Repel and Deflect Missiles

[charlatan]

So, as we all know, 0.20 removed Repel Missiles from the game, because it was too easy for anyone to cast them by removing your armor/swapping wizardry/etc and then running around with free ranged mitigation. However, this basically just shifted the issue up to Deflect Missiles, without fixing the underlying problem. It's still possible to cast Deflect Missiles with just int and spellcasting, and even with investment it's not very worthwhile to get it down to low failure rates like one would with other spells.

It could be possible to salvage these spells, though. Repel Missiles could be reintroduced and both it and Deflect Missiles could be given an additional <your current failure rate>% chance to break instead of deflecting a projectile. This means that there is almost no difference for those who use the spells "as intended" by lowering the failure rates significantly through skill investment, while the spells become useless for people attempting to game the system by using the spells in, say, plate armor at 100% failure rate by excessive swapping (which is tedious and optimal, aka "a bad thing" according to the design philosophy). Minimal investment for failure rate will mean that the spells are significantly less effective, and it would probably be good to make spell failure more important for these spells (as spell failure is pretty important for most other spells). Although this would be a "special case", as the potency of a buff is generally based on spellpower alone, I believe that this is an intuitive solution so long as it is conveyed in the spell descriptions.

At the very least, Minor Magic lost a pretty useful spell with no compensation, so if not Repel it would be nice to have something to fill that void.

[watertreatmentRL]

The spell breaking mechanic of dmsl is part of the problem with the spell though. Having to pay attention to whether it's up or not is not as annoying as having to recast it every 50 turns, but it's pretty bad.

I think the devteam pretty much wants to cut back on duration-based spells as a way to address the recasting issue. Hellcrawl is currently exploring a different direction, making the cost of duration spells come out of max mp and adjusting for armor and effects that influence failrate by updating the mp reserve cost to be (spell level)/(1 - failrate)^2 on every turn. In my opinion, this works pretty well, but eventually it would be best to move to less "continuous" skill and spellcasting systems that have hard breakpoints for casting things rather than failrates and so on.

[Siegurt]

So, as we all know, 0.20 removed Repel Missiles from the game, because it was too easy for anyone to cast them by removing your armor/swapping wizardry/etc and then running around with free ranged mitigation. However, this basically just shifted the issue up to Deflect Missiles, without fixing the underlying problem. It's still possible to cast Deflect Missiles with just int and spellcasting, and even with investment it's not very worthwhile to get it down to low failure rates like one would with other spells.

It could be possible to salvage these spells, though. Repel Missiles could be reintroduced and both it and Deflect Missiles could be given an additional <your current failure rate>% chance to break instead of deflecting a projectile. This means that there is almost no difference for those who use the spells "as intended" by lowering the failure rates significantly through skill investment, while the spells become useless for people attempting to game the system by using the spells in, say, plate armor at 100% failure rate by excessive swapping (which is tedious and optimal, aka "a bad thing" according to the design philosophy). Minimal investment for failure rate will mean that the spells are significantly less effective, and it would probably be good to make spell failure more important for these spells (as spell failure is pretty important for most other spells). Although this would be a "special case", as the potency of a buff is generally based on spellpower alone, I believe that this is an intuitive solution so long as it is conveyed in the spell descriptions.

At the very least, Minor Magic lost a pretty useful spell with no compensation, so if not Repel it would be nice to have something to fill that void.

Currently the chance to break for dMsl is dependent on spell power, did you mean it's not dependent *enough* or did you just want it's chance shown, or did you just not know?

Also current it takes a significant bit of spellcasting and int to cast dMsl with 0 charms/air investment, particularly in platemail, although as you point out, you could swap out of platemail. However "investing in spellcasting" *is* investing in dMsl, it's not even a very good way to get dMsl online, with one less level in spellcasting you could spend that XP on enough charms/air to be considered a 'significant investment' so I don't really see that you're statement makes much difference in terms of actual XP investment (Unless you are specifically worried about people who are just loading down enough spellpower from casting non-charms/non-air spells being able to cast dMsl "for free" which I don't personally don't see as a problem.)

The swapping thing is a problem, but unrelated to XP spending.

[charlatan]

Currently the chance to break for dMsl is dependent on spell power, did you mean it's not dependent *enough* or did you just want it's chance shown, or did you just not know?

Also current it takes a significant bit of spellcasting and int to cast dMsl with 0 charms/air investment, particularly in platemail, although as you point out, you could swap out of platemail. However "investing in spellcasting" *is* investing in dMsl, it's not even a very good way to get dMsl online, with one less level in spellcasting you could spend that XP on enough charms/air to be considered a 'significant investment' so I don't really see that you're statement makes much difference in terms of actual XP investment (Unless you are specifically worried about people who are just loading down enough spellpower from casting non-charms/non-air spells being able to cast dMsl "for free" which I don't personally don't see as a problem.)

The swapping thing is a problem, but unrelated to XP spending.

The idea that it would be a special case stemmed from the fact that the spells would rely directly on both spell success and power for their effectiveness, but it isn't a huge deal as a special case as most spells already indirectly use spell failure for their effectiveness (as most spells are cast in combat, unlike r/d-M). What I meant, and perhaps I should have clarified, is that by swapping wizardry items you can cast the spell with absolutely no extra investment as a caster, and as a melee with very minimal investment, despite Deflect being a level six spell. If the spell stopped working after you swapped off all of those wizardry items/reequipped your armor it wouldn't be as exploitable.

The spell breaking mechanic of dmsl is part of the problem with the spell though. Having to pay attention to whether it's up or not is not as annoying as having to recast it every 50 turns, but it's pretty bad.

I think the devteam pretty much wants to cut back on duration-based spells as a way to address the recasting issue. Hellcrawl is currently exploring a different direction, making the cost of duration spells come out of max mp and adjusting for armor and effects that influence failrate by updating the mp reserve cost to be (spell level)/(1 - failrate)^2 on every turn. In my opinion, this works pretty well, but eventually it would be best to move to less "continuous" skill and spellcasting systems that have hard breakpoints for casting things rather than failrates and so on.

I really like Hellcrawl's system for buffs and would much prefer it to the current weirdness, but I understand that it's not likely to be implemented so I am trying to find a solution within Crawl's current magic system.