Vestibule Violator
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Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.
Vestibule Violator
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dpeg wrote:Currently, the value of a scroll (or now also slaying) is independent of the weapon. I think that is a good feature.
Barkeep
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dpeg wrote:Currently, the value of a scroll (or now also slaying) is independent of the weapon. I think that is a good feature.
Ziggurat Zagger
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Ziggurat Zagger
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minmay wrote:KoboldLord wrote:So, was the weapon plus improved in any way during this commit? I'm a little bit fuzzy on reading the code, but it's still basically +1dN damage, where N is the second plus? Only now slaying now works the same way?
Yes.
Swamp Slogger
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Temple Termagant
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KoboldLord wrote:I was actually hoping I was misreading the code.
So, uh… Anybody care to explain why melee combat builds needed another nerf relative to casters? This seems counter-intuitive to me. The change certainly makes things more clear and intuitive, which is certainly a benefit, but does the benefit of clarity outweigh the drawback of making the weakest sorts of characters even worse?
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Ashenai wrote:If melee characters are too weak, there are many ways to buff them that make sense: argue in favor of some of those. Don't argue in favor of keeping an old, bad feature just because you feel it happened to randomly shove balance in the right direction.
Ashenai wrote:It's like people who were complaining about lightning bounces being nerfed. Did Air Elementalists need a nerf?
Ashenai wrote:If melee builds needed the ridiculous slaying bonuses to stay viable, then that is a problem,
Ashenai wrote:maybe weapon skills should have a bigger impact on your damage output, especially at higher levels (it always bugged me that most weapon skills max out in usefulness well below level 27.)
Ashenai wrote:It is important to focus on the long term regarding game balance; don't complain when a single change pushes balance in the "wrong" direction, especially in trunk.
Vestibule Violator
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Temple Termagant
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KoboldLord wrote:That's a very nice attitude to have, but sometimes you do have to pay attention to changes that are unfavorable. They start to stack up over time.
If there's a reason why the damage enchantment and slaying unification had to be a strict nerf affecting melee types exclusively, I'd still like to hear it.
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snow wrote:Casters are stronger than melee builds but honestly I feel that most melee builds are really strong too. Berserkers are extremely popular for a reason. Just because a fighter can't tab into that ogre but a caster can kill it trivially doesn't mean much... there are many situations that a fighter can survive that a caster can't.
The "hard" area for melee builds, in my experience, is after the temple but before the lair (or sometimes the early lair too). This is when you don't have a huge stack of items to deal with any situation that comes at you and it sucks to be you if that hydra gets within melee range because you don't have blink. swiftness, all those other utility spells casters get to play with.
Swamp Slogger
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Vestibule Violator
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Swamp Slogger
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Slime Squisher
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minmay wrote:[url=http://www.gitorious.org/crawl/crawl/commit/eb71eb6f778cc1bedcda4273de0b9c5b4c8b350e]I've actually seen a lot of people thinking that (for example) a -1, +5 whip is the same as a +0, +0 demon whip.
Vestibule Violator
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Barkeep
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Galefury wrote:First off, enchantment of x gives only 1dx bonus damage, not x. Second, base damage is affected by stat and skill modifiers while enchantment isn't. The end result is that +5 base damage gives you far far more extra damage than +5 enchantment.
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Swamp Slogger
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There are three source for damage numbers in the game. base damage, enchantment damage, ring of slaying damage. I think it would be nice to make them equal. I do not feel that rebalancing would be so hard.
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minmay wrote:I've actually seen a lot of people thinking that (for example) a -1, +5 whip is the same as a +0, +0 demon whip.
The first number is the enchantment to-hit, which affects the weapon's accuracy, and the second is its damage enchantment...
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Barkeep
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dpeg wrote:However, I don't like this pervasive talk of "reliant on spoilers". Folks, the game is winnable without knowing any formulas.
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njvack wrote:You don't need to know formulas to win the game; however, as it stands, the ways you can know +0 demon whip is better than a -1, +5 whip are:
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nicolae wrote:Just out of curiosity, what enchantments on a whip would make it as close as possible to being as effective as a demon whip? Or is that question not even meaningful.
Ziggurat Zagger
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dpeg wrote:I agree the system is confusing (but it is so for reasons... setting up a system where all the parameters are relevant is no mean feat -- that is why we read so often "it will need some balancing and tweaking"). However, I don't like this pervasive talk of "reliant on spoilers". Folks, the game is winnable without knowing any formulas. And by this is I mean that I won fighters since pre-DCSS, I never cared about the numbers, and I am not alone (and far from a really good player). If you pick up the +6,+6 falchion, you will realise at some point that the damage output is lackluster. As I said, not ideal but it is manageable.
It is always the case that players who want optimal performance need the source or spoilers. There is no reason to make all formulas available in the game. (This is a design decision.) It is desirable to reduce confusion. I believe that making slaying work like enchantments does reduce confusion a little.
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Temple Termagant
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jejorda2 wrote:If slaying is changed to work like enchantment, it will be so much less valuable that you'd almost always want some other ring instead.
Dungeon Master
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minmay wrote:dpeg wrote:Folks, the game is winnable without knowing any formulas.
Not sure what your point is here. You could say this about any game that exists or ever will exist.
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Ashenai wrote:jejorda2 wrote:If slaying is changed to work like enchantment, it will be so much less valuable that you'd almost always want some other ring instead.
This makes no sense, because slaying is a variable quality. Are you saying you'd almost always want to use some other ring than a +100/+100 slaying ring? No? Well then clearly the only issue is what numbers make slaying worthwhile.
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KoboldLord wrote:The phrase 'reliant on spoilers' is, indeed, frequently abused as a dogwhistle on this forum against something that the poster in question doesn't like, but I think the difference between base weapon damage and damage enhancement bonus is legitimately a point where that criticism can be applied fairly. Base weapon damage is a wildly different measurement than damage enhancement bonus, but unlabeled as they are in the user interface I believe nearly every newbie confuses the two until another forum poster disabuses them of their confusion. This isn't something that only occasionally comes up as confusing.
KoboldLord wrote:As a user interface issue, this really shouldn't be too hard to fix. One possibility would be to add 'dice' as units to the base weapon damage in the weapon description. For instance, a falchion would have base weapon damage '8 dice' and a demon blade '13 dice'. No explanation about what dice actually means, but the +5 on your weapon is just +5, and not +5 dice, so it's intuitive to presume that +N is going to end up generally smaller than +N dice.
Another possibility would be to simply stop giving weapons numeric base weapon damage at all. Instead, they get letter grades for base weapon damage and base weapon accuracy, graded on a curve. Demon weapons are all A-ranked weapons, with clubs and daggers being F-ranked. Two-handed weapons have a parallel scale, since they don't really need to be directly compared to one-handed weapons, so an executioner's axe would be a two-handed A-ranked weapon and a halberd would be D- or F-ranked. This tells an unspoilered player absolutely nothing about the inner workings of the game, but nevertheless tells them exactly what weapons are actually useful without any potential for confusion.
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dpeg wrote:Would you mind adding this to the wiki? I believe something could be gotten out of this thread, but without wikification it will drop and rot.
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