sanka wrote:The most relevant comment from that thread is the analysis of the new fire magic spells by bt:
bt wrote:1. Foxfire and starting FE book in general
While Foxfire is fairly interesting to use and deals good damage for a lvl 1 spell, the drawbacks make it really awkward to start a run with. You can't use it in melee in a corridor at all. This along with the way D:1 is usually generated (lots of corridors) makes some FE starts especially difficult.
Encountering an early awake adder in a corridor as a non-RPois species leaves you with two options: run and most likely die; melee it with untrained unarmed and most likely die. Adder in a corridor is an extreme example, it can be jackals, leopard gecko, bat or cockroach instead, and the spell is still tricky to use in semi-open spaces, so it's not like completely avoiding corridors (even if it was possible) solves the problem. All the other caster starts have their lvl 1 spell to use in these situations, FE has untrained unarmed.
The clunkiness of Foxfire gets more pronounced when we consider two other early FE spells:
- Inner Flame: Foxfire is auto-targeted and slow (deals damage 1 turn after being cast at best), so makes IF more dangerous (IF'ed monster gets a chance to get closer) and unreliable (can target non-IF'ed monster)
- Conjure Flame: works best to create gaps in corridors... where you can't really use Foxfire.
Overall FE start feels very awkward to play, all three early spells are slow and unreliable. Your Sticky Flame doesn't work well with either Inner Flame or Conjure Flame and those two spells don't work too well together either, and when you get Fireball online everything else besides Sticky Flame feels redundant, and training Hexes for Inner Flame feels like a waste, cause it's the only Hex in a book and you are already training two schools to get Fireball online (compare it with Dazzling Flash/Fulminant Prism combo of Conj starting book where Prism is your main damage spell so you'll naturally get Flash as well). Also a very-very-very minor point, but FE start being so damn weird and convoluted makes for a bit of a flavor mismatch, as fire mages are usually the most generic "kill them with explosions" type of characters.
In conclusion Foxfire seems like an interesting idea, but is a poor lvl 1 starting spell and doesn't synergise well with anything in FE starting book.
bt wrote:4. Starfire. Didn't find a use case for this one. It's very unwieldy with allies like all the other large non-targeted AoE spells, but unlike them it can miss and costs 6 MP (also none of the common summons are immune to it). So in pretty much every case I would pick one of Irradiate (not even close with this one), Static Discharge or IMB as my point-blank AoE. I tried using Starfire with FE start and Fireball was more appropriate for a given situation almost every time.
This spell reminded me somewhat of ADOM magic system, where almost all spells are targeted by choosing one of your eight movement directions. So there were bolt spells that shot one bolt down a direction, and greater bolts (or whatever they were called), that worked like Starfire. In practice the greater version was used exactly like the normal version, cause being surrounded is bad. What makes Starfire's case worse is that when you do get surrounded you really want your AoE to not miss.
As an aside, having played a lot of ADOM, I don't miss it's magic system or it's targeting at all, I don't think it can hold a candle to what DCSS currently has. Also such targeting makes for a supremely tedious gameplay and is more suited for simpler floor architecture of ADOM anyway.
I think the rest of the schools are not worse than they used to be, but fire magic is in a very strange position, that would need an overhaul IMHO.
There are still an awful lot of spells with manual targeting tough.
Note the quoted comment was wrong here inner flame is actually safer, not less safe with foxfire than it was was, since foxfire does it's damage 1 turn later, you can cast inner flame, then foxfire, and move away from an adjacent critter, doing damage to it and having it explode before it walks up next to you. That it *also* was improved and now generates flame clouds and thereby increases foxfire's (or any other thing's) damage just means it's a generally-useful spell instead of a very rarely useful spell.
Also starfire is just bolt of fire (literally the damage and to-hit are identical) without manual targeting, Bolt of fire was just kind of Ok for a level 6, so starfire is too (the automatic hitting of fireball is, and was, often more useful than BoF/Starfire) That starfire can be used to hit multiple adjacent things is a slight upgrade over BoF, but if you had multiple adjacent things using BoF wouldn't be your go-to usually anyway, so at best it's kind of a wash.
Foxfire being fairly limited in corridors is a valid concern, but since it can be used reasonably at any corner or junction in practice it's a pretty minor case (also foxfire does more damage per cast in the optimal case and doesn't miss when compared to flame tongue, but with less flexibility targeting wise)
Overall the biggest nerf to FE was conjure flame (which was frankly overpowered previously, but now is mostly crap, outside of a few edge cases I never use new conjure flame) however they are definitely more complicated to use now as a start.