To everyone who strongly dislikes this change: don't worry. There isn't a lot of support for this from the dev side either, so unless I win over a lot of people (and convince myself this is definitely a good idea) it's not coming to trunk at all. There probably will be some haste removal though.
Sprucery wrote:No, I'm serious. I want more dangerous situations where I can barely survive by using all my knowledge. In practice this means that sometimes some situations could be too much to handle without a bit of luck. I'm fine with that. Sometimes the RNG giveth, sometimes it taketh away. That's the way it should be.
I agree that there should be more dangerous situations where you can just barely survive if I do my absolute best, but I don't see any value in unavoidable deaths. They are, at best, a necessary evil. Introducing this ability is an attempt to give players another type of skill test that should reduce unavoidable deaths when used well and give room to make the game harder for people who use them poorly.
tabstorm wrote:The net result is a player buff.
That's probably true. I could have tuned the variables better. However, the goal is not a player buff, and it doesn't have to result in a net player buff. There are a lot of levers to pull: number of haste potions generated, how fast the ability recharges, whether it starts charged or not, every other aspect of the game's balance. Hypothetically, an ability like this could make room to, say, move all speed 10 monsters to speed 12.
lethediver wrote:In all seriousness, i think "use X times per Y levels" is a little...... un-Crawl-like.
It's not like things in crawl, but that doesn't strike me as a problem.
and into wrote:Also kind of annoying if the uses don't stack.
Where you see annoyance, I see tension. Players are incentivized to save the ability and also to spend it. I think that offers the possibility of a good choice, the kind that creates good gameplay.
fearitself wrote:What about this ability being every two levels of xp but it doesn't start until you've reached level 10? Probably 99% of games have not dropped wand of haste by then and nobody is casting it before then.
Now you've eliminated oversupply and buffed a bit around lair.
I don't really want to buff the player, but I particularly don't want to buff them around Lair or afterward. At that point in the game, players are already far stronger than I'd like.
Shard1697 wrote:...so, exactly the opposite of what crawl, which is hard enough in the early game but too easy in the mid to late game, needs?
You're saying that a game that's extremely hard at the beginning (maybe too hard?) and very easy later (maybe too easy) needs to be more hard at the beginning and more easy at the end? That sounds silly to me. Making the late game harder is something I strongly support; making the early game easier isn't actually something I want to do, even though this branch currently does just that.