Slime Squisher
Posts: 406
Joined: Thursday, 16th June 2011, 18:36
Necromancy school suggestion: -MaxHP costs
An overall check on the power of Necromancy (while endeavoring to preserve its fun value) is suggested in https://github.com/crawl/crawl/wiki/0.2 ... lease-Plan.
The linked plan page mentions the possibility of having most Necromancy spells cost HP as well as MP. That change would push players even harder toward HP-generation (divine, arcane, racial, consumable) as a way to offset this.
Instead, add a "temporary reduction to Max HP" cost to spells in the school, which you then work off via XP. Just like Drain, this would be represented by a -MaxHP status which gradually scales up as you incur more such cost and down as you work it off. Use appropriate dangercolor scaling (according to what total % of your MaxHP you are currently missing), but no hard breakpoints.
"Why not just use Drain?" Unlike Drain, -MaxHP doesn't directly scale back your ability to killdudes.
How impactful this would be is a matter of tuning. But the gameplay impact, once tuned suitably, would be "play more carefully as there are temporarily more situations that can burst you to death" instead of "arrange to be generating HP fast enough you don't care about HP you lose."
I'd submit this has major thematic value too. Necromancy shouldn't be "there's a cost but I can beef up to ignore it" but instead "I feel the cost but it's worth it because HAHAHAHAHAH!"
In Progress:
Long-term goal: complete the pantheon.