Pain brand needs rework


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

Spider Stomper

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Post Monday, 11th March 2019, 11:12

Pain brand needs rework

I'll give you two example.
the first example)
Let's assume that the title of this post was 'Flaming/Freezing brand needs rework'. Then I write: 'Let's train fire/ice magic school to increase the damage to this brand.' When you look at this, you will sigh and write: 'Look, increasing the weapon damage has nothing to do with magic training.'

a second example)
Suppose there was no such thing as Pain brand so far. And, let's assume that the title of this post was 'New brand idea'. Then I write: 'Let's train necromancy magic school to increase the damage to this brand.' When you look at this, you will sigh and write: 'Look, increasing the weapon damage has nothing to do with magic training.'

Yes, I think so, too. We take it for granted just because it's been here before, but if this was a new idea, we wouldn't have liked it. Its design is very old, and it doesn't match the current game design. Pain brand needs rework.

For example, these things?
1. Remove pain brand(Not a favorite opinion.)
2. Change the damage from necro to weapons skill. Perhaps the formula for the negative energy damage is '1d(4 + weapon skill/5)?'
3. To remove pain brand and add staff of pain( For magic users). This adds additional negative energy damage to the attack spell. This damage is based on necro.
This is all I can think of now. Anyway, what I want to say is simple. No magic training is needed to increase the damage caused by melee attacks.

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 11th March 2019, 11:37

Re: Pain brand needs rework

We already have a staff of death, so we don't need a staff of pain imo.

How about scaling the damage somehow by the maxHP of the target? So it would cause more pain to those who have more life. Just an idea.

Scaling it with weapon skill would make e.g. daggers of pain less intriguing, since you don't typically train much weapon skill for a dagger.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 11th March 2019, 11:41

Re: Pain brand needs rework

4. Move pain from the best magic school to the worst magic school (Translocations?). I think it is good to have a few brands which break some rules as long as the brands are fun (chaos, distortion, lots of unrandars).
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Slime Squisher

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Post Monday, 11th March 2019, 12:38

Re: Pain brand needs rework

sdynet wrote:I'll give you two example.
the first example)
Let's assume that the title of this post was 'Flaming/Freezing brand needs rework'. Then I write: 'Let's train fire/ice magic school to increase the damage to this brand.' When you look at this, you will sigh and write: 'Look, increasing the weapon damage has nothing to do with magic training.'


The corresponding magic skill does increase the damage with a staff, and it also needs an investment into Evocations. When using a staff, you practically need three skills(staff skill + magic skill + Evocations) instead of two (weapon skill + Necromancy), or instead of one (weapon skill). Considering everything that Necromancy can do, including some of the most broken spells the game has on offer, I don't see this as a bad trade.

sdynet wrote:a second example)
Suppose there was no such thing as Pain brand so far. And, let's assume that the title of this post was 'New brand idea'. Then I write: 'Let's train necromancy magic school to increase the damage to this brand.' When you look at this, you will sigh and write: 'Look, increasing the weapon damage has nothing to do with magic training.'


I wouldn't at all mind a new brand idea that relies on a magic skill. Something like Hexes or Transmutation could be pretty fucking cool. Also, let's not assume. If I want to post a suggestion to change the flame/freezing/any other brand, I will post it as such. This is about the pain brand.

sdynet wrote:Yes, I think so, too. We take it for granted just because it's been here before, but if this was a new idea, we wouldn't have liked it. Its design is very old, and it doesn't match the current game design. Pain brand needs rework.

For example, these things?
1. Remove pain brand(Not a favorite opinion.)
2. Change the damage from necro to weapons skill. Perhaps the formula for the negative energy damage is '1d(4 + weapon skill/5)?'
3. To remove pain brand and add staff of pain( For magic users). This adds additional negative energy damage to the attack spell. This damage is based on necro.
This is all I can think of now. Anyway, what I want to say is simple. No magic training is needed to increase the damage caused by melee attacks.


1. Feature removal is actually quite popular on tavern. Especially when it concerns old features.
2. This would pretty much make it a nerfed vorpal brand. Why would you want this?
3. A staff that directly adds damage to attack spells does seem interesting, but depending on the actual numbers could spell (pun intended) trouble when implemented. It would either be weaker than the usual # boost a staff normally gives, or so universally powerful it would just overcharge early/mid spellcasters. Would this negative energy damage apply to all attack spells, or just to a subset? Would the damage boost be additive or multiplicative? What would the scaling be with regards to skills, would it need a hard cap, would it need diminishing returns?

