duvessa wrote:I have no intent to be inflammatory, I genuinely believe that whirlwind and wall jump are fundamentally bad ideas and fundamentally broken mechanics, in largely the same way that reaching is: they make the game take more real-world time to play without adding more meaningful, difficult decisions.
Thanks for approaching this in a more constructive way now. I really appreciate it!
duvessa wrote:I get that there are a lot of people talking about how cool and fun whirlwind and wall jump are, but what tactical depth do they actually add to the game? I've been presented with formulaic "combos" but as bel says, the optimal path technically being more complicated doesn't make it more interesting. More options are nothing if they don't add more decisions.
I will go back to this later but I think you may be fixating on the single enemy case. Against one enemy, it is possible that you will come up with a flowchart, but I'd argue this flowchart doesn't have to be the same for each player, or for each build. At the moment there isn't a set of actions that is significantly better than any other, where a player would prefer to spam whirlwind, another will constantly wall jump away + lunge, while another will chain wall jumps. Hopefully tab will fit in here after the changes, but I agree that this single target scenario isn't necessarily that ripe with decisions.
However, when there are multiple enemies, that's when it gets interesting. Only using whirlwind is very much not optimal in this case, with combos between Whirlwind and Lunge being the most damaging option. These take significant thought to set up, and the opportunities to do so arise constantly thanks to the brief "freeze" moments that wall jump distraction affords you. When people are talking about the god being fun, they generally talk about handling multi enemy fights, and the decision trees there are quite deep.
duvessa wrote:Just as casting Agony at a monster thrice and finishing it off with melee isn't inherently deeper than tabbing, whirlwinding then wall jumping back then lunging isn't inherently deeper than tabbing. So far, both in theory and in my personal experience, consecutive wall jumps make Crawl's positioning game substantially less deep even if you ignore the movement speed increase, since terrain that was already good becomes even better.
I agree that spamming WJ is boring and shouldn't be optimal, much like "jkjk" shouldn't. This will immediately stop being optimal when it takes 150% auts however, and in-fight jumps will only ever be desirable to gain better positioning. Wall jump will still be great (although worse) for running away, but that's intended; we must not forget that this is a god that forces you to be in bad (i.e. exposed) situations, so it needs a powerful escape tool.
duvessa wrote:Whirlwind's not as bad in that regard, but it's worse in another regard because it's a free ability that applies a binary debuff. If the monster isn't slowed yet, there's not much reason for me to do anything other than whirlwind.
Why not? There are many things you could do before you apply that slow. An even safer approach would be to wall jump around the monster without falling adjacent to it, until it's distracted, lunge, and then repeat. If you're truly afraid of the monster's damage, this is probably optimal. With the new changes, you may want to tab instead of whirlwind if you think you will take the monster out fast enough than the slow won't matter.
duvessa wrote:But whirlwind and wall jump completely ruin the god for me and I don't think I'm alone in this.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that whirlwind and wall jump have issues, and some people (like Brannock) share some of my concern, but we think they're relatively minor, solvable issues. I would say from what I've heard so far in terms of feedback, you're the only one that thinks they're broken or impossible to salvage.
duvessa wrote:Free abilities set an extremely high bar, because by adding one you're claiming that you can increase the depth of tactics by enough to justify increasing mechanical complexity. Finesse and banishment and evocables and power leap know they can't meet that bar so they have permanent or semi-permanent costs instead, so that they introduce a different sort of decision. Spells know they can't meet that bar as a whole so they have MP costs. Many special abilities without meaningful costs, like reaching, swiftness, and launchers, are widely reviled by high-level players because of this. Melee attacks are universally accepted, but even something as "simple" as movement gets heavy scrutiny (luring monsters for long distances is not well liked, and almost nobody likes player movement being faster than monster movement). Now that martial attacks are in mainline DCSS I'm going to apply that scrutiny to them, too.
I think we are classifying these abilities in a completely different way. While you think of them as free actives, I think of them (and my design was in this line) as an extended set of weapon intrinsics, much like cleave, dagger stab, or riposte. Riposte does not have a MP cost, it has the opportunity cost of the sword stats. Ditto for cleaving and stabbing. These new three weapon intrinsics have the opportunity cost of a god slot, which I think is fair.