Spellpower based range breakpoints

[amaril]

...are kind of dumb, because they provide significant jumps in damage output at arbitrary opaque points of power. Spells should have consistent ranges, and if the effect of spellpower needs to be maintained it should increase damage to a greater linear degree.

Second proposal (the real reason for the first proposal): spells that bounce should always have even ranges. This includes w/ Veh support; lbolt and shock should just get double the range boost. The buff won't break vehumet. Luring monsters to safe bounce chokepoints isn't fun and should be minimized. It sucks that I want to lower spellpower to increase lbolt's functionality.

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[mattlistener]

I thought the positional game around multizapping was good for DCSS.

Self-damage from lightning is part of its flavour. With rElec+, many lightning school spells become more usable, including 5-range LB. Seems ok to me.

[amaril]

If I looked around the map awhile I could find a walk path that would allow me to double zap the gila monster without first being hit. There's no way I'm going to zap here and risk taking max lightning bolt damage on top of a gila monster hit. But last xl I could have because my spellpower was lower and lbolt had range 4. The main problem with this is that looking around the map for a place to double zap isn't as easy as it sounds: zap pathing is often unintuitive, especially when corners are involved.

The best solution would be to make the player immune to doublezaps, because the player is already immune to doublezaps if they just reposition. This would keep the 'gimmick' of bouncing spells, i.e. they are weaker in open areas than they are in winding tunnels.

[amaril]

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lololol but that is besides the point tbh

[Shard1697]

personally I can't stand wallbounce spells because of the way that they bounce differently not just based on the angle they hit a wall, but also the position of other walls around that wall.

like, shooting east here-

  Code:

......#
.@....#
......#


bounces differently than shooting east here-

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.....##
.@....#
......#


Drives me crazy.

To me it doesn't make any sense that the bolt bounces differently because there's a wall north of the tile immediately before the wall it's actually hitting. It's hitting a flat face, shouldn't it bounce straight backwards either way?
The idea that the 'real' wall is... an average of nearby walls? Like you have to draw a line between the actual walls displayed ingame to find the real bounce angles, sort of like this-

-is so crazy and counterintuitive to me.

It definitely feels, based on the way walls look(and normally behave) that wallbounce spells should behave as if wall are like this.

I don't know if I need to spell this out this way but it feels like no one ever talks about this.
Of course in a game with 8-directional movement the true nature of a single wall tile(to make diagonal movement between walls make sense) is an octagon, and that's the only way diagonal bounces make any sense, but that still doesn't make this behavior make sense to me.

[Hellmonk]

Remove boltbouncing. The "cool tactics" are like, not standing next to walls around certain enemies and luring dudes for a billion years and it's also unintuitive as fuck. In a much tighter tactical game it could make sense, in DCSS I think on balance boltbouncing is dumb and bad.

[Patashu]

https://github.com/Floodkiller/crawl/pu ... 12190fdf13

That was surprisingly easy and fun to code.

[svendre]

Lets remove all walls. They are dumb, because they could be used to gain a tactical advantage when they are in the correct formation to be used in a particular manner. Reduce all tactics to the lowest common denominator of charge in and swing/fire at first sighting.

No, not really. Please don't yank out more potentially interesting game mechanics in the interest of dumbing the game down. It's already suffered some losses and doesn't need more. A few cases of how the bouncing mechanism can create choices:

* You may or may not have resistance, thus affecting your decisions though you aren't limited if you choose to take risk in receiving more damage
* You often have multiple interesting choices in which creatures will receive double zaps or single zaps
* Lightning is loud, so is less predictable in terms of potentially getting boxed in from multiple directions despite your choice of positioning
* You don't always just get to decide where to fight every single monster all the time, there are plenty of reasons why not

[Pereza0]

personally I can't stand wallbounce spells because of the way that they bounce differently not just based on the angle they hit a wall, but also the position of other walls around that wall.

Personal opinion, but I personally enjoy the weirdness of the system. Takes a bit more effort to get into advantageous positions but also allows more possibilities since there are more ways things can bounce around.


Also the fact its unintuitive seems to go well with the theme of Air being powerful but unpredictable and hard to control... though I thing I am stretching it here

[Leafsnail]

I don't like bounce mechanics, and I also don't like the weird way variable AoE effects scale with power (IE it means you don't know where to fire to hit a monster next to you but avoid hitting yourself).

However, I actually like range breakpoints in principle on stuff like Lesser Beckoning or Flame Tongue where it doesn't cause random annoyances and downsides. Breakpoints like that provide a clear skill training incentive to the player, allowing them to make an informed choice. To me it's actually way less opaque than just providing incremental, impossible to notice benefits: if I put some more XP into this skill my spell gets better in this obvious and tangible way, and I can weigh this against other benefits I could get. Wheras if putting points into a skill just gradually increases the damage then I'd need to look up how much it's increasing the damage relative to how what my other skill is doing (or more realistically just ignore the choice and hope whatever arbitrary training scheme I'm doing is good enough).

Ideally I'd actually like the game to have more clearly signposted breakpoints like that.

[Shtopit]

Bouncing is a thing for fire magic, too, if the walls are glass. However, the aiming system for fire spells isn't optimized for this. I only noticed it because I got an "are you sure" message. So such a change wouldn't touch only electricity.