Tree burning vaults (was: Wand simplification happy dance)

[nago]

As being a general topic, I'd like to address a possible issue with lightning wand removal: is possible to rework the vault(s) that require to burn down trees, such as the Lair one?

Most of chars don't learn lv.5/6 fire\air spells, I don't think it's good to put loot behind "walls" openable in that way.

[njvack]

Mod note: Split to new topic.

[njvack]

Non-mod-note: I didn't know for a long time that burning trees was a mechanic in the game, and even now I have a hard time remembering what effects cause trees to burn.

[bananaken]

Yeah, this makes special levels like forest-themed depths or those Lair endings more interesting and dynamic. It's not necessarily a bad thing to restrict these to the cool guys who can train the relevant spells but you're definitely missing out now.

[Majang]

The wand of flame is still in the game. Maybe it can be bumped up so that it can be used to ignite trees? Possibly with an evocations threshold, say 8 evo or so.

[crawlnoob]

Yeah, this makes special levels like forest-themed depths or those Lair endings more interesting and dynamic. It's not necessarily a bad thing to restrict these to the cool guys who can train the relevant spells but you're definitely missing out now.

It's a bad mechanic to restrict areas of the game to characters who make a highly specific and significant skill investment to get a particular spell which may or may not be available in a particular game. Doubly so if the situation is spoilery.

You choose a character build, initially as a general idea of solving Crawl using a given skill set, and eventually as a number of cummulative responses to the challenges of Crawl which works to evolve that skill set. Some characters with some skill will do better in some areas against some problems, and vice-versa. But everybody can conceivably succeed. Enter spoilery vaults of secret loot. Don't got lightning bolt? Oh that's too bad, get lost. "I better learn lightning bolt on every character or I might miss some of these fairly common loot drops" is not a behavior that is in line with creating good decisions and/or fun.

I thought those types of vaults got axed several iterations ago? For being spoilery. They definitely need to go if they are not possibly accessible to any character thru item drops.

A better example of a "locked-loot" vault is the square of glass walls surrounded nine items that often loads in early D. You cannot miss the vault if you explore the floor, you definitely know loot is locked inside, and you probably do not have the ability to open it when you find it. But there are multiple options. You can learn LRD, but you can also find a wand of digging or even a wand of random effects (do they still have digging?), and then you are presented with a decision. Do I backtrack and open that vault, or is it a waste of time? Whether or not that is an interesting decision is another discussion (food clock, piety decay, backtracking, stairs, etc..) but the vault, on its face, works within the game design mantra.

[bananaken]

It's a bad mechanic to restrict areas of the game to characters who make a highly specific and significant skill investment to get a particular spell which may or may not be available in a particular game. Doubly so if the situation is spoilery.

I think we both agree but I was being more charitable while interpreting the change :p but that's where it can be a bad thing; if lightning removal is accompanied by changes that strictly treat trees as a different type of wall that can be situationally exploited in combat then it should be fine. DCSS development does a lot of piece-wise changes so hopefully things like those spoilery vaults would be next.

Otherwise, this reminds me a lot of that "lure boring beetle/deep troll earth mage all the way to slime pits" thing where lack of digging can lock you out of a rune unless you're willing to do something boring even if it's unlikely (which doesn't sound like a good state to leave things in). In this case if you lack the right spells you would lure an ogre mage or wizard to burn down trees for you.

[Plantissue]

I don't see a problem with trees being digable, except perhaps to make swamp slightly different. Or perhaps change wands of disintegration to blow up trees. Possibly a more enjoyable solution than changing vaults.

[KoboldLord]

Tree burning is almost completely useless tactically. If you start a chain reaction, you want to walk away and wait for it to burn out rather than approaching it, and the most significant impact it has is that it removes a few (almost invariably non-threatening) monsters that would have otherwise provided xp. It should just be removed.

