Name | dcss:brainstorm:combat: enchantment |
---|---|
Summary | Make base damage, enchantment, and slaying have the same effect. |
Added by | minmay |
Added on | 2011-11-13 16:34 |
In 0.9, if you ignore brands and berserk and such (which aren't relevant here):
In current 0.10:
Slaying was changed to be identical to enchantment, because unspoiled players assume that it will be. However, it appears that unspoiled players also assume that base damage will be identical to enchantment, too. Therefore, I suggest making slaying and enchantment work just like base damage currently does. I would like to see this happen before the release of 0.10, so the system doesn't change *twice* for every player.
There are definitely advantages to unifying base damage with slaying and enchantment, yes. However, I think this change is too major to have a chance at balancing it for 0.10 at this point. The slaying change was relatively small; most games people never even find slaying, and even if they do then the change to how it works isn't very likely to affect their play. You are suggesting something that would affect every single game in which someone uses a weapon. There are other far-reaching weapon changes that are planned (for instance, removing magic numbers for weapon skill to get min delay), and your argument about things changing twice for every player would make more sense as an argument to delay this change until then.
All your proposed changes are working under the common misconception that base damage is currently always twice as good as weapon enchantment. This simply isn't true. At zero fighting and weapon skill and strength/dex at 11, they are equally good (on average). Base damage only becomes twice as good quite late (str/dex at 18 and weapon and fighting skills at 20, for example). In other words, your proposal would have the effect of nerfing weapon enchantment for anyone with lower skills than that, and nerfing it by quite a lot in early game.
Currently weapon enchantment starts out very important and becomes gradually less important relative to base damage as your skills increase. This has nice effects like encouraging use of enchant weapon scrolls earlier rather than later, while they are more significant. This sort of thing would be completely lost with your proposal.
Sacrifices like this might be worth making the system simpler and more intuitive, of course… but it would take a lot of rebalancing. As I explained above, your proposal as is would be a strict nerf to all melee chars in early game, for instance… not something we want. Getting a change like this into crawl at some point could be great, but there really isn't time to balance it properly for 0.10 at this point. — elliptic 2011-11-13 21:54First of all: yes, it would also be good to hold it off for later. I guess I really mean that I wouldn't like to see it in 0.11.
I'm not working under the assumption that base damage is twice as good as enchantment; I'm actually pretty familiar with what it does. The reason for halving the enchantment cap is so that weapon base stats don't have to be adjusted (if it was left at +9 the difference between a demon whip and executioner's axe would become a lot smaller, probably a bad thing). Note that making weapons less useful at low skill is intentional (I don't like how finding a highly enchanted weapon makes an early caster just as good as an early fighter), but it's true that it would be a nerf to backgrounds that don't need one. — minmay 2011-11-13 21:54