Hellmonk wrote:Hard to think of a spell school concept worse than direct damage school number 7.
summoning school number 3
Anyway, serious part: it's worth training translocations just to get Passage of Golubria on a
lot of characters, without going all the way to Controlled Blink. Portal Projectile is also really, really strong. It's wildly inaccurate to say you only train Tloc for cblink. It's not even an exaggeration of the truth, it's just flat out wrong. 90% of the time you train Tloc in a 3-rune game it should be for PoG and stop at PoG, and then you get some other good spells with it as a bonus.
Assuming you are not opposed to the existence of a defensive spell school like Translocations (and I will assume that at least the OP is not, since they left all the other defensive schools alone), the main issues with Translocations are that the individual spells are badly balanced with respect to each other, and that a bunch of them don't work in Zot/orbrun for no good reason.
- Apportation is level 1. It shouldn't be.
- Shroud of Golubria has the same problem as other buffs with letting you maintain it while exploring, and the same problem as Infusion where it's designed to be bad later in the game but actually isn't. Granted, it isn't really relevant to the Translocations school anyway since spell power does nothing for it.
- Lesser Beckoning should never have been nerfed. Its original version was already weak. It feels like it was nerfed because someone didn't want the effect in the game at all - and if that's the case, remove it instead of making it garbage.
- You cannot get enough spell power for Gell's for it to get a large enough radius to be useful for moving monsters. By the time you have lots of spell power, moving around monsters that are in LOS isn't good anymore no matter how far it moves them. It needs to be better at low power. The main use of it right now is to do damage by colliding monsters with your own summoned butterflies/rats, which is stupid.
- If you haven't guessed from the rest of this post, I think PoG is way too good. It acts a lot like semicontrolled blink now, with the bonus of letting you recover from bad teleports. Hard to get this effect right, since the original version of it was way too weak, but man, for now you could at least increase its spell level.
- Force Lance's power level is fine but it's only useful for the damage because the knockback isn't strong enough (unless a lich casts it at you, in which case you fly halfway across the level, or take collision damage if you forgot to lure them somewhere with lots of floor tiles behind you, monsters shouldn't cast this spell btw), so it just ends up being a generic IMB/Icicle substitute.
- Disjunction is supposed to be a bigger and "better" version of Dispersal, but it's the same level as Controlled Blink for some reason so it's just strictly worse than Controlled Blink outside zot/orbrun/formicid which is super dumb. This should be at least one level below Controlled Blink.
I find Controlled Blink relatively inoffensive because it's in a similar position to Fire Storm or whatever: the rest of the game is free when you have it, but there's a big gap in time between starting to invest xp in it and actually getting any return on that xp. It's too good in extended but every time you do extended, it seems less like a part of the real game, same for ziggurats.