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.

The Pakellas change is awesome. I really love that god. It simplifies some otherwise obnoxious aspects of the game.

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.

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

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.

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?

It sucks when it happens, man.

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.

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

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.

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?’