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Spell enhancers

Name	dcss:brainstorm:effect: spell enhancers
Summary	This page is about the spell enhancer effect, such as the ones in rings of fire and ice, robe of archmagi, and the school staves (staff of fire, death etc). It's not really about the items themselves or their other effects (such as damage), although of course that is related.
Further information	From 240.
Added by	evktalo
Added on	2010-09-12 18:37

dpeg:

In DCSS 0.1, spell enhancers (rings of fire/ice, staves, robe of archmagi) have been nerfed into uselessness. I think it's fair to say that the main use of rings of fire/ice is the resistance, and the main use of staves is the resistance or the attack effect.

The nerf consisted of two parts:

spell staves have no wizardry effect anymore (apart from the staff of wizardry, of course)
the stepdown function was not applied to enhancers but now is

I think that both ideas are reasonable and we should keep 1. – it's not good to mix spell success boost and spell power boosts. However, applying the stepdown is what makes the powerboost (spellpower*1.5) essentially useless. There are several options:

Apply less stepdown to enhancers (this would be a mix of pre-0.1 (with no stepdown applied at all) and current )full stepdown applied) states).
Remove stepdown for enhancers but reduce enhancer multiplier from 1.5 to 1.3 (say).

There was also the idea to make enhancers not work multiplicatively, but I don't like that very much. Also, it wouldn't affect single enhancers, obviously.

Please note that enhancers (and casting in general) was way overpowered in 4.0.0b26 – the nerfs appeared for a good reason.

288 will make enhancers more desirable. — evktalo 2010-09-13 12:38

Just to note that I'm not convinced enhancers are useless. I like to use them on conjurers (though that may be a mistake). — rob 2010-09-13 15:20

Ozocubu's armour and condensation shield

I suggested in 2315 that ice enhancers should boost the efficiency of Ozocubu's armour and condensation shield. For those spells, the efficiency is linked with the ice skill, not the spell power. This means that a ring of ice has the same effect as a staff of enchantment it boosts duration (which is boring). This change would make ice enhancers attractive to hybrids who relies on those spells to boost their defence. As those spells are strongly link with ice magic, I think it's thematic to boost their efficiency with ice enhancers.

To make it really interesting, the boost should only happen when your enhancer is equipped. So it creates an interesting choice: should I equip my ring of ice to boost my defence or use another one? Those builds already have a lot of pre-battle casting, we don't want to add uninteresting equipment switching to it. They could also use a staff of cold when things go wrong, to help escape.

Yes, if this is done, they definitely should help when worn/wielded for the duration, instead of casting. Perhaps this should be the norm for all the duration-based spells and enhancers. — evktalo 2010-09-13 12:38
Exactly. But right now, the effect of power on duration-based spells is mostly to boost duration, so it wouldn't make much sense. I think some other spells could have their effect boosted by power (and enhancers) and I have created a wiki page about that. — galehar 2010-09-13 14:20