Sil-Q balancing toward first official release

[wobbly]

Re smithing & grace items this gets annoying inventory-wise with vanyar spears & feanorian blades. I'd definitely keep artifacts like Maeglin's armour and the gloves. You could always make con the smithing stat. Most of the things you want to make cost con and if you smith con for your kit you use it.

[Quirk]

Maybe it could say 'While standing in a doorway".

Done.

Dropping gloves and hammers would make some sense, but I'd have to balance smithing costs down a little bit to compensate, and that might get a little bit trickier, as reaching the higher tiers of smithing does currently require this kind of ladder of making smithing gear. More guaranteed forges might help in giving people more opportunities to choose to pour XP into Smithing. I will probably hold off for the coming release though.

With the high level songs, one of the problems with things like str boosts is that you can't do as much with strength in this fork due to no Momentum

Well, light weapons obviously don't wear Strength as well as they did, but two-handed ones can still soak it up. I did go away after you said that and played with damage sides and things, but it didn't feel terribly clean design-wise. Maybe we need some way to make Strength more useful for light weapon users though it needs to be something that doesn't make bastard swords strictly better than greatswords again.

Strength aside, Valour's ability to stun on top of the +3 Dex can shift a battle in your favour by +5 Melee/+5 Evasion, which seems like quite a lot even if you can't use the Strength. I'm actually improving its odds of stunning by making it a more standard Will/Song test. I don't know if anyone's played with it so far though; it may still not have enough punch.

Re: alchemy IMO as is it should be moved to slot 5.

Excellent. Our thinking aligns. This will be the case in the next release.

Song of challenge, the balance seems good, maybe slightly too powerful, as orc archers become easy to deal with only 2 points in song and 3 grace. It also downgrades cat assassins from a terror to annoying. I like the mechanic though and the monster stances, I think this mechanic should be developed further.

I'm making this a little bit more nuanced for the next release; it should take an extra turn or two to get enemies riled up. The mechanic currently combines with Anticipate to let you call in extra trouble to hit it harder.

The betrayal curse is interesting but I wielded a betrayal bastard sword artifact for thousands of turns and never noticed it betraying me.

Okay, this is very good to know. I didn't want betrayal artifacts to be too traitorous (or nobody would ever pick them up), but it would be better to have them be a little more treacherous. Tweaking the odds to increase the chances of things going wrong.

Re smithing & grace items this gets annoying inventory-wise with vanyar spears & feanorian blades. I'd definitely keep artifacts like Maeglin's armour and the gloves. You could always make con the smithing stat. Most of the things you want to make cost con and if you smith con for your kit you use it.

This is not a bad idea. I still feel that if I remove Grace from Smithing I need a new Grace tree so as not to weaken Grace too greatly, but having Smithing itself based on Con seems thematic and unlikely to cause a smithing kit issue.

[Infinitum]

Well, if you're going to design a new tree anyhow, how about removing smithing as a player skill alltogether? If you want to retain the smithing interface haing the Forges be staffed by enslaved Elven/Dwarfen smiths who creates bespoke items to the players specification on demand could be one solution instead.

As for new skill tree: something based on Knowledge/Wisdom/Lore Mastery would be nice and thematic. Some skills can be moved from the other Grace trees. Creating one unique artifact (using the smithing interface, and possibly a set amount of design points to prevent grace stacking) would be a nice ultimate skill.

My preference would be to also replace all current limited use items/effects with "Words of Command" (read: spells that behave as scrolls from other roguelikes) and have the same tree increase the utility (if not raw power) you gain from them.

[fph]

Sounds like you're reinventing shops...

[ripforareason]

Re smithing & grace items this gets annoying inventory-wise with vanyar spears & feanorian blades. I'd definitely keep artifacts like Maeglin's armour and the gloves. You could always make con the smithing stat. Most of the things you want to make cost con and if you smith con for your kit you use it.

At least spears of the vanyar or feanorian swords can have a use though. More so with the latter... but then you have to deal with the Danger thing the whole time. Questionable for one point of smithing.

Also, awkward problem(?) with putting smithing on con is that you're going to backload it like in regular Sil. Players will start putting Con<+2> on everything, and Con<+2> makes an item quite good in addition to boosting smithing in this hypothetical fork. See: Helm of Con<+2>, round shield of Con<+2>, amulet of Con<+2>, Mail Corslet of Con<+2>, etc. With just one or two less slots in the smithing kit smithing is fine, you can carry most items you need and your kit without issue.

[ripforareason]

Is it just me or is every early game enemy a little bit tougher in sil-Q?

[Quirk]

Is it just me or is every early game enemy a little bit tougher in sil-Q?

I haven't done anything to buff them. There's the new spider, of course, but apart from that the early game should be a little easier - a bit more leeway with stealth, a few items available from orc skeletons...