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I don't agree; plenty of variants have viable no-melee classes without pulling too far from the basic Angband experience. However, removing melee capability from mages and priests would be a pretty big change for Vanilla.
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ZAngband chaos mages did decently, IIRC. And it's been a long time, but I seem to recall playing a GWangband mage and being surprised how useless my melee weapon was.
ToME 2 mages don't melee either, though that's getting pretty far from Vanilla.Comment
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I disagree a bit on that currently melee is so important for priests/mages too. For my priests/mages it tends to only come into play at farming time in end-game.
Thus my opinion is: for priests give a very high level endgame single target killer, maybe a slay-evil spell like orb. Doesn't have to be that much better than orb in dmg/rnd, but higher dmg/mana. Orb is already good vs small groups, and dispel evil mwahahahahaaa *coughcough*. Currently was it annihilation in wrath of god just plain sucks.
For mages, rift is wicked enough for singles, so I'd upgrade manastorm, radius 5? radius 6? Increased dmg in the outer layers of the area effect too. Don't upgrade the single target value of it, but make it bigger and badder around the epicenter.
With those two changes I feel priests and mages would handle farming style "blaablaa yet another pit of dragons" with less finger aches. Only in the very VERY late game do I tend to fall back to melee on mages/priests, because it just gets so damn slow compared to "hold ctrl-dir" to "cast AoE spell at high range, spam it so aggroed monsters die, rest, move 1 step repeat" ... Of course if the pit is weak, have immunity etc. then naturally can just wade in and use the "cast AoE or beam at nearest" hotkey to pewpew them all dead-dead-dead.Comment
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As a matter of fact, I think this will be my next fork path after takk gets menus fixed so I can test if my no-selling patch works! 2 spell changes, mana storm and whateveritwasinwrathofgod, wheeeee.Comment
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Annihilation has severe drawbacks, like it doesn't affect nonliving creatures at all. Also it is a bolt without chance to beam. Make it radius 0 ball-spell, make it affect pretty much everything and lower the manacost and failure and you have a working spell. Currently it is just waste of spell slot.Comment
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Agreed with Timo. Call it Smite or something so we can imagine Eru reaching down a finger to smush out the offending monster.
Radius-0 ball, unresistable 350 damage against any target.
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I like having priests vs evil stuff though, so I'm thinking more of just a bit higher than orb single trg vs evil but nice dmg/mana ratio.
Smite:
Radius 0-ball
20% higher than orb dmg with similar double vs evil style
Mana per dmg ratio to be decided, but better than orb somewhatComment
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Orb is IMO unfeasibly slow in the lategame. Great mana efficiency, sure, but it just doesn't deal damage fast enough. Its damage peaks at 75 + 3d6 (clvl * 3 / 2 + 3d6), doubled against evil, giving a maximum single-shot damage of 186. In contrast, the mage's manastorm peaks at 400 damage (300 + clvl * 2), flat out, against any target.
I don't object to priests focusing against evil, and I do think that mages should be better at blowing stuff up, but I also think that the priest's spell needs to be hitting around 350/shot to be worthwhile. That's more than a 20% boost compared to Orb.Comment
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Just to clarify, I wasn't suggesting that magi/priests should be in any way barred from using melee. I just meant that I didn't feel that melee should be as competitive for them as it is now, compared with their spells. I am encouraged by ewert's response: I hadn't realised that MarbleDice's changes to mana costs had been so useful for casters."Been away so long I hardly knew the place, gee it's good to be back home" - The BeatlesComment
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Doesn't manastorm still have something like 20% failure at peak? That would make it 320 damage [adjust as needed] and the difference between a sure thing and a significant failure rate further weakens the comparison. It's still better of course, but maybe 60% better rather than 120% better.Comment
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4 hits x 100 (pretty okay dmg) = 400, priest/mage hit rate not okay -> much less
Okay you CAN get high melee dmg with priest/mage too, but hit rates are much less than real melee classes. I know my last priest that had bolts etc. couldn't hit for ... beeb against M.
I didn't remember orb dmg that it was so low. Off the top of my head I'd go for 250 against evil at 50, 0% fail.Comment
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There's still the problem that priests are designed to be melee-fighters. They had originally five blows and rune to protect them and healing to heal any damage they got in fighting. They are not even meant to have very strong offensive spells. Mages have offensive spells and originally they didn't have rune, which BTW IMO doesn't belong to mage even now. That's clearly melee-protection spell.
Even with annihilation boosted to melee-levels, you still have a think which to use your mana, one rune for many rounds of melee fighting and healing as needed, or rune, annihilation and healing which burns your mana way faster. I think priests still choose melee over annihilation. Unless you make it really cheap spell. Like three or four mana max.Comment
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@Eddie --
IIRC, mana storm has 9% failure at cl 50 18/200.
As for priest damage spells, why bother? The combination of
* Rune of Protection in a town book(!)
* Essentially unlimited healing @300HP in the same town book(!!)
* Adequate Melee with a pretty-good weapon
means that any mana spent on spells is wasted unless you can do something like 250 damage/turn at a cost of 10 mana.
Rationale: M has a 1 in 5 chance of breaking a glyph in melee, so the cost of a glyph is 55/5 = 11 extra mana turn of melee, or ~7 mana/turn overall, since M has a 1/3 chance of attempting a spell.
Add in 1/2 healing spell for every broken rune, and the cost goes up to
(16/2 + 55)/5*2/3 = 8.4
Of course, this makes some assumptions, like LOS will be broken up so you can phase to recast ?RoP, but that's OK since Priests also have Earthquake in a town book...Comment
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