Clairvoyance as spell and as potion (3.4 beta)

[Timo Pietilä]

Hello.

Just finally got Godly Insight after finding several of all the other priest dungeon book except WoG and cast clairvoyance for first time. This works a bit differently than potion of enlightement. Clairvoyance doesn't reveal what kind of items dungeon has (only their positions) but potion does. Is this intentional? IMO it would be better if both of those work like that spell. Maybe potion of *Enlightement* should reveal items too.

[Magnate]

I like this idea - I always thought that the difference between !Enlight and !*Enlight* should be more significant than the bizarro INT+WIS boost.

[Derakon]

*Enlightenment* used to be Enlightenment + Self Knowledge + INT + WIS (+ Detection?), but Self Knowledge went away.

I think Fizzix got rid of the object detection on Clairvoyance because he felt it was too scummy. Personally I never felt the need to abuse it the way he was thinking of, but oh well. Mapping and lighting the entire level is still useful even if it doesn't reveal items.

However, I don't think that !Enlightenment should be similarly nerfed, mostly because using that to make a distinction between Enlightenment and *Enlightenment* is silly. Detection effects should not be the bonus for such rare potions. Or if they should be, then the bonus should be "reveals all monsters on the entire level" -- that's a useful feature that isn't replicated by any other item and makes it significantly better than the basic Enlightenment.

[fizzix]

The game has always distinguished between clairvoyance and enlightenment, even though they were functionally identical in past versions, and for as long as I can remember. For example, the potions have the enlightenment effect, but that arkenstone activates for clairvoyance. This naming convention predates 3.4 by a long ways.

The only difference is that now clairvoyance has been made fuzzy and enlightenment shows everything. This was by design, although it was informed with input from others on the irc dev-channel along with test-playing by me. Basically it came down to, now that fuzzy detection exists, what should be fuzzy and what shouldn't be. The somewhat arbitrary decision was that the rogue spell and the potions would be full detection and everything else would be fuzzy. This felt right, and I don't think it'll change for 3.4, unless there are some serious problems with it.

I should say that there was disagreement on whether clairvoyance should full detect or fuzzy detect. My personal opinion is that if it had full detection, optimal priest play would be very boring in the deep dungeon, and I think optimal boring play is something we should try to avoid.

From a design perspective, I would like players to have the ability to enlight choice levels that have vaults or are otherwise promising, but *enlight* potions are way too rare for this to serve the purpose. I'm ok with there being 1-2 !enlight potions per level. The implication is that the player is going to have to kill a bunch of monsters to find them, and that's fun. I'd sooner replace *enlight* with a commoner potion of clairvoyance that maps and fuzzy detects the level, than make !enlight fuzzy.

Edit: I realize I'm unclear on something. Do *enlight* potions have fuzzy detection, if so they shouldn't. I'm ok with Derakon's suggestion of revealing all monsters on the level.

[d_m]

How about introducing potion of clairvoyance (as per the spell, with fuzzy detection) and preserving enlightenment as it is now?

If !enlightenment is too common we could make it rarer.

This change helps everyone who doesn't get the spell a little bit, but I think we can tweak allocation probabilities so that the game's overall difficulty isn't affected too much.

Timo, what's your feeling on all this?

[Timo Pietilä]

From a design perspective, I would like players to have the ability to enlight choice levels that have vaults or are otherwise promising, but *enlight* potions are way too rare for this to serve the purpose.

How about making them more common deeper then? If all they do is detection on top of normal enlightement to full stat char then why would they need to be rare? Currently it's basically just a enlightement potion with asterisks around the name unless you find it very early.

Clairvoyance can stay as it is, fuzzy object detection is a good thing.

If kept rare maybe *enlightement* should really show all monsters on the level as well as objects. Otherwise it is too similar to normal enlightement.

[fizzix]

I'm ok with *enlight* showing all monsters (all traps as well?). I'm pretty sure it won't be broken, especially since you almost certainly have full detection by the time it shows up. Anything more drastic is likely to require test-playing before 3.4 unfortunately. I'll see if I can code this up this weekend.

[d_m]

I'm ok with *enlight* showing all monsters (all traps as well?). I'm pretty sure it won't be broken, especially since you almost certainly have full detection by the time it shows up. Anything more drastic is likely to require test-playing before 3.4 unfortunately. I'll see if I can code this up this weekend.

+1 I think all this sounds good.

[Timo Pietilä]

Clairvoyance doesn't reveal what kind of items dungeon has (only their positions)

Same spell again + detection. Every now and then I seem to get false positives (red asterisk) for things that are not there. First I believed that they were items that something pick up, but it looks like that is not the case. Is "false positive" also intentional, or is it a bug? It isn't bad, it just feels like something that might not be intentional. If it is intentional I think that should be mentioned somewhere in spell descriptions.

[Magnate]

Same spell again + detection. Every now and then I seem to get false positives (red asterisk) for things that are not there. First I believed that they were items that something pick up, but it looks like that is not the case. Is "false positive" also intentional, or is it a bug? It isn't bad, it just feels like something that might not be intentional. If it is intentional I think that should be mentioned somewhere in spell descriptions.

They're items you have squelched. This avoids metagaming where you toggle squelch to see which red asterisks disappear ...

[Timo Pietilä]

They're items you have squelched. This avoids metagaming where you toggle squelch to see which red asterisks disappear ...

Of course -facepalm-

[d_m]

Of course -facepalm-

It was I who fixed this bug, and even so I often wonder "where did all my items go?"

While I think this is the right behavior it might be nice to have a better way to explain to players what happened. I don't know if having a message generated would be annoying spam or useful, but it would be nice if it was a bit more obvious.

[Magnate]

It was I who fixed this bug, and even so I often wonder "where did all my items go?"

While I think this is the right behavior it might be nice to have a better way to explain to players what happened. I don't know if having a message generated would be annoying spam or useful, but it would be nice if it was a bit more obvious.

I think the place for this is in the squelch help: "WARNING: squelched items will still show up as red asterisks when detection magic is used, so don't be surprised if they 'disappear' when you walk into the room".