Wands of Slow Monster are awesome

[Magnate]

Which is why I don't think it could be directly energy. My experience is pretty consistent: hit the monster with the wand once, they start moving at 1/3rd normal speed. The "one in five" I reported earlier was simply because I was in melee at the time and using a weapon that gave 1.6 blows/round.

Ok, I have just pushed a new RC build which contains the fixes I described above. You should now see monsters moving at half speed after a successful zap.

[Storch]

Slowing, confusing ...

Since when is slowing, sleeping, confusing monsters effective in V? I remember that it never did much and so I just discard wands of Slow, Sleep, Confuse, do not use the spells etc. Seems to be a wrong habit. Did I miss something?

[Magnate]

Since when is slowing, sleeping, confusing monsters effective in V? I remember that it never did much and so I just discard wands of Slow, Sleep, Confuse, do not use the spells etc. Seems to be a wrong habit. Did I miss something?

Well now, you know how some people are really pleased that there's loads of development going on, and other people think it's awful etc. etc.? Well this is one of the side effects: effects which sleep/slow/confuse monsters have been slightly reworked to make them slightly more useful. In fact we went a bit too far and made them too useful (by accident), hence this thread. So we're, um, rebalancing them. The idea is to make them useful but not overpowered, so your decision whether to carry or throw away those wands is a real decision, rather than a no-brainer either way.

[Storch]

Well now, you know how some people are really pleased that there's loads of development going on, and other people think it's awful etc. etc.? Well this is one of the side effects: effects which sleep/slow/confuse monsters have been slightly reworked to make them slightly more useful. In fact we went a bit too far and made them too useful (by accident), hence this thread. So we're, um, rebalancing them. The idea is to make them useful but not overpowered, so your decision whether to carry or throw away those wands is a real decision, rather than a no-brainer either way.

Thanks! It seems I will have to enjoy it while it lasts. It's great that these formerly absolutely useless spells and wands will do what they are supposed to :-)

[CunningGabe]

Turns out there were a couple of bugs. First of all, monsters were sometimes being slowed even when you saw the message that they were unaffected. Second, whenever the timer for the monster-slowing effect counted down 1, the monster was slowed again, each time. I just sent in a pull request, so these will be fixed in 3.3.