Feedback at iood.
The idea comes from a FR about redoing Iskenderun's Mystic Blast, which some feel is not showy enough. I personally think IMB has its niche and should be kept, but the ideas can be turned into a separate spell. Thus, I played around with it and have a working draft (branch iood on git).
tentative name: Iskenderun's Orb of Destruction. Needs to be changed, it's too long for the interface. Some folks propose naming it IMB (replacing that spell), I'd rather drop “Iskenderun's”, leaving “Orb of Destruction”.
tentative level: pure Conj 7, book of Annihilations
it isn't instanteous, but creates a projectile that travels at speed 30
when it hits, it uses BEAM_NUKE (same as Eyes of Devastation): MR-less disintegration, can dig a single square of rock walls. Blows up corpses.
the projectile is weakly homing, with lots of inertia, similar to revenant's missiles in Doom 2.
no friend-or-foe recognition (save for the initial tracer). If the designated target is gone, the orb continues unguided.
there is a smoke trail. The initial idea suggested tloc smoke, but I find this wrong as there are no instanteous translocations involved. Even regular opaque smoke may be abusable, so we may give it transparent smoke for visual effects only.
player-cast IOOD dissipates when outside LOS, monster-cast does not – leading to loads of possible fun. This discrepancy can be explained by saying that “most copies of this spellbook suffer from a scribal error …” in the spell description.
Playtesting it, I was pleasantly surprised by fun you can have dodging it in an open area.
Avoiding it is impossible in a corridor (save for blink/etc); in open, it's tricky with normal speed (10), fun as a spriggan (16), easy when hasted (20), trivial with swiftness/spriggan+haste (32). That's assuming you don't have a nasty Pan lord with its entourage fighting you, of course.
For testing:
make yourself a spriggan, go to an open area
&M statue ; spells:orb_of_destruction
stand several squares from the statue, when it launches, go to the side
Issues:
name
tracer rays are not followed exactly
smoke colour may be too much of a fruit salad
damage balancing
greedy explore goes after every single chunk
the orb has too much health for AI to ever effectively deal with it
too accurate, in most cases never misses
