Remove Potions of Mutation

[MainiacJoe]

The potion of Mutation has several problems:

• Unlike the other potions that exist to discourage quaff-ID, the effects of this potion do not wear off with time. This makes it a newbie trap in two ways: they have a 7/8 chance of getting at least one bad mutation from it (assuming first quaff, not Ha/Ds), and then they'll be tempted to use a high-value Cure Mutation potion suboptimally to fix it.
• Once the lesson of not drinking it is learned, it becomes as boring as the other bad potions. Even its use as ersatz rMut by filling mutation slots is pointless, because:
  
• It is redundant with mutagenic chunks, except chunks are a more flavorful way to get a mutation. Chunks are more common to make up for only one mutation per chunk.

So there is no loss to the game by removal.

• Everything "good" it can do, mutagenic chunks can do.
• Degeneration potions and to a lesser extent ambrosia and lignification would still exist for the ID-game if that's important, but they don't do permanent damage.
• Quaff-ID becomes marginally feasible with the removal of mutation potions, which in turn could enable reducing the number of ?ID making meaningful decisions with that resource more frequent.

[Sar]

I know a lot of people who enjoy hoarding and chain-quaffing them. Then again, Crawl is being developed for the Hypothetical Hyper-optimal Goodplayer and not people who actually enjoy playing Crawl...

[Blade]

I'm one of those people who enjoys hoarding and chain-quaffing them lately. The increase of !curemut drop frequency (and a few of the changes to badmuts making them less crushing for a character) means that it's much more reasonable to chug potions of mutation for a player who is so inclined.

[MainiacJoe]

Ah. So one difference between mutagenic chunks and the potion that I overlooked, is that you can hoard the potion but you can't hoard chunks. Thank you.

[Tiktacy]

Quaff ID'ing is already discouraged enough because Quaff IDing can potentially waste valuable resources unless you are in an unfavorable position(which you are intended to try to avoid).

It is not a newbie trap. A newbie trap implies that only new players are effected by it, but in reality quaff IDing is quite common in the early game and can potentially lead to interesting situations if you get some particularly challenging mutations like teleportitus(one of my recent games that I splatted had this, although the splat had nothing to do with the mutation).

You can get mutation potions early game on a character you don't mind splatting, but mutagenic chunks are pretty rare in the early game and only become common at the second half of the mid-game.

I oppose the removal of potions of mutation, btw.

[kuniqs]

You're kidding, right? Bad mutations are nowhere near as bad as they used to be, and getting free AC or some resistance is lots of fun.

[MainiacJoe]

I'm not kidding. Perhaps I've avoided mutation potions for long enough time to not notice that the bad mutations are acceptable nowadays.

[Sar]

personally I never quaff mutation because I find bad muts to be very unfun to play with and good muts aren't really fun and good enough to tempt me

but if people enjoy it, good for them

[Lacuenta]

Fr: remove potions of degeneration and poison (if they havent already) mutation is perfect for the job.

[crate]

I don't think the potion of mutation has any problems in and of itself. Crawl mutations in general have a lot of problems but they aren't easily solvable and this isn't really the right topic to discuss mutations in general.

[WildSam]

I am big mutation fan so would like to skip subjectively defensive part.

Choice between mutation chunks and potion is trivial.
Potions dont require you to hussle with inventory and do wierd things.

[Hurkyl]

An alternative that achieves the same goal but keeps the potion is to prompt the user to allow them to cancel drinking a potion of mutation.

Quaff ID'ing is already discouraged enough because Quaff IDing can potentially waste valuable resources unless you are in an unfavorable position(which you are intended to try to avoid).

Better to have one known potion of haste when you need it than yet another stack of 2 unknown potions.

Also, scroll IDing potions comes at the cost of having to read-ID scrolls... which can potentially waste valuable resources.

[MainiacJoe]

I have felt similar to Sar: I never quaff them anymore, they aren't worth the risk. I recall recently in a thread about ecumenical altars people arguing passionately that a ~5% chance to get Xom was too big a risk. Mutation potions have much higher risks than that! (Though Xom is a quatitatively worse outcome than most bad mutations of course)

The flaw in my proposal, however, was that I under-estimated the differences between the potion and the chunks. I appreciate the comments that have helped me see that.

I will stand by my assertion that there is a real difference between the temporary nature of degeneration and the permanent nature of bad mutations. But I will accept that removing the potion is a poor solution to this problem, if indeed it is a problem at all.

[dynast]

But cure mut spawn rate increased so now you can hoard them and quaf mut when you have enough cure mut to undo mistakes, then quaff bene mut to boost. Also, when desperate, muts potions can be rolled to get rid of bad muts such as teleportitis, or make them worse.

[duvessa]

Counter-proposal: remove mutagenic chunks and the ID game instead.

[edgefigaro]

Chunk game is more fun than quaff game.

[duvessa]

Mutagenic chunks are really odd because they behave unlike all other chunks, and using them is less interesting than using potions of mutation because you cannot stockpile them and you get one mutation at a time. Potion of mutation is a much better item.

[infinitevox]

To the OP:
You also can't use mutagenic chunks if you worship Gozag, as nothing leaves a corpse.


I oppose removing both the potion of mutation and mutagenic chunks.
Mutation roulette is one of my absolute favorite mini-games to play in crawl. It's another thing that makes it unique among rouge-likes, and I honestly think removing either of them would remove an interesting aspect of the game.

[wizzzargh]

To the OP:
You also can't use mutagenic chunks if you worship Gozag, as nothing leaves a corpse.

As a pedantic quibbling aside, believe bribed neutral monsters leave corpses, I managed to eat a Vault Guard in my last Gozag game
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/Wizzzargh/m ... 090255.txt

[prozacelf]

To the OP:
You also can't use mutagenic chunks if you worship Gozag, as nothing leaves a corpse.

As a pedantic quibbling aside, believe bribed neutral monsters leave corpses, I managed to eat a Vault Guard in my last Gozag game
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/Wizzzargh/m ... 090255.txt

So do Pikel's freed slaves, Kirke's former pigs, and Ely's pet quokka. None of whom actually leave mutagenic corpses. But I guess if you want to bribe a branch because you see a vault full of ugly things because you're really committed to eating purple chunks, go for it.

[infinitevox]

Clearly a feature, not a bug. XD
Either way, if anything, I'm all for increasing the spawn rate of !mut potions....

>.>
<.<
That, or please give us that species that a couple of us have talked about that has mediocre stats and Evolve 2....

[Shard1697]

Demonspawn originally got mutations randomly from the normal mutations pool and were kind of a mess as a result.

[Sar]

They also weren't guaranteed to max their muts level. They also would get mutations that allowed them to cast stuff like Throw Flame natively. Yes, a level 2 spell. Good old Crawl, before it was ruined by always stupid devs.

[Lacuenta]

Monstrous demonspawn could get evolve 2 to make them more fun instead of autoquit.

[Shard1697]

Monstrous demonspawn are already fun and not an autoquit, though.

[jeremygurr]

Clearly a feature, not a bug. XD

That, or please give us that species that a couple of us have talked about that has mediocre stats and Evolve 2....

I love the mutation potions also, and the vast majority of the cases I play with them I end with some significant positives with only a few usually minor negatives.

BTW: My crawl fork DCSS-CA has the Kobold modified to have permanent evolve 2. It's one of my favorite characters to play. Sometimes they end up with bad mutations, but in the long run, bad gets replaced with good, and you could always use cure mut to clean things out if it gets too bad.

[ventricule]

To the OP:
You also can't use mutagenic chunks if you worship Gozag, as nothing leaves a corpse.

By the way, and slightly off-topic, I think it would be funny if with low probability there could be a potion of mutation among one of the potion petition choices. Maybe with some tweaking so that the corresponding good potions are better than usual, or maybe so that it only appears within some super combo heal wounds-hasting-resistance-might-mutation.

Since potion petition is often used in some panick situations, it would provide some nice tradeoff between immediate tactical advantage and long-term strategic risk.

[dowan]

They also weren't guaranteed to max their muts level. They also would get mutations that allowed them to cast stuff like Throw Flame natively. Yes, a level 2 spell. Good old Crawl, before it was ruined by always stupid devs.

Onget sez: Stupid devs always stupid remove...

[freetheworld]

if the purpose of mut, degen, lig potions are for the idgame... can we not look at a bigger problem here. The idGame is not an idgame but really more of a delay to when you get your potions once you've played the game a few times and figure out what potions are there.

would this be a better solution;

1: Make the spawn chance of bad potions equal to that of heal and cure potions... when quaff iding, it pretty obvious what the heal potions are cause they seem to spawn more frequently and you tend to have a stack of them, unlike the bad ones.

2: lower the spawn rate of idScrolls, these things drop so damn often I don't think I've had a game since .12 that I didn't have enough to id every new potions the moment I found it by level 3, and still have so damn many more I can keep wasting them on wands and everything else. The abundance of them seems to defeat the purpose of them.

Though, outside of brand new players, I don't see the point in having to id potions and scrolls and feel the bad (have only bad effects) should just be removed and all potions scrolls should be id'd from the get go. It doesn't do much but add tedium to the game. I feel if you've put your self into a situation where quaffing unknown potions is your only option, you lost the game several options ago. That or all the bad ones need to be reworked and given some sort of possibly positive effect for niche situations. So they have a purpose beyond forcing you to wait till youve id'd them then never pick them up ever again for the rest of the game.

[Leszczynek]

when quaff iding, it pretty obvious what the heal potions are cause they seem to spawn more frequently and you tend to have a stack of them, unlike the bad ones.

Not really the case in trunk with potions of degeneration. It's not unusual they're my 1st-3rd highest potion stack after the first few dungeon levels.

2: lower the spawn rate of idScrolls, these things drop so damn often I don't think I've had a game since .12 that I didn't have enough to id every new potions the moment I found it by level 3, and still have so damn many more I can keep wasting them on wands and everything else. The abundance of them seems to defeat the purpose of them.

I don't enjoy the *Contam/*Drain wear-ID roulette, thank you very much. Even leaving me aside, there are other players who haven't been playing this game for several years like you and they actually like using ID scrolls on other things like branded weapons. Do you want to restrict options only because they aren't optimal?

Though, outside of brand new players, I don't see the point in having to id potions and scrolls and feel the bad (have only bad effects) should just be removed and all potions scrolls should be id'd from the get go. It doesn't do much but add tedium to the game.

I won't mind only if it comes at the cost of substantially increasing the difficulty of early to mid game, at which point other experienced will surely start screaming their lungs out, judging from what I see in GDD threads.

[spudwalt]

I like potions of mutation -- quaff-IDing one during the early game can add an element of surprise to a character ("I got fire breath and bony plates? Sweet!" or "Oh, great, I got shouting and teleportitis. Now what am I going to do?").

Later on, potions of mutation serve as a reserve source of mutations in case you decide you want to try randomly mutating, but you've killed everything in most of the places where you find mutagenic chunks, since chunks are always temporary. Obviously, potions of cure mutation are the best way to get rid of malmutations, but if I haven't found any/don't have any left, I'll sometimes try drinking some potions of mutation to hopefully at least counteract the bad stuff, and if that makes the problem even worse, well, I'm playing Dungeon Crawl -- it's *supposed* to be hard.

[Hurkyl]

it's *supposed* to be hard.

"Hard" comes in different flavors. "You have to choose between missing fun and randomizing the difficulty level" is of the bitter variety.

I appreciate some people like gambling and gratuitous randomness, but it's rather grating when it's forced onto people who don't.

[Aethrus]

You can take my rMut, you can take my Phase Shift, you can take my Mountain Dwarves and Sludge Elves and whatever else you want.

But you're not taking my goddamn purple from me. I won't stand for it. I have a Xom-given right to chug mut potions until I'm either an abomination or the ultimate life form. And nothing can take that right away from me.

[WingedEspeon]

Proposal: Potions of mutation are not generated normally and mutagenic chunks are removed. Things that used to have mutagenic corpses now drop potions of mutation on death instead.