If the cool effect of having the player run through a forest as trees explode into flame clouds all around wants to be preserved in the game, make it a portal vault gimmick that actually forces the player to keep ahead of the exploding trees. Because simply walking away is pretty unquestionably the best way to handle fighting near a burning tree in the current game.

Naturally, the tree-burning vault treasures should all be removed for the same reason digging treasures should all be removed. It should not be optimal to go around burning trees in case there's treasure hiding behind this particular one.

[Siegurt]

Tree burning is almost completely useless tactically. If you start a chain reaction, you want to walk away and wait for it to burn out rather than approaching it, and the most significant impact it has is that it removes a few (almost invariably non-threatening) monsters that would have otherwise provided xp. It should just be removed.

If the cool effect of having the player run through a forest as trees explode into flame clouds all around wants to be preserved in the game, make it a portal vault gimmick that actually forces the player to keep ahead of the exploding trees. Because simply walking away is pretty unquestionably the best way to handle fighting near a burning tree in the current game.

Personally I use flaming trees to kill stuff in appropriate vaults whenever they're available, I walk only far enough back to make sure I won't get caught in the conflagration, but keep in LOS so that clouds keep burning and killing stuff. Mostly this comes up in lair:$. Maybe that's not a tactically interesting use, I like it, for whatever that's worth.

Naturally, the tree-burning vault treasures should all be removed for the same reason digging treasures should all be removed. It should not be optimal to go around burning trees in case there's treasure hiding behind this particular one.

Afaik, it was fixed quite some time ago such that all the digging and tree burning vaults which have treasure, have it visible, so there's never a need to go digging or burning out random squares.

[Majang]

Tree burning is almost completely useless tactically. If you start a chain reaction, you want to walk away and wait for it to burn out rather than approaching it, and the most significant impact it has is that it removes a few (almost invariably non-threatening) monsters that would have otherwise provided xp.

Like Siegurt, I use it a lot on the final level of Lair. In that forest you have to fight a good number of spriggans, which are quite hard to hit otherwise. The conflagration traps them quite often, and I can watch in glee.
You make it sound as if monsters killed in a conflagration provide no experience. Is that true?

[crawlnoob]

Having an option that negates the challenge of a significant portion of what is supposed to be one of the most challenging floors in a branch, with almost no risk or investment on the part of the player, is a very convincing reason to remove that option.

It's like packing the world full of TNT in minecraft or something, not that minecraft is challenging. But you get the idea.

[Rast]

After 2k+ games, one of the few things that I still find fun about crawl is setting trees on fire.

[Shard1697]

It's like packing the world full of TNT in minecraft or something, not that minecraft is challenging. But you get the idea.

Packing the world full of TNT in minecraft would make the game 10x more dangerous bare minimum

if a creeper blows up ever good fucking luck with TNT exploding and propelling other lit TNT everywhere. or even if you made sure no creeper ever exploded, if a random aboveground lava pool starts a fire you could still be uberfucked unpredictably

not that this really matters wrt your actual point but tbh now that I've thought about it I would love to see that. it would undoubtably lag like shit once any went off

[prozacelf]

Tree burning is almost completely useless tactically. If you start a chain reaction, you want to walk away and wait for it to burn out rather than approaching it, and the most significant impact it has is that it removes a few (almost invariably non-threatening) monsters that would have otherwise provided xp. It should just be removed.

If the cool effect of having the player run through a forest as trees explode into flame clouds all around wants to be preserved in the game, make it a portal vault gimmick that actually forces the player to keep ahead of the exploding trees. Because simply walking away is pretty unquestionably the best way to handle fighting near a burning tree in the current game.

Naturally, the tree-burning vault treasures should all be removed for the same reason digging treasures should all be removed. It should not be optimal to go around burning trees in case there's treasure hiding behind this particular one.

It does also have the cool side effect of giving you a boatload of Dith penance when you shoot off a lightning bolt and forget that it'll start a forest fire!

But yeah, these vaults should probably just be changed.