurations MORE, swap to a blowgun when your primary is a Vampiric Weapon MORE.

[kuniqs]

I do not like this trend of putting *drain or *contam on anything that makes the player strong. Those intrinsics are good enough for me to never use those amulets unless I'm in extended and they're artifacts.

Because !oCancellation are rare, and you want to remove rMut, I do not think adding contamination to amulet swapping is a good idea.

At least faith and spirit amulets' negative effects are thematic. They also do not permanently cripple the player who wear-identifies them. Pity the noob who finds one of these on D1.

[DraconicPenguin]

While I somewhat understand the rationale behind the changes, the concern is that these changes are being made without the appropriate balancing adjustments elsewhere. The key issues are that some amulets are significantly more powerful than others in ways that discourage player choice, and mutations can cripple a character in ways that are difficult to recover from or work around.

My suggestions would look like this (note that not all of these may work well together):

• Increase the swap times for amulets. Extending the delay for putting on or taking off an amulet from 5 to 20 auts (two turns) would make swapping amulets in combat a less viable strategy, while still allowing switches between encounters.
• Change Malmutate so that it inflicts mostly temporary mutations, with a small chance (e.g. 20-25%) that it would inflict a permanent mutation. The amulet of resist mutation would significantly reduce the chances of a mutation from Malmutate becoming permanent (down to, say, 5-10%), but provide only limited resistance against temporary mutations (e.g. 33.3-50%). The resistance provided by the amulet against other sources of mutation should be reduced to 66.7-75%, down from 90%. (Protection against mutations due to contamination should stand at 50%.)
• Make potions of cure mutation slightly more common and/or bias them towards removing bad mutations (e.g. 66.7% chance of removing bad mutations, 33.3% chance of removing good mutations).
• Change the amulet of regeneration so that it reduces the maximum HP of the character by ~10% while it is equipped; this will make it less useful in the presence of monsters capable of quickly dealing heavy damage and encourage the player to consider other amulet choices in complex combat situations. Adding rot on removal to discourage swapping it out isn't really the best idea as it tends to constrain player choice.
• Change the amulet of the gourmand to reduce satiation by 2000 points upon removal (dropping an Engorged character to Full), partially negating its benefits. This effect should not bring satiation below Hungry.
• The effect of randomly teleporting an enemy in the new amulet of dismissal is rather odd and the penalty for removing it (7 points of magic contamination) is too high and tends to constrain player choice. Changing the existing amulet of warding to make it evocable, with an effect similar to Aura of Abjuration but less powerful (with effectiveness dependent on Evocations skill) is likely to be a better solution. This effect, if active, would cease immediately if the amulet is removed.