Potion of Mutation changes


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Dungeon Dilettante

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Joined: Monday, 30th April 2018, 02:45

Post Monday, 30th April 2018, 02:48

Potion of Mutation changes

Why did they make potions of mutation -remove- mutations? Cultivating a huge list of wacky mutations was a major highlight of the game for me, and this makes it impossible. If you don't want that to be the experience with mutations, then just get rid of them altogether, because that's all they're good for. I stopped playing as soon as I realized what the changes were and haven't wanted to play since.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Joined: Sunday, 5th May 2013, 08:25

Post Monday, 30th April 2018, 03:04

Re: Potion of Mutation changes

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/b9e5f3fc1c77
A brief explanation of the philosophy behind this change:

The current status of Crawl's mutation game is essentially
solved: if you get malmutations, quaff Cure Mutation. If you find
Beneficial Mutation, quaff it. If you're feeling lucky, or if you
absolutely need to get rid of a certain malmutation and are out of Cure
Mutation, then quaff Mutation. These choices are not very interesting.
Cure Mutation in effect becomes a tax paid for making positioning
mistakes against malmutators, and when they run out of !cmut, then for
some players malmutators become top priorities, with a risk of
'permanently ruining' their character if they become too malmutated.

Since the new potion generates frequently, for now, it ensures that
the player will usually have the option to reroll their mutations if they
get a set that they decide that they don't want to play with. The
decision to reroll is also no longer binary: each mutation set is
evaluated in the context of the character's abilities and strengths, and
the player will decide "Is it worth risking getting something worse
or better?" (Compare the Cure Mutation decision described above.)

It creates a mutation baseline for most characters: at least two
mutations in any given game (unless they were lucky / savvy enough
to never be malmutated, and Zin-ite enough to never succumb to the
purple temptation!), and likely 3+.

The goal is to increase player control and interaction with the mutation
mechanic, and to generate more relevant and interesting decisions that
will differ on a character-by-character (or even mutation-by-mutation)
basis.

For this message the author duvessa has received thanks:
Fingolfin
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Pandemonium Purger

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Post Monday, 30th April 2018, 03:16

Re: Potion of Mutation changes

If you are a single issue voter and your single issue is 'I want to be able to mutate myself horribly', try Gooncrawl: https://github.com/Floodkiller/crawl

IIRC it doesn't revert the potion of mutation changes, but it does bring back purple (mutagenic) chunks which work functionally the same way.

Snake Sneak

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Joined: Thursday, 23rd November 2017, 02:14

Post Monday, 30th April 2018, 11:40

Re: Potion of Mutation changes

Then the mut potion frequency was reduced again, so now good players try to avoid LOS to mutators and if they get mutated they drink until their mut set is slightly good.

If you want people to deal with mutations more, maybe you could make mut potions give temporary mr++.

Dungeon Dilettante

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Post Monday, 30th April 2018, 14:42

Re: Potion of Mutation changes

That's not interesting at all! That's "if you have some bad mutations, drink a potion"! Not only does it ignore the entire positive end of mutations as something worth pursuing, it makes the multi-tier good mutations borderline inaccessible! Not only is it no more interesting of a decision, there's less of them with less interesting results! Optimal play is only ever going to be a set of if->then decisions mitigated by random chance, making those decisions lead universally to more suboptimal outcomes(more powerful malmutators, fewer possible responses to mutation, fewer resources the player wants to protect) doesn't help anything, especially when it comes at the cost of interesting and varied content for those of us who aren't trying to play optimally.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Joined: Saturday, 18th June 2016, 13:57

Post Monday, 30th April 2018, 15:32

Re: Potion of Mutation changes

It does irk me that you are likely not going to get lvl 2 or 3 good mutations with the current potion. It would be nice if it had a higher chance of strengthening your current good mutations, instead of probably substituting them with a different lvl 1 set.
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Blades Runner

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Joined: Thursday, 25th October 2012, 03:19

