Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari


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Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Wednesday, 8th February 2017, 14:57

Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

Remove curses and scrolls of remove curse. They really serve no point other than Ashenzari's conduct.

Currently Ashenzari's conduct is just an ?rc tax and really all it does is increase the time needed to swap items by 10 auts (and another 10 to regain lost skill levels via recursing). This just adds tedium when dealing with enemies that show up at the edge of LoS and aren't immediately threatening (quite a bit of them) and really, most people can find the 3 needed turns to swap an item (up from 1).

Change Ashenzari to allow cursing and uncursing of items at will. Cursing an item takes the standard 10 auts for an action (or 0, doesn't really matter), but uncursing costs a good chunk of Piety and takes 100 or 200 auts, making it silly to use in the middle of combat in most cases. Ashenzari's conduct is supposed to prevent swaps, so why not have it penalize swaps?

This makes swaps a much worse idea in battle and penalizes the player's versatility before battle (by costing a lot of Piety), which is what Ashenzari's conduct is meant to do.

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jwoodward48ss

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Post Wednesday, 8th February 2017, 15:42

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

PowerOfKaishin wrote:Remove curses and scrolls of remove curse. They really serve no point other than Ashenzari's conduct.

Currently Ashenzari's conduct is just an ?rc tax and really all it does is increase the time needed to swap items by 10 auts (and another 10 to regain lost skill levels via recursing). This just adds tedium when dealing with enemies that show up at the edge of LoS and aren't immediately threatening (quite a bit of them) and really, most people can find the 3 needed turns to swap an item (up from 1).

Change Ashenzari to allow cursing and uncursing of items at will. Cursing an item takes the standard 10 auts for an action (or 0, doesn't really matter), but uncursing costs a good chunk of Piety and takes 100 or 200 auts, making it silly to use in the middle of combat in most cases. Ashenzari's conduct is supposed to prevent swaps, so why not have it penalize swaps?

This makes swaps a much worse idea in battle and penalizes the player's versatility before battle (by costing a lot of Piety), which is what Ashenzari's conduct is meant to do.


1. You have mischaracterized the point of ash's equipment swapping. It isn't too prevent you from swapping tactically as needed, it is to prevent you from swapping as *often*, it is to force the choice of when and how much you do so to be strategic, to have a long term cost. Maybe we should shift the focus here, but you made no argument to that effect. (If you believe that we should, please tell us why)

2. A long delay just forces people to retreat upstairs before switching equipment, it is already often a decent plan, this would make it a requirement, adding lots of tedium to the game.

3. An action that long, even if taken out of combat, is prone to having wandering monsters stop by. I assume you mean for the action to be interruptable, (changing equipment as a 200 turn paralysis death trap sounds pretty awful, as does starvation by equipment changing) so if you are interruptable, do you just have to start over, do you intend for the player to spend thousands of turns trying to swap out a cloak because rats wander by? I think an action that long with a binary yes/no status is pretty annoying, and tracking progress is annoying in its own right (plus it is prone to being gamed, e.x. trying to get the uncursing status to be just before it is actually uncursed, so you can swap it out tactically at a later point freely)

There was a proposal a while back that curses just sort of wear off after a while of normal play (maybe xp gated, or exploration based, which would go with ash's theme) which might be close to what you had in mind while not presenting some of the technical design problems of a super long action.
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luckless

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Post Wednesday, 8th February 2017, 16:08

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

Siegurt wrote:1. You have mischaracterized the point of ash's equipment swapping. It isn't too prevent you from swapping tactically as needed, it is to prevent you from swapping as *often*, it is to force the choice of when and how much you do so to be strategic, to have a long term cost. Maybe we should shift the focus here, but you made no argument to that effect. (If you believe that we should, please tell us why)


"player's versatility before battle (by costing a lot of Piety)"

Making this skill piety based (and the cost non-trivial) means that you do not swap as often.

2. A long delay just forces people to retreat upstairs before switching equipment, it is already often a decent plan, this would make it a requirement, adding lots of tedium to the game.


