Feature request: restore drained life.

[buzzkill]

In short, if something (maybe time hounds and ementals could be exempt) drains your XP, you would as a minimum, get that XP back when you kill the life drainer. I'm tired of fighting the undead, killing them, and ending up with less XP then when I started. If it steals your life force, shouldn't you get it back when you kill it, if you kill it?

[PowerDiver]

I once made a lesser request -- that all of your exp be restored when you quaff restore life levels, but I couldn't even get agreement on that.

[Zikke]

In short, if something (maybe time hounds and ementals could be exempt) drains your XP, you would as a minimum, get that XP back when you kill the life drainer. I'm tired of fighting the undead, killing them, and ending up with less XP then when I started. If it steals your life force, shouldn't you get it back when you kill it, if you kill it?

I imagine this will run into the same limitation as my eternal request to have thieves drop their stolen gold when killed.

Though technically, they "touch to lower experience" and not "drain experience". Otherwise Vecna would go up in levels as he drains your experience. *shudder*

[Pete Mack]

I imagine this will run into the same limitation as my eternal request to have thieves drop their stolen gold when killed.

Though technically, they "touch to lower experience" and not "drain experience". Otherwise Vecna would go up in levels as he drains your experience. *shudder*

I just don't understand this kind of issue: I like the possibility of genuinely bad things happening to you short of death.
Don't like losing equipment/gear? Don't fight water/fire hounds.
Don't like getting stats drained? Don't fight (most) undead.
Don't like losing gold? Don't fight Smeagol in melee at cl 3.

I also like your point that undead don't actually get significant benefit out of lowering stats, so you shouldn't get benefit out of getting them back.
Vecna gaining levels is bad enough; but it could be worse: he might touch to drain life and gain HP, the way Morgoth et al drain charges from your pack!

[d_m]

I imagine this will run into the same limitation as my eternal request to have thieves drop their stolen gold when killed.

That's actually been in Vanilla HEAD for some time now.

[Derakon]

Honestly I don't think this is that big a deal. Note that even if your experience is drained, you still get 10% of the kill experience applied to your max experience (code in gain_exp in xtra2.c). So yes, you're losing 90% of the kill experience, but usually I'm not fighting monsters for experience, and experience drain is only a major issue if it's chopped off several levels, which it only does if I meet an OOD drainer early on (e.g. facing a Ghost when I don't have SI yet). Otherwise it's an annoyance at worst, and doesn't need to be nerfed.

[PowerDiver]

I just don't understand this kind of issue:!

It is irrelevant currently because of the IMO broken exponential increase in experience. Let's not argue about this now, please, I'm just providing context.

I'm interested in it for two reasons. I'd like a unified "adders add" approach where you have current and max on various counters and don't special case so much. I'm also interested in a system where everything grants a small amount of exp, from learning a flavor to killing the first monster of each type.