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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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Vestibule Violator
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Vestibule Violator
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danr wrote:For monks, it would make for an interesting game actually - you start out intending to be a hybrid, but you will start with the melee game rather than the magic game. Once you find a spellbook or (less likely) an elemental staff, that starts to set your priorities.
For casters, it just seems better flavour wise, and would make it just a tiny bit easier to develop the melee game. Why should casters start with short blades? That just makes them dual-school in weapons if they want to get into staves, and casters should not be forced to dual-school their already limited melee game.
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danr wrote:I agree about the negative aptitudes - it's almost as though the game doesn't actually want anyone to use staves. I have never ever used one as my main melee school.
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Curio wrote:danr wrote:I agree about the negative aptitudes - it's almost as though the game doesn't actually want anyone to use staves. I have never ever used one as my main melee school.
Me either. I see three solutions to this:
1) Merge with pole-arms.
2) Improve aptitudes for races, add more ego-staves drops, increase drop-chance of a staves in general, add staves as starting weapon variant.
3) Do nothing. Keep being useless skill.
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jpeg wrote:Erm, correct me if I'm wrong but don't wizarding staves fall into this group as well?
danr wrote:Interesting idea - to merge with polearms! Because polearms are also quite weak as a class.
minmay wrote: ...nearly guaranteed to actually find a lajatang...
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Curio wrote:Huh? RNG treats us differently then - cos i found executioner axes way much more times than lajatang.
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danr wrote:Interesting idea - to merge with polearms! Because polearms are also quite weak as a class.
It might be tricky code-wise though because currently staves are treated differently from all other weapons in the source code. They are not actually classified as "OBJ_WEAPON".
Vestibule Violator
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danr wrote:Are there maybe more fixed-art lajatangs?
danr wrote:Also - does the chance of a rare weapon being generated increase later in the game?
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danr wrote:If starting with Makhleb and a +2 weapon is permissible, starting with a staff and no god should certainly be.
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minmay wrote:danr, a quarterstaff with no Fighting or Staves skill is enough to clear D:1 with. This isn't that bad for non-casters, but for casting backgrounds I think it is completely unacceptable; fighters need to be better at fighting than casters, because they're worse at nearly everything else.
You won't see much of an increase in games won by casters because casters already have an easy D:1, save for poor species choice.
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danr wrote:Okay, for non-casters then - monks, fighters etc.
For casters, what if there was a smaller version of the quarterstaff, a staff that was 5' instead of 8' or whatever a quarterstaff is? It would be 1.5 handed and do damage of 4 or 5.
It could be a "rod", "baton", "staff" or something like that.
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Stormlock wrote:What about a 'Cane' as a one handed weak staff weapon for mages? I like the mental image of an old spellcaster out of mana bashing rodents with his cane.
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danr wrote:There is a point.
Finally, why should staves, out of all the weapon AND magic schools, be the only school that one cannot start with? Because stick technology is beyond the knowledge of all backgrounds?
There should at the very least be a choice between an "unarmed monk" and a "quarterstaff monk". That would be a class that would be very natural to go hybrid later, but there is not the issue of having staff + spellcasting to make D:1 trivial.
So: what about at least letting monks have access to the highly obscure stick technology?
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minmay wrote:szanth wrote:I completely disagree; the first few floors don't matter at all. Floors 1-4 are throwaways as far as I'm concerned.
If you think the first few floors of the game don't matter at all, why do you want to change them by adding staves?
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szanth wrote:minmay wrote:szanth wrote:I completely disagree; the first few floors don't matter at all. Floors 1-4 are throwaways as far as I'm concerned.
If you think the first few floors of the game don't matter at all, why do you want to change them by adding staves?
So you might as well make the process as enjoyable as possible.
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minmay wrote:szanth wrote:So you might as well make the process as enjoyable as possible.
What makes you think this will make the process more enjoyable for the average player? Does starting casters with staves add any tactical or strategic decisions? As far as I can tell, it just makes the game easier for them.
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Stormlock wrote:What about a 'Cane' as a one handed weak staff weapon for mages? I like the mental image of an old spellcaster out of mana bashing rodents with his cane.
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danr wrote:It just helps you get through the relatively boring early game more often so that you can spend more time playing in the more interesting middle game.
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danr wrote:dpeg - back on topic, what would you say to allowing staves as a starting weapon choice for one or more classes?
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