Post Monday, 30th April 2018, 15:52

Re: Potion of Mutation changes

What irks me about mutations is that you can mostly avoid them, but only if you play tediously. For example, order allies to retreat ahead of you, just in case you might step into sight of a malmutator that uses malmutate on you the instant they see you (which is really annoying.) The history of it that I remember is that it's always been a pain to avoid them. Cure mutation potions used to be so extremely rare, sometimes your only option if you wanted to get rid of Teleportitis was to scum abyss and that could take forever and you'd get even more mutations in the process. So, they made the new mutation potions and they were plentiful, then, basically it's the same situation except instead of trying to keep mutations gone, you are instead trying to hold onto those potions to get rid of bad mutations (and usually gaining a few good ones in the process.) So, it's gone pretty much almost nowhere except now characters usually have a few good mutations, or could be badly mutated if they didn't play tediously to avoid malmutate. If the new mutation potions are much harder to find now, then things have really gone full circle, minus amulets of resist mutation.

I don't much understand what the mutation system is trying to accomplish. Are we supposed to be punished with bad mutations for not walking on egg shells every game? More and more I find myself playing Zin through the malmutate portions of the game then switching gods. It's odd to clear most of the game until entering Zot5, slimes and abyss. At least mummies and ghouls used to be able to avoid them, but now with the stupid wretched star things which are so so lame (and unavoidable, LOS isn't even required for their b.s.) that they cause massive stat drain to undead, dying of stat drain is now even worse. Playing with necromutate, you practically have to keep turning it on-off every time you see a wretched star. I guess I just really hate malmutate.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 30th April 2018, 18:31

Re: Potion of Mutation changes

svendre wrote:What irks me about mutations is that you can mostly avoid them, but only if you play tediously. For example, order allies to retreat ahead of you, just in case you might step into sight of a malmutator that uses malmutate on you the instant they see you (which is really annoying.) The history of it that I remember is that it's always been a pain to avoid them. Cure mutation potions used to be so extremely rare, sometimes your only option if you wanted to get rid of Teleportitis was to scum abyss and that could take forever and you'd get even more mutations in the process. So, they made the new mutation potions and they were plentiful, then, basically it's the same situation except instead of trying to keep mutations gone, you are instead trying to hold onto those potions to get rid of bad mutations (and usually gaining a few good ones in the process.) So, it's gone pretty much almost nowhere except now characters usually have a few good mutations, or could be badly mutated if they didn't play tediously to avoid malmutate. If the new mutation potions are much harder to find now, then things have really gone full circle, minus amulets of resist mutation.

I don't much understand what the mutation system is trying to accomplish. Are we supposed to be punished with bad mutations for not walking on egg shells every game? More and more I find myself playing Zin through the malmutate portions of the game then switching gods. It's odd to clear most of the game until entering Zot5, slimes and abyss. At least mummies and ghouls used to be able to avoid them, but now with the stupid wretched star things which are so so lame (and unavoidable, LOS isn't even required for their b.s.) that they cause massive stat drain to undead, dying of stat drain is now even worse. Playing with necromutate, you practically have to keep turning it on-off every time you see a wretched star. I guess I just really hate malmutate.

Re wretched stars: they actually do require LOS, just not LOF (the attack is smiting) and the mutations caused are temporary (it isnt true malmutate), you can get rid of them all just by killing more stuff, and why on earth would you use necromutation in the abyss at all, that seems like a terrible plan, almost nothing does any of the types of damage that necromutation prevents in any kind of significant amount. Racial undead do get the shaft though, as temp malmutate and regular malmutate do the same thing to stats.
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Blades Runner

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Joined: Thursday, 25th October 2012, 03:19

Post Monday, 30th April 2018, 22:00

Re: Potion of Mutation changes

Thanks, yes I meant LOF (not LOS). I wasn't complaining about wretched stars as giving permanent mutations, or even the temporary ones to the living. Rather I was saying how malmutate has become even worse because the stat drain from wretched stars makes undead characters (who could otherwise reasonably deal with malmutate causing stat loss) much worse. I agree that necromutate isn't really super helpful for abyss, except that it is one way to avoid mutations, and the wretched star also makes it more tedious to pull off.

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