Alternate artifact activations: auras

[Derakon]

Reading the "Recharging" thread gave me an idea to change how some of the current artifact activations work. For example, the Palantir currently activates for Enlightenment, which is pretty bloody useful. It's counterbalanced by having to keep the aggravating artifact equipped long enough for the activation to recharge. I suggest an alternate approach: when you activate the Palantir, you gain a radius-10 (or -15, or -20, or whatever), wall-piercing auto-detecting light source. X-ray vision! This lasts until you deactivate it. When activated, the Palantir also aggravates. Thus, to gain its extraordinary ability, you have to be actively using it.

Similarly, Celeborn activates for banishment. We could change that to a continuous effect wherein any monster that steps next to the player is automatically banished, and the player takes continuous damage so long as Celeborn is active. Thus the player becomes effectively untouchable in melee (aside from uniques), at the cost of a continual HP drain, when Celeborn is active. Obviously you'd no longer be able to use Celeborn to remove entire classes of monsters from the level, though. And HP drain would have to be significant enough that players wouldn't want to just leave the activation on all the time, compensating for the drain with regeneration.

Others I could see: Taratol/Feanor hastes you at the cost of draining mana; melee weapon gains an extra attack but drains HP; early ego-item activates for See Invisible or Free Action but slows you down slightly, etc. Basically the idea being that these are mixed-blessing items which have a default "no blessing, no malus" state, but you can turn on the blessing and the curse when you want them.

Of course, Vanilla doesn't currently have any kind of system for continually-cast effects, nor for items that are continually activated, so this would require some code changes. I think it'd make room for some really unique artifacts, though.

[Timo Pietilä]

Of course, Vanilla doesn't currently have any kind of system for continually-cast effects, nor for items that are continually activated, so this would require some code changes.

It does have that, at least for detection. Telepathy and dwarf treasure detection at least are area effects that are continuously on, and that means that you only need to add range, the actual effect and that duration ill-effect in the game.

Something like Holcolleth sleep suddenly becomes a powerful activation with this. I think banishment or mass-banishment as duration-activation is a bit too much though.

Some variants have fire auras which hurt the monsters that touch you, and that would be something worth incorporating to vanilla too.

[Magnate]

It does have that, at least for detection. Telepathy and dwarf treasure detection at least are area effects that are continuously on, and that means that you only need to add range, the actual effect and that duration ill-effect in the game.

Not quite. Telepathy is a special case, handