Hi, crawlers! Spring has sprung, so here’s some changes for you:
- Wand changes:
- Removed: Cold, Fire, Draining, Fireball, Frost, Invisibility, and Magic Darts.
- New: Acid, which shoots a beam of corrosive acid. Roughly as powerful as Draining was.
- New: Iceblast, which launches an explosive, partially physical explosion. Somewhat more powerful than Fireball was.
- Monsters will no longer machine-gun their wands quite as often.
- Other removed items: Xom’s chesspieces, rods of destruction & the swarm, and potions of poison.
- Luckily, potions of degeneration are back! They now drain all stats by 1d3 points when consumed.
- Even more luckily, stats now regenerate faster at low XLs.
- Statue form, bat form & hydra form no longer have stat modifiers. Low-strength Vampires rejoice!
- Statue form also now gives somewhat more AC.
- Other spell changes:
- Ozocubu’s Armour now gives ponderousness (+0.1 movement delay).
- Passwall is now level 2 (previously, level 3).
- Song of Slaying has been simplified; it now gives +slay with every kill, capping at +9 slay. (It was previously… complicated.)
- Removed spells: Stoneskin, Condensation Shield, and Phase Shift.
- God changes:
- Ashenzari now lets you directly curse items, rather than needing to create scrolls of curse armour/weapon/jewellery. This ability still consumes a scroll of remove curse.
- Okawaru’s abilities (Heroism & Finesse) are now considerably lower duration at low Invocations, but cost less piety and scale to higher max durations.
- If you would regenerate MP under Pakellas while already full, you can now get a potion of magic instead.
- Sif now gives miscast protection at ** and amnesia at ****. (Previously, the reverse was true.)
- Yredelemnul’s Enslave Soul now works on angels and demons
.
- Swamp worms’ ambush predator functionality should now function correctly. Beware…
- The Captain’s Cutlass now does flat bonus damage when it disarms an enemy.
Thanks to chequers for helping to compile this post.
For those who are interested, there’s also two new experimental gods being tested – Ukayaw, God of Ecstatic Dance, and Hepliaklqana, God of Ancestral Memory. They can be played on CBRO or, for the antipodeans, CPO.
Happy crawling!
1. Comment by n1000
19/Feb/2016 at 07:33
i will DL and have a look
2. Comment by altajko
19/Feb/2016 at 08:06
This update is the reason why I don’t play anymore.
3. Comment by noxul
19/Feb/2016 at 14:36
I agree with altajko. enough with removing stuff every update, nothing will be left at this rate really :(
4. Comment by Demise
19/Feb/2016 at 14:58
Hmm, I don’t know about uwahsfwdqw but to be honest hwqhdqhsdqh looks pretty good!
5. Comment by Bregath
19/Feb/2016 at 15:01
Seriously? No wands? They saved my life more than a hundred times!
6. Comment by Cigarettes
19/Feb/2016 at 17:12
Why are you guys removing so much? It feels like every time I come back to the game, there is less and less.
7. Comment by PleasingFungus
19/Feb/2016 at 18:09
@Bregath: no wands, except for the several new wands types & the >dozen untouched old wands :)
With regards to removal generally, part of the process of being a responsible dev is being willing to prune. More is not always better – it’s very easy to add something to the game that makes it less fun, and similarly, removing things is sometimes just what’s needed to improve the game.
We are adding things all the time – new monsters, items, spells, gods, whatever. But you’re attached to the things that already exist, and don’t yet care about new things. That’s perfectly understandable – but it’s not a good argument against change.
I’d be more than happy to link to some of the discussion & reasoning that led to any of the changes above, if there are any specific questions beyond ‘why do we remove so much?’
8. Comment by Adventurer
19/Feb/2016 at 18:09
They add far more than they take away. I hate when people whine about this stuff. There’s a reason DCSS is the best, they understand game design.
9. Comment by altajko
19/Feb/2016 at 20:03
@PleasingFungus I have read the reasoning that lead to removing wands and rods in the commit messages, but they do not persuade. I really think there is a place in this game for wands of cold, fire, draining, fireball and invis, as well as the rod of swarm. For me, this removal for the sake of removal has gone a bit too far. And since I see no chance that these changes would be reverted, I’d better just leave. Let new players come.
10. Comment by Adalace
19/Feb/2016 at 20:46
“Luckily, potions of degeneration are back!”
-_-
11. Comment by irum
20/Feb/2016 at 03:26
Haters gonna hate… What’s the goal of this – no, is there even a goal for this update?
12. Comment by PleasingFungus
20/Feb/2016 at 04:44
The goal for the trunk update posts is to keep people informed about what’s going on. They don’t really have any correlation with the dev process otherwise, so there’s no high-level goal for the entire batch of changes presented in one of these posts – other than making the game more fun, anyway.
13. Comment by TeshiAlair
20/Feb/2016 at 09:52
How about you play the damn game before freaking the hell out about removals?
The boring wands were replaced with Acid, which is hella fun, and Iceblast, which is pretty cool. Additionally, this make invis a far more meaningful resource.
I do kinda miss swarm, but it was also pretty damn redundant- shadows was way cooler, and there is also sack of spiders.
There is no place in the game for 3 virtually identical rods that simply recreate spell effects. Now there is design (and inventory) space for more interesting things.
Also, the new gods look fun as heck.
14. Comment by wizardeyejoe
20/Feb/2016 at 14:58
Ignore the haters devs, SLASH AND BURN.
15. Comment by Taxman
21/Feb/2016 at 04:52
I like the god changes.
I like the faster stat regen at lower levels.
I like the machine-gun removal (nothing like getting a low level promising character wiped by a goblin with wand).
I get the rod removals, don’t agree with the wand removals but that’s not what gets my goat.
I really, really don’t like the defensive spell removals and to a lesser extent the nerf for Ozo’s armor.
I’m also still profusely against the mutation changes made earlier.
As such I’m now even more likely not to move on from v17
16. Comment by nukularpower
21/Feb/2016 at 15:55
I can tell you why I hate the removals: Regardless of how good they make you feel for being a “responsible dev” or whatever, they take out that much more of the flavor of the game every time. What excites me in this game is finding stuff thats “new” to me, that I havent seen before, rare occurances that break the patterns I’ve seen 200 times – most of which have at this point been stripped out. So, on I go :/
17. Comment by nukularpower
21/Feb/2016 at 15:57
“add far more than removed”? I see 7 wands and 2 rods removed with 2 added, 3 spells removed and 0 added. How is that adding “far more”?
18. Comment by survivor
22/Feb/2016 at 01:09
I started playing crawl back at version 0.4 in 2006 or 2007. Really loved it for a long time. I just have to ask– what is the endstate of all this “pruning”? Its laughable to me. Haven’t played for the last few updates, but still follow the pruning, the way I would follow someone defacing a statue in interesting ways.
19. Comment by Anon
22/Feb/2016 at 01:33
I don’t get the hate for the removal of the wands, but I personally would have preferred the defensive skills to have a severely reduced active time as opposed to being completely removed.
20. Comment by pratamawirya
22/Feb/2016 at 04:37
“Removed spells: Stoneskin, Condensation Shield, and Phase Shift.”
I assume that there will be replacement spells in the future. It just sucks that it’s not clear to us players right now what they will be like.
In the mean time, if the replacement spells are still not coded or ready to play, why not just let the old ones in the game? Why remove it so quickly? Did the old spells really drag the gameplay down or something (to the point the gameplay became OBJECTIVELY bad/annoying)? I don’t think so …. I mean, the spells might not be perfectly designed, but they’re not that bad either.
21. Comment by pratamawirya
22/Feb/2016 at 04:50
Let me elaborate a bit on my previous comment. I get that Statue Form’s higher AC is to compensate (somewhat) for the removal of Stoneskin. But what about Phase Shift? I loved that spell. Now it’s just … gone.
It sucks when it happens, man.
22. Comment by PleasingFungus
22/Feb/2016 at 05:15
@pratamawirya: The spells that were removed were removed because we feel that made the game more fun to play, not because we’re planning to replace them. Their slots in the books will be filled with something else, sooner or later – we do keep writing new spells! – but that’s not really the point.
Consider a hypothetical. What mad dev added a button any character could press to increase their AC by 5 for the next 50 turns? If you wanted to win the game, you’d want to press that button every time it expired, for a permanent +5 AC. But that’d be a lot of really tedious makework for you as a player, and it wouldn’t add any strategic depth or fun decisions to the game! Adding that button would be a terrible idea, yes?
23. Comment by PleasingFungus
22/Feb/2016 at 05:20
@Anon: We did consider reduced durations – I was actually pushing for that for Phase Shift in particular, for a while.
The problem is, as we realized, it still doesn’t really produce interesting decisions – it’s just “do you want +8 EV for the first few turns of this fight?” You probably do, so you’re still casting it at the start of every fight, so it’s just a nerf that doesn’t fix much.
24. Comment by pratamawirya
22/Feb/2016 at 05:44
1. +8 EV is useful but not broken;
2. Nobody forces any player to use Phase Shift (it’s not broken, anyway);
3. Casting Phase Shift before every tough battle is a bit tedious, but is it not fun? Debatable at best. I, for instance, have never found the spell to be boring.
4. Does not add any strategic depth? It requires 5 spell levels, so it’s not like I could just memorize it on any character ….
5. Why not change it to behave like Repel Missiles?
25. Comment by Adalace
23/Feb/2016 at 21:00
I tried the new dancing god on Berotato. Here are some thoughts:
1. Piety decreases too quickly while maneuvering during combat. More combat-related actions should increase piety.
2. Hunger costs on abilities seem too high. It takes a long time in constant combat to unlock the higher abilities, and then to be penalized for using them by high hunger costs makes me feel like it’s not worth it, even after all the work it takes to increase piety that far.
Basically by the time my piety is high enough, combat is usually about finished.
26. Comment by Taxman
24/Feb/2016 at 02:27
I call B.S.
To ‘use’ that button, you have to commit to training the right skills and restricting yourself from certain equipment. For some builds those spells are significant portion of your defense.
27. Comment by Pruneme
25/Feb/2016 at 12:26
The button analogy is flimsy at best. Putting on a buckler and training Shields skill to 5 is also like a “permanent button” to increase your Shield. Meanwhile, Condensation Shield is a temporary button that also requires several skill levels of training to be pressed. I really don’t see any kind of equivalence here.
Is there now even any point in playing an Ice Elementalist? They were already always vastly inferior to Fire Elementalists in most aspects, but at least what they lacked in raw direct damage they could make up with utility spells. Even their damage spells required several disciplines like conjuring, air and summoning to be viable. Now it’s just pointless to be an IE, even for Mermen it now makes more sense to go heavily into the fighter route
28. Comment by PleasingFungus
25/Feb/2016 at 17:07
@Pruneme: I think there’s some misunderstanding. A buckler isn’t a “button”; you put it on once and it works, with no further involvement from the player. You don’t need to press a button to “raise your shield”, or anything like that. Strategically it’s similar – which I think is what you’re getting at? – but from a tactical/UI perspective it’s completely different.
IE is and was much stronger than you’re giving it credit for. I’ve seen skilled players describe it as the ‘second-strongest background in the game’ (after Berserker), and while I’m not sure I’d go that far, I’d certainly put it up against FE any day.
29. Comment by Spidey
27/Feb/2016 at 04:28
Hepliaklqana ancestors should have the same base speed as your character, after all they are the same species.
30. Comment by Blink Frog
28/Feb/2016 at 19:17
I don’t miss the removed wands. The new ones are more than adequate to compensate and you still find a ton of them.
The Pakellas change is awesome. I really love that god. It simplifies some otherwise obnoxious aspects of the game.
31. Comment by DaStockMan
7/Mar/2016 at 04:58
Agree with most here. I stopped playing this several months ago because it has become way too simplistic. A starter-roguelike I would only recommend to noobs. I still watch for the updates though and shake my head at what happened to a once great roguelike.
32. Comment by Brickman
9/Mar/2016 at 00:24
I for one am quite happy to see all the redundant wands go. I do not like carrying around five different wands that hit the same trajectory for similar damage in different elements. And acid is certainly more interesting since you can’t get it otherwise.
Though if you’re cutting both of the good fire wands, I have an idea for making flame (which isn’t even worth picking up usually) more interesting. Turn it into a “wand of embers”, which inflicts a little “mini-sticky-flame” that burns about as hard as the wand of flame per turn for 2-4 turns. It wouldn’t be much more powerful in the late game, but it’d be much more fun.