More to the point: "No magic training is needed to increase the damage caused by melee attacks." If you don't rely on the pain brand or staff hits in most of your games, does it even matter? A game element that you rarely use or consider a niche case may well be the best option for others. Aside from casting Excruciating or being gifted by Kiku, I almost never even see weapons with a pain brand, let alone take them up as a staple. By the time a strong Necromancy skill is useful for spells, you don't need it for a pain weapon anyway because it works on next to nothing.
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Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Monday, 11th March 2019, 13:23

Re: Pain brand needs rework

Have to disagree. Pain brand and its association with Kiku offers a good route to mixed builds for a pretty broad cross section of combos. In a game where straightforward armored melee builds do pretty well for a similarly broad cross section of combos, that's a good thing.

Coming from the other direction, it wouldn't be inherently problematic to introduce similar magic school dependence to other brands. Many brands are currently very strong with absolutely no investment in anything, as has been discussed here many times. Pain brand doesn't have this problem. Brands with damage or other effects dependent on magic skills bring an additional dimension of specialization to melee-oriented characters and, I think, would encourage use of spells that might otherwise be ignored. Applied across the board, this approach would also reduce incentives to swap weapons and slightly reduce the dominance of Trog as a god for melee characters.
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Post Monday, 11th March 2019, 18:51

Re: Pain brand needs rework

Pain is pretty unique in a few ways. In general, I don't think you can get it with regular brand scrolls, either you find it (very rare) or you're using Kiku's gift. In Kiku's case, it's a god with the unusual property of training a magic school as its primary interaction rather than invocations. This is also interesting, because it interferes with heavy armor a bit to get 100% benefit while still offering melee quite a lot in terms of ~raise dead (castable even in CPA in 3 rune after a while).

I'm not opposed to other brands operating contingent on magic school training. It would give more of a place to vorpal (doesn't need a school but does less damage) and some of the less-appreciated brands like protection become more competitive.

Would it create too much spell-sword incentive, since you're going to cast spells anyway if you're training them significantly? Maybe, but heavy armor is also really god in crawl so maybe not.

I'm also OK with leaving just one brand as somewhat unique based on god interaction, or even introducing this kind of scaling to holy wrath weapons.

Blades Runner

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Post Monday, 11th March 2019, 19:59

Re: Pain brand needs rework

Pain brand is pretty worthless to me. It's hard to get unless you worship Kiku and are willing to not take the Necronomicon which is a pretty bad idea. It divides your effectiveness early on between STR and INT. Later on, when it could be good because you've had enough training to bring up both melee and spellcasting, pain won't work on most of the monsters that are actually dangerous.

All that said, I think that rather than pain being broken, it highlights how imbalanced everything else is towards melee. Brands require no investment at all, and are swappable. That is a big issue with spell casting, that it's hard to spend enough xp for all the schools needed to cover all the various monster resistances and abilities. Why are things so skewed? It's like super paranoia of people kiting everything has gone so far in the other direction that it's now backwards.

So, in conclusion unless spell casting and melee were better balanced, I think the other brands should be slowed down like pain is, by a need to train the corresponding magic schools. I don't think it would be the best solution, but it would still be better than nothing for partially balancing the game.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 11th March 2019, 21:20

Re: Pain brand needs rework

If weapon swapping is bad and brands are too powerful, we can nerf them directly like the more XP you get wielding some weapon, the more damage the weapon deals with its brand. It can be interesting to win the game with whip of electro which you find on D:2. Some characters swap weapons too often (cleaving/stabbing/electro vs non-resistant/pain vs non-resistant/vorpal vs resistant). Also that would be a good incentive to finally do something about blowguns and missile launchers.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 11th March 2019, 21:25

Re: Pain brand needs rework

My suggestion: Make pain brand Kiku-exclusive, Gods are allowed to break/bend general design choices, that's the point of them after all.
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Post Tuesday, 12th March 2019, 02:37

Re: Pain brand needs rework

While I see no problem with making pain brand kiku-exclusive, the claim that the way brands are represents a "design choice" is extremely overdrawn.
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Post Tuesday, 12th March 2019, 13:54

Re: Pain brand needs rework

I think that pain could be made to answer to INT instead of a skill.
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