Ranger new spell idea...

[LanceDiamond]

I had a thought about something like a create projectiles spell that would target a stack of 20 or less projectiles and duplicate them on success or destroy them on failure. Not sure if something like that could be done in such a way that it isn't horribly overpowered where you stand in town and fill your house with bolts of death or whatever. Maybe have the spell success based on your dungeon level vs the level of the projectile - so if you find a high level projectile all you could do with it in town is destroy it... Success rate - I dunno, 50/50 seems flippy - better seems overpowered and lower seems pointless so bad idea?

Maybe a silly idea - new to rangers and not wanting to make them overpowered but some sort of spell like this would make sense imho. If I could think of how to not make it too overpowered I might mess with coding it. Thoughts?

[Donald Jonker]

Well, rangers already have the branding spell, which puts an elemental brand on a stack of ammo of your choosing. Standard ammo is always available in town, so that isn't a problem. But in 3.1.x, ego ammo is somewhat rare, so perhaps the idea isn't all that misguided. Just not sure that rangers need all that much of a helping hand w/r/t damage output.

Steamband has devices that create ammo, and makes that ammo unsaleable in town in order to balance it. But standard ammo is somewhat rare and expensive in that variant.

[PaulBlay]

Thoughts?

OK there are some tricky points here.

1. It can become a 'money mine'. I suggest that any pile of missiles targeted by this spell be made "100% discount" (in other words, unsellable).

2. I suggest a sharp cut-off (e.g. 100% failure when power of missiles is too high.) Give an appropriate warning message as well "These missiles are beyond your power to duplicate."

3. I suggest testing vs character level, not vs dungeon level reached.

4. Rather than double or nothing I would suggest 1d4 destroyed on failure, 2d6 created on success (or similar).

Overall I like the idea but it could very easily break game balance completely. How powerful missiles can be for a X level ranger to duplicate would have to be very carefully examined. I would suggest "Handy missiles can be duplicated, really nice missiles can't" as a general aim. In other words the day-to-day fighting could be done with magically generated missiles but you should always want a nice found bunch of ego arrows for a difficult opponent.

[EDIT] In fact I would also suggest that rangers shouldn't be the only class able to cast this (but rangers should have some sort of bonuses to the process).

[buzzkill]

Rangers should have the class ability to create {average} or crude (+0,-x) arrows from trees in the wilderness. This quantity and time it takes would be based on CL. Rather than a separate command, it could happen by default when resting. Of course, it wouldn't work out very well in V (no wilderness).

[PaulBlay]

Of course, it wouldn't work out very well in V (no wilderness).

Quite.

Rangers should have the class ability to create {average} or crude (+0,-x) arrows from trees in the wilderness. This quantity and time it takes would be based on CL. Rather than a separate command, it could happen by default when resting.

How about having rarer trees, found in more dangerous areas, produce better quality arrows?

[buzzkill]

How about having rarer trees, found in more dangerous areas, produce better quality arrows?

Are there such things?

I just kind of threw that out there for the heck of it. Once somebody decides to implement it, then I'll start hashing out the details. Maybe Nick will pick it up .

[Nick]

Are there such things?

I just kind of threw that out there for the heck of it. Once somebody decides to implement it, then I'll start hashing out the details. Maybe Nick will pick it up .

Well, I do have different types of trees... now I'm going to have to think about this, damn you .

[Daniel Fishman]

Surely the difficult part of making arrows is the arrowtips rather than the shafts?

[Atarlost]

Actually, I think you can make arrows without heads. They won't do near as much damage, though. Decent quality arrowheads, though, don't break on use. You can collect and reuse them without limit as long as you have the opportunity to pick them up.

[PaulBlay]

Surely the difficult part of making arrows is the arrowtips rather than the shafts?

I think it's a little late in the day to start bringing up realism. But if you want to go down that route, then I hope you've made enough arrows yourself to throw around "surely"s like that.

[Zikke]

Actually, I think you can make arrows without heads. They won't do near as much damage, though. Decent quality arrowheads, though, don't break on use. You can collect and reuse them without limit as long as you have the opportunity to pick them up.

I thought arrows without arrowheads are just quarrels, which is just a sharpened stick, essentially.

Would be fine making (+0,+0) arrows, but it would be important to make them worthless to vendors. You could even make them a separate item, like "Crafted Arrows" or "Home-made arrows" or "sharpened sticks" to govern their resale value.

And I believe the "Brand Missiles" spell should make the arrows unsellable. It's way too easy mass-brand arrows and sell them.

[buzzkill]

I think it's a little late in the day to start bringing up realism. But if you want to go down that route, then I hope you've made enough arrows yourself to throw around "surely"s like that.

Any 2-bit ranger knows to collect the heads from bent and broken arrows for re-crafting, or to fashion cheap necklaces to sell at the craft fair.