Again, making it piety-based means that while you may use this strategy, it's only when you really need it, which can't really be described as a tedious moment.

3. An action that long, even if taken out of combat, is prone to having wandering monsters stop by. I assume you mean for the action to be interruptable, (changing equipment as a 200 turn paralysis death trap sounds pretty awful, as does starvation by equipment changing) so if you are interruptable, do you just have to start over, do you intend for the player to spend thousands of turns trying to swap out a cloak because rats wander by? I think an action that long with a binary yes/no status is pretty annoying, and tracking progress is annoying in its own right (plus it is prone to being gamed, e.x. trying to get the uncursing status to be just before it is actually uncursed, so you can swap it out tactically at a later point freely)


100 auts is the amount of time needed to change armour. 200 is twice this amount, which may be slightly unreasonable but not to the degree you are saying. I think there is some unit confusion here. A single normal-speed movement action is 10 auts or 1 turn.

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jwoodward48ss

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Post Wednesday, 8th February 2017, 16:16

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

PowerOfKaishin wrote:
Siegurt wrote:1. You have mischaracterized the point of ash's equipment swapping. It isn't too prevent you from swapping tactically as needed, it is to prevent you from swapping as *often*, it is to force the choice of when and how much you do so to be strategic, to have a long term cost. Maybe we should shift the focus here, but you made no argument to that effect. (If you believe that we should, please tell us why)


"player's versatility before battle (by costing a lot of Piety)"

Making this skill piety based (and the cost non-trivial) means that you do not swap as often.

2. A long delay just forces people to retreat upstairs before switching equipment, it is already often a decent plan, this would make it a requirement, adding lots of tedium to the game.


Again, making it piety-based means that while you may use this strategy, it's only when you really need it, which can't really be described as a tedious moment.

3. An action that long, even if taken out of combat, is prone to having wandering monsters stop by. I assume you mean for the action to be interruptable, (changing equipment as a 200 turn paralysis death trap sounds pretty awful, as does starvation by equipment changing) so if you are interruptable, do you just have to start over, do you intend for the player to spend thousands of turns trying to swap out a cloak because rats wander by? I think an action that long with a binary yes/no status is pretty annoying, and tracking progress is annoying in its own right (plus it is prone to being gamed, e.x. trying to get the uncursing status to be just before it is actually uncursed, so you can swap it out tactically at a later point freely)


100 auts is the amount of time needed to change armour. 200 is twice this amount, which may be slightly unreasonable but not to the degree you are saying. I think there is some unit confusion here. A single normal-speed movement action is 10 auts or 1 turn.


You are correct i had misread your proposal as 100 turns not 100 aut

Also there is a slight problem with consuming ash's piety bar, namely that it means i now have to choose between working around the conduct and using his abilities, if i have to use ashs piety to counteract the conduct he imposes on me, then what is the point in taking him at all?
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Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Thursday, 16th February 2017, 16:11

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

I missed that last part of your post for some reason. Anyway, the piety cost means that you now have to choose wisely when swapping equipment (or whether or not to swap equipment). Obviously some balance would need to be in place to determine how much piety it would cost.

Spider Stomper

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Post Thursday, 16th February 2017, 16:50

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

Having played Hellcrawl, I've come around to the (hardly original) view that curses (and identification) serve no purpose other than to make the early game more annoying. But this doesn't require letting Ash worshippers to switch equipment at the cost of time and piety alone, much less make this a good idea.

Like Siegurt says, the point of Ash's equipment swapping is to make it cost a plentiful, not-otherwise-that-useful, but basically finite resource. !rc's are ideal for this purpose, but there are other candidates. Permafood (a la vampiric weapons in most cases) is a good one. (Of course, having played Hellcrawl I also think there should be no food, in which case the replacement is less obvious. Maybe !curing, wand charges, or the like. Or just gold.)

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VeryAngryFelid

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Post Thursday, 16th February 2017, 18:05

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

luckless wrote:Having played Hellcrawl, I've come around to the (hardly original) view that curses (and identification) serve no purpose other than to make the early game more annoying. But this doesn't require letting Ash worshippers to switch equipment at the cost of time and piety alone, much less make this a good idea.

