new demonspawn muation proposals

[petercordia]

I'd like to put these demon-spawn mutation ideas out there, just in case they're any good

Magic Hands
body-slot facet which improves your magic
tier 1: magic runes cover your hands (+15% spellpower, negated by gloves)
tier 2: glowing runes densly cover your hands (+30% spellpower, negated by gloves)
tier 3: A swirling mass of magic writing fills the air around your arms (+50% spellpower, prohibits gloves)

Alternate implementation of Magic Hands:
tier 1: gain ability to channel magic (as if wielding staff of energy with Evocations skill = 6 + XL/3)
tier 2: gain ability to channel magic efficiently (as if wielding staff of energy with Evocations skill = 18 + XL/3)
tier 3: 1 rank of archmagi

Lord of Silence
two tier facet
tier 1: you can evoke Silence (5 tile radius, decreasing with time like the spell)
tier 2: you are unaffected by Silence
tier 3: a permanent aura of Silence surrounds you (6 tile radius)

[Sorcerous]

Lord of Silence looks interesting, having an immunity to one of the 100% effective late threats is definitely new. Permanent silence would still wreak havoc with game balance in terms of any non-demonic casters, and because mutation progression is partly random you could end up with an absurdly safe character by the second rune. If the silence immunity doesn't extend to anything other than the Ds, that could act as a counterbalance factor: allies can't be directed towards/ away and mess up your plans etc.

Magic hands (both implementation ideas) seem seriously overpowered compared to one slot being taken away - even more so when compared to claws 1-3. Non-caster Ds would still almost never have MP issues for Invo-actives and could also abuse +Spirit.

[chequers]

More Ds mutations is always good! Especially more proposals that encourage playing a caster (or at least non-meleedude).
Yes, these sound very strong. "Lord of Silence" alternate proposal: radius 1/2/3 evocable silence

[petercordia]

Thanks for your feedback!

I think Magic Hands could be toned down by replacing Archmagi by Wiz, since Wiz is generally considered weaker than Archmagi. I wanted to design a body-slot facet that aids magic. The tricky thing is that a partial unit of Wiz or Archmagi feels ugly.

In my mind the core or Lord of Silence was Evocable Silence -> Silence immunity -> Permanent Silence. I hope that permanent silence will cut out on tedium, and make the trait feel more relaxed. Perhaps radius 1/2 (evocable) -> Silence immunity -> radius 2 (permanent) would be more balanced.

[chequers]

Rather than a partial unit of Wiz/Archmagi, you could give a full unit for a subset of spells. Like mummy necro enhancer. Another idea would be to give 1/3rd of the unit for each level of the mutation.

Permanent silence sounds like it would be extremely strong. The impact on floors like elf:$ or tomb would be significant. I think you'd have a hard time convincing the devs it's a reasonable Ds mutation. Maybe if you had a play-testable build showing its strength was OK you might have some luck.

[duvessa]

Magic Hands seems redundant with wild magic; why not just make wild magic a Ds mutation facet instead? As with robust.

A mutation that replicates an existing spell is not a good design, think of a different effect for the first level of that mutation. I'm gonna have to ask everyone to be more specific about what "unaffected by Silence" means. I assume you can still cast spells, use god abilities, and read scrolls, but do you still get the stealth penalty? Do you still get to hear noises? Do you still make noise within silence, or do you have to rely on throwing/spells in order to make noise? Do you get to order around allies?

[TheMeInTeam]

Having permanent silence + darkness while still being able to cast spells would be nuts actually. Anything other than hell fiends appearing on top of you or maybe OOFs is trivial like that. But even those wouldn't attract other enemies as you 1v1 them.

[Hellmonk]

The biggest problem I have with demonspawn mutations now is that a lot of them are boring or don't do anything at the first couple ranks, and these avoid that, so that's cool at least. It's probably worth pointing out that there's already a demonspawn mutation that gives spellpower (augmentation). Wild magic as a Ds facet would be ok, though current design would place that as a tier two mut rather than body slot. Giving wiz, either as a body slot or as part another mutation sounds like a pretty reasonable addition.

While we are on the subject of demonspawn mutations, I would like to see partial or full reworks of the following tier 2-3 facets: ignite blood, icemail, damnation, passive freeze, foul stench, negative energy, and mana shield. Ignite blood, icemail, hurl damnation, and passive freeze have incredibly boring and mostly inconsequential rank 1 and 2 muts (they're all resistance pip followed by immunity to a particular cloud type), so they're incredibly unsatisfying until you hit the final rank. Passive freeze sucks then too unless you get it unusually early, and the first two ranks don't even make sense for hurl damnation anymore. Foul stench does nothing at rank 1. Negative energy facet gives rN+ followed by a bad form of torment resistance, and similar to passive freeze doesn't even feel good at rank 3 since you get it so late. Mana shield, unlike the others in this list, gives you the good part of the mutation first, but the third rank does practically nothing.

You could incorporate a spell enhancer into one of the facets somewhere. Hellcrawl does this in the icemail facet, but you could easily add a fire enhancer to ignite blood or even put the legendary hexes enhancer into the "negative energy facet" and shift its focus. That facet might also be a good place to incorporate some form of passive silence. You can make it a one or two tile donut and avoid having to deal with the implications of silencing the player. The final mut might look like hex enhancer, black mark, silence donut, which would make for a pretty fun "debuff" facet I think.

Foul stench would be fine if it did the actually useful part of the mutation at rank 1, so I'd suggest just making rank 1 become the current rank 2 plus rRot and then adding a new rank 2 halfway between that and rank 3. I think you could do something similar with ignite blood. Mana shield facet's rank 1 and 2 mutations should be swapped imo but that doesn't fix rank 3 being pointless and I don't have an incredible idea for that one. I would also suggest either merging icemail and passive freeze or removing passive freeze.

[duvessa]

Maybe three levels per mutation is just too many.

I also want to note that we have three Ds mutation facets dedicated to retaliating against monsters that attack you in melee (passive freeze, spiny, foul stench). That's kind of silly.

[petercordia]

It sounds like the biggest problem with Lord of Silence would be the ability to recast silence whilst silenced (and my initially proposed perma-radius being too big). I can't imagine a 2 or 3 tile radius perma-silence would be game-breaking in Elf/Tomb.
It should be possible to fix this by prohibiting recasting of Silence whilst your temporary silence radius is bigger than your permanent silence radius, similar to the way Dragon's Call can't be recast whilst it is active.
@duvessa: blink, and to a lesser extend regeneration & repel missiles and the like are already available as a mutation and a spell. Usually the spell and mutation are slightly different. In this case both the cost and initial radius would be different. I don't think the similarity between the mutation and spell would be a problem. As for the question what precisely 'Immune to Silence' would mean, I would leave that to the programmer and change it if playtesting gives reasons for doing so.

I wonder whether it would be workable to randomly select in which order spellschools get a wiz/spellpower boost (for Magic Hands). Currently all Ds mutations are deterministic. I expect it would be a pain to program. But a sequence like wiz Conjurations -> wiz Conjurations & Summoning & elemental spells -> wiz everything might be problematic for gameplay reasons.

With regards to changes to the other demonspawn mutations:
Ignite Blood would be fun with a fire-magic enhancer, imo
Icemail would be fun with an ice-magic enhancer, but that might push it to tier-3 strength,
Hurl Hellfire could be changed to allow you to evoke Hellfire at rank 2 at the cost of 30% of your hp (and at the cost of 15% hp at rank 3, as is currently the case). The rank 2 ability would be very situational, but arguably less situational than the current flame-cloud immunity.
Passive Freeze I wouldn't mind to see removed. Merging it into Icemail could also be ok.
Foul Stench could thematically give access to gourmand (rotting ~ raw meat). It wouldn't make it much stronger, but it would change gameplay and thus make it feel better, i think
negative energy: giving it a hex enhancer could be fun
Mana Shield: I actually find rank 3 extremely impactful. Playing characters who rely on mp for attacking & escape, rank 1&2 are difficult to play with, but rank 3 is great. (Though Sublimation of Blood can also be used as a workaround).

[petercordia]

I had a new idea for Magic Hands:

(body-slot facet)
tier 1: mp regen
tier 2: eliminate spell hunger
tier 3: wiz+

Any opinions on whether this would be balanced / fun, and whether this would be the correct order in which to give the benefits?

[chequers]

Wiz as a demonspawn facet could be good. I'm less sure about the other ones. MP Regen is already given by spirit shield mutation, and spell hunger is wildly controversial in terms of desirability / power level (plus a dev was talking about removing food soon??).

Some more brainstorming:

Reduce cost of spells from a certain school by 1 MP (probably a tier 3 level 3 mut)
Add all level <=3/6/9 spells of a certain school to your library ("demonic knowledge")
Occasionally double cast spells (maybe any targeted conjuration veh supports)
When attacked, cast a random spell in retaliation (how to design this so it doesn't encourage servitor-esque strategic amnesia?)
An ability like sif's old-new `Cast` -- activate to cast your next spell for 0 mp + Exhaustion