A somewhat silly tactical idea

[Therem Harth]

Instant LOS disruption for half-troll warriors.

Works like this. If you have > 18/120 STR, you can bash a wall, and that triggers a small earthquake, radius increasing slightly with increasing STR (so if you're crazy strong you can get radius 2 or maybe 3).

This way, instead of dealing with this:

.....
.UU..
.U@U.
#####

You can deal with this:

U%..U
%.%U#
%.@%U
##%.%

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Hulk Smash!!!!


Sorry, this one just makes me cringe because of that association....

But I actually like the idea that fighters and perhaps rogues could maybe do things like this. How's about, sacrifice 1 melee attack from your usual number, to get a useful effect, such as:

--Push -- fighter, forces opp 1 square back.
--Switch places -- rogue. @ and critter exchange spots.

Your wall smashing idea is a variant, but should probably be an action unto itself.

For just 1 or 2 such things...perhaps not worth the trouble. If we can come up with several tricks for fighter and rogue, could be nice additions.

[Therem Harth]

Pushing one monster back wouldn't be too useful generally. Even pushing everyone around you back wouldn't be so great. I see what you mean about using the bash key for this though.

Basically I'd like to make warriors a bit stronger against groups of monsters. Warriors have no area attacks (not even crowd combat), and no reliable healing. Their only recourse other than flight or banishment is to take monsters on a few at a time. A low-radius earthquake creates obstacles and allows them to do just that.

Though warriors are already the most item-dependent class. Maybe it would be better to add rods of earthquakes? Just give them half the radius of a scroll of destruction...

[Therem Harth]

Part of my inspiration BTW comes from ToME2, which you probably know I'm a fan of. In T2 you can worship various Valar, and one of them (Tulkas) gives you access to Earth magic... Which includes an earthquake spell, a digging spell, and a spell that creates walls around you. This way you can manipulate the terrain to make it safer to take on monsters.

The other thing I can think of that might work for this is some kind of instant tunneling ability - one turn to tunnel into a wall and then move into the empty space. Maybe use an item for this too? A rod of tunneling, which when zapped lets you bore through walls instantly for so-and-so turns?

[camlost]

Well, I liked it as an action.

http://code.google.com/p/skills-angband/issues/detail?id=22

[Therem Harth]

Thanks.

[nullfame]

Instead of dealing with 4 major demons having LOS, you only have to deal with 3! Heck, if you're really lucky maybe you get one with ALOS on you. Where do I sign up?

Creative idea though

[cofresi]

Here's another tactical idea for warriors that is useful but not a gamebreaker. Warriors can take out a pack of sorrounding monsters that are of considerably lower level (10-20 levels less or so) in one combat sweep. So a high level warrior sorrounded by orcs/kobolds/trolls, lesser hounds, lesser breeders etc and some summons can cleave trough annoying groups and get to the real meat of the problem. It just expedites the game and decreases dependency on zapping rods (good) and bread and butter combat tactics (bad, leads to sloppiness). This should at least be true for humanoids and probably for natural creatures/animals as well.

[Derakon]

The move to fractional blows will allow for something similar to that. A high-level warrior won't need anywhere near his 6 blows/round to kill a weak monster, and with fractional blows, he won't be charged for the unused blows. In practice that means that he can kill several weak monsters in one turn's worth of energy.