Like Siegurt says, the point of Ash's equipment swapping is to make it cost a plentiful, not-otherwise-that-useful, but basically finite resource. !rc's are ideal for this purpose, but there are other candidates. Permafood (a la vampiric weapons in most cases) is a good one. (Of course, having played Hellcrawl I also think there should be no food, in which case the replacement is less obvious. Maybe !curing, wand charges, or the like. Or just gold.)


How did you arrive at that conclusion? Limiting the amount of times you can swap equipment period doesn't seem very fun. It's "meaningful", sure, but in a way that's very stressful and promotes bad habits such as "well what if I find something better?". Why does it need to be finite, and in that way? That's silly and annoying.

Why can't I use my godly abilities if I don't get enough !rc scrolls to curse all of my gear?

It's so hard to do what you say, because if the resource is too finite then players are hugely punished for getting cursed gear and running out of !rc, and that's not cool. Not finite enough and it might as well not be finite at all.

It seems much more meaningful to make the point of curses under Ashenzari to lengthen the time it takes to swap equipment. You can argue that rings shouldn't be swappable on a dime already, but that's a discussion for another thread.

Spider Stomper

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Post Thursday, 16th February 2017, 20:13

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

ok, fair enough. You think Ash should be changed because you don't think equipment swapping should consume a finite resource. All I'm saying is that the question whether this is the case is distinct from the question whether curses should be removed, and should be discussed as such.

Shoals Surfer

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Post Saturday, 18th February 2017, 17:12

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

I'd be fine with Ash taking her rightful place in the SSS+ tier.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Saturday, 18th February 2017, 22:14

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

Ash would not be that good even if you didn't need curses.

I'll agree that I would prefer that, though. Ash can be a straightup god of divinations instead of divinations and also curses.

Shoals Surfer

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Post Sunday, 5th March 2017, 06:05

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

curses have been nerfed severely to make them feel more tedious over the last couple of years.

The purpose of curses was to kill your character. It was to force you to be cautious, while really trying to increase the temptation of blindly putting on something you really liked. The curses used to be good. Now, not so much. The game I think is being streamlined in favor of playing faster, which is a shame I think.

With Ash the purpose was to bind yourself and live with the choice I think. Allowing curse removal seems silly when you want to severely bind yourself, rather then freely choose when you wish to be binded. I think Ash needs a rework so cursing is permanent. And what you gain in return for that is balanced through the piety gain and abilities.
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Abyss Ambulator

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Post Sunday, 5th March 2017, 06:21

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

What if we made 2 new gods instead:

- The first god passively boosts all your melee skills by up to 5 at 6* of piety, and has an invocation at 5* that doubles your attack speed. I call him... Okazari.
- The second god passively boosts all your magic skills by up to 5 at 6* of piety, and restores MP on kills and gifts the player spells as piety grows. I call him... Ashumet.
remove food

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Post Sunday, 5th March 2017, 20:04

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

TonberryJam wrote:curses have been nerfed severely to make them feel more tedious over the last couple of years.

The purpose of curses was to kill your character. It was to force you to be cautious, while really trying to increase the temptation of blindly putting on something you really liked. The curses used to be good. Now, not so much. The game I think is being streamlined in favor of playing faster, which is a shame I think.
...are you literally just making stuff up now

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Halls Hopper

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Post Monday, 6th March 2017, 01:53

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

I do seem to remember the earliest version I played (Linley's) had a necklace that would choke you to death when equipped. Unless you don't count that since this is just a branch of that.

bel

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Post Monday, 6th March 2017, 07:42

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

That probably came from nethack: there's an amulet of strangulation there which does the same thing (if it's cursed, otherwise you can simply take it off).

Shoals Surfer

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Post Wednesday, 8th March 2017, 06:05

Re: Remove curses (in general) and changes to Ashenzari

no, b/c curses are non-issue now.

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