Staves

Right now, wizard's staves are functional but many of them are quite boring. Ideas for making them more interesting and/or balanced, or even for new ones, should go here. One idea is to add evocable effects to some or all staves (aside from channeling, obviously!). This effect would have an MP cost, with success rate and power depending on both Evocations skill and the appropriate magical skill. I think (Evoc+skill/2)/27 success would work well.

• Should cause electricity to arc through water when it shocks something in water, like a weapon of electrocution.
• Evocable effect: creates a targeted gust of wind which can knock back monsters and moves clouds. Knocks back smaller monsters and flying/levitating monsters more (larger ones may not move at all, especially at low skill), has no effect on monsters in water, including land monsters standing in shallow water. Also doesn't affect insubstantial monsters. Would reliably move a human one or two spaces at 5 skill, would reliably move a human seven or eight spaces and an iron dragon one or two spaces at 27 skill. Costs 3-5 MP. This could be used to knock monsters into deep water or lava, which is neat but might be too powerful - higher MP cost?

• Right now, incredibly weak. Worse than a weapon of venom in melee, and the power boost hardly matters for anything except Venom Bolt and Poison Arrow.
• To improve its melee performance, make it poison things much more often (100% at medium Poison/Evoc skill) and let it inflict multiple levels of poisoning at high skill. Maybe even let it poison resistant monsters, but not as heavily, similar to Poison Arrow.
• Evocable effect: randomly creates single-tile poison clouds within LOS. Success and number/power of clouds increases with Evocations and Poison Magic. (Poison+Evoc/2)/27 success rate; fills about half the screen at 27 skill, fills about 10 squares at 5 skill. Costs 1-3 MP.

Strongly agree with some kind of melee buff for the staff of poison, see also 2540. — marvinpa 2010-09-16 14:41

Why not give it venom brand?

Changed, it now works 50% with 0 skill, 100% with 8 Poison. Staff of Olgreb has the same chance, but can ignore rPois on livings and plants 1/4 of the time. — kilobyte 2010-12-09 14:45

Right now there are plenty of staves with quite similar mechanic behind. So, fire\cold\earth\air\poison\death - practicaly do same thing - corresponding resist and damage(school\evoks).

As far as I can understand basics of game design and philosophy section of crawl's manual - this is wrong. Perfectly for 1 mechanic we need 1 item. So, first of all I suggest:

• to unite fire and cold staves to staff of temperature;
• to unite earth and air staves to staff of extremes (name still in development).
  • 'of States', 'of Pressure', or 'of Density', because— [insert physics reference] Nivim 2013-05-15 02:34

Due negative crosstraining this will bring nearly no change to gameplay. Elemental damage dealt with melee would go from max skill. As for resists - I suppose same mechanic would do. So fire mages will get their +rF and earth their lack of rElec. In case of tie - give both resist or none. Piu 2012-06-04