[LanceDiamond]

Bit more play under my belt as a ranger and I've modified my idea a little.

What about a ranger spell similar to elemental brand, but to add a random slay to a stack of ammunition with the same restrictions as elemental brand has (won't work on stuff already branded, etc.)?

In no case should it add the x5 slay, always just the x3 but there seem to be eight of these:

#define TR1_SLAY_ANIMAL     0x00010000L /* Weapon slays animals */
#define TR1_SLAY_EVIL       0x00020000L /* Weapon slays evil */
#define TR1_SLAY_UNDEAD     0x00040000L /* Weapon slays undead */
#define TR1_SLAY_DEMON      0x00080000L /* Weapon slays demon */
#define TR1_SLAY_ORC        0x00100000L /* Weapon slays orc */
#define TR1_SLAY_TROLL      0x00200000L /* Weapon slays troll */
#define TR1_SLAY_GIANT      0x00400000L /* Weapon slays giant */
#define TR1_SLAY_DRAGON     0x00800000L /* Weapon slays dragon */

I don't see this as game breaking or overpowered if you can't cast it until the same time as elemental brand - by that time you can just kill stuff. Also, it's not totally game breaking because you're limited in the number of arrows you can actually store and carry with you.

I don't think this would be particularly hard to code but I'm not clear on how to add a spell into spell.txt. The mage spells are numbered through 63, then the preist spells start at 64 - so if I want to add in a spell to play with, how would I go about that? Do I need to renumber all the preist spells to make room for an additional mage spell at the end or can I just make this spell #129 and try and figure out how to get it into the right book?

My other thought was to make elemental brand do a random slay instead of a brand maybe 5% of the time - that'd be very easy to do of course, but I think that'd be next to useless. Random one of 8 slays, 5% of the time?

[Magnate]

I don't see this as game breaking or overpowered if you can't cast it until the same time as elemental brand - by that time you can just kill stuff. Also, it's not totally game breaking because you're limited in the number of arrows you can actually store and carry with you.

It would be game-breaking, because it guarantees infinite Slay Evil ammo, making Morgoth twice as easy to kill. Many ppl consider the existing Brand Ammo spell overpowered as it is (since it guarantees acid brand ammo for Sauron).

[LanceDiamond]

I knew it wouldn't be too hard to code...

I was poking around spells.txt & x-spell.c and I noticed that mage spell #7 was commented out in x-spell.c and didn't exist in spells.txt so there was a free spell id to play with.

I now have Make Slayer in book #8. Can't figure out how to get mana cost, level learned and failure rate in yet so right now it's 0/0/5% but it works. It was mostly just a cut/paste of brand_ammo into a new function I called slay_ammo. The only changes I made to brand_ammo were thus:

	r = randint0(80);

	/* Select the brand */
	if (r < 11)
		brand_type = EGO_HURT_ANIMAL;
	else if (r < 21)
		brand_type = EGO_HURT_EVIL;
	else if (r < 31)
		brand_type = EGO_HURT_UNDEAD;
	else if (r < 41)
		brand_type = EGO_HURT_DEMON;
	else if (r < 51)
		brand_type = EGO_HURT_ORC;
	else if (r < 61)
		brand_type = EGO_HURT_TROLL;
	else if (r < 71)
		brand_type = EGO_HURT_GIANT;
	else
		brand_type = EGO_HURT_DRAGON;

I changed the randint(100) to randint(80) since 8 choices divides nicely into 80.

slay_ammo then calls brand_object and that function does have some cases for the type of brand but only inasmuch as the message to be displayed. The default of "magical aura" winds up being used.

One thing I just noticed playing around, it seems that these two:

#define EGO_HURT_ORC		116
#define EGO_HURT_TROLL		117

Are now acid & lightning arrows respectively, not slay orc & troll as I would have thought. I may back them out, possibly even add them to brand I dunno. Acid/lightning branding shouldn't be happening in a spell called Make Slayer I don't think. And Make Slayer isn't the greatest name while I'm thinking about it either...

I do feel like this would be a decent change to get into the base game - it'd make up for the lack of interesting ammo drops and you're still forced to stand around town making it and decide what to carry.


Edit: Didn't see the above post - I took a while to make my post. In my initial experiment, I got no slay evil ammo - I could make it less probable I guess. Maybe only half the chance of the others or something. Also, the brand ammo doesn't add acid, it only offers Fire/Cold/Poison. This is 3.1.1 I'm working with - does 3.1.0 differ in this regard? I do agree, a ranger with the "right" arrow types is quite deadly (fun since I've not played one before) but OTOH do you think you should have to save ever single slay evil piece of ammo you find the entire game ONLY for Morgoth because otherwise it's so incredibly rare you won't have any when the time comes? I mean I envisage a high level ranger making his arrows for the purpose he needs and this allows that.