Slaying & Weapon Enchantment

In 0.9, if you ignore brands and berserk and such (which aren't relevant here):

• Base damage is augmented by weapon skill and str/dex.
• Slaying is augmented by weapon skill.
• Enchantment is augmented by nothing.

In current 0.10:

• Base damage is augmented by weapon skill and str/dex.
• Slaying and enchantment are augmented by nothing (they both have identical effects).

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 21:54

First 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

• Make the effect of enchantment and slaying identical to that of base stats, not changing the mechanics of those base stats themselves. This means a -1, +5 whip performs identically to a +0, +0 demon whip, unless you are a demonspawn.
• Change the scroll enchantment cap on weapons from +9 to +5, and change the failure rate of weapon enchanting to [current enchantment]/5, so that enchanting a +4 item to +5 has a 20% chance to work.
• Change the hard enchantment cap on weapons from +15 to +9. Currently, unbranded weapons and randarts can generate normally with up to +12, and god gifts can have up to +15, +12 (Okawaru) or +12, +15 (Trog). In my opinion, in the new system both branded and unbranded weapons should generate with up to +9, and god gift cases should be removed - in other words, you can get a +9 +9 weapon from any source other than enchanting it yourself, but the only way to get a +10 or higher enchantment is to find a fixed artefact. (Scythe of curses buff! It needs it…)
• Halve the average enchantment of all generated weapons (floor, acquirement, god gift, etc).
• Double the effect of base to-hit (and by extension, to-hit enchantment and slaying). This doesn't reduce transparency because the mechanics of to-hit aren't shown anywhere anyway; accuracy values only matter for comparing to other accuracy values, and doubling their value probably actually makes this easier to do.
• Halve the frequency of all three enchant weapon scrolls.
• Revert amounts of slaying to 0.9 levels (up to +4 for the randart property instead of +6, up to +6 +6 or +0 +8 on rings). Note that accuracy slaying becomes much more valuable with this, but it probably needs it. Damage slaying becomes slightly stronger too since it will be affected by stats, but I don't think this is a big issue, and it's not like the numbers couldn't be reduced further if slaying really needs the nerf (I'm sure it doesn't).

• Weapon quality is more intuitive.
• Weapon skill's effect on damage is bigger.
• Strength/dexterity are slightly more valuable for weapon combat, but this barely means anything.
• Unarmed combat gets a much-needed nerf.
• People will finally pay attention to accuracy.