Cocytus Succeeder
Posts: 2184
Joined: Tuesday, 3rd February 2015, 22:05
Better DD
DD has been a problematic (read: broken) species for a long time. The problems are well-known, but just to recapitulate, and to set the stage for the solution:
Problems:
- God healing, vampiric draining and vamp weapons exist, so "no healing" is limited in practice.
- The heal wounds cost (permanent MP loss) isn't really meaningful in practice because of the above factor, and the ability is too strong in general (especially in the early game, where you literally cannot die.)
- Scummy and silly behaviour is encouraged: like leaving bags of HP alive, or using vampiric draining on popcorn instead of killing them with your executioner's axe.
Solution:
So, what's the solution? Well, here's mine. You can find it here, if you want to play around with it. Beware: I have done minimal testing.
- You get a "heal on kills" mutation. Healing bonus on kills is same as what Makhleb provides.
- Healing bonus gained over your max HP is stored in an "overflow". If your overflow reaches 30 HP, you get an ambrosia potion and your overflow is reduced by 30.
- Ambrosia potion heals you like it normally does.
- No healing from any other source. This includes:
- You can quaff heal wounds and curing, but they will not heal you. They will still have the other effects, like curing rot.
- No god healing: Ely Greater and Lesser Healing, Ru Draw Out Power, Trog's Hand, Yred's Drain Life, Makh and TSO's heal on kills. Gozag potion petition can grant heal wounds and curing, but as discussed above, they will not heal you.
- No healing from vampiric draining.
- No healing from vamp weapons.
I've not handled Jiyva yet. Or Nemelex Elixir card. If I missed anything else, let me know.
We can now discuss the solution.
Why use heal on kills?
Clean, simple mechanism. Very common, since most DD worship Makhleb anyway.
As to why not use an exploration based system (which I used in my previous implementation), the main reason is that I no longer think that exploration-based piety makes sense. See this thread for my thoughts.
Other (smaller) reasons include problems with balancing the drop rate in the previous version: I found that the "healing buffer" wasn't smooth because branch ends are typically much tougher than the floors which come above them.
Why use a buffer in the form of ambrosia potions?
Crawl combat is very swingy and unpredictable, so a "no regen" species needs some sort of buffer to make it playable.
This particular implementation discourages "banking" easier monsters. You get the same healing no matter when you kill a monster. Ambrosia potions, on average, provide about 30 HP. So, I generate a potion at 30 HP overflow.
Why use ambrosia instead of heal wounds?
To discourage healing in combat.
Minor things and possible tweaks:
There are some quality of life improvements from the previous implementation. Only the "overflow" is stored as ambrosia potions, not the entire healing amount. Thus, button mashing to heal is reduced. Of course, simply granting heal-on-kills is strictly a buff to earlier implementation, but can easily be balanced by nerfing DD in some other way.
Healing functions can, of course, be tweaked if they are too generous or non-smooth or whatever. It's also possible to generate DD with a few ambrosia potions in case they find the early game too tough without healing.
Comments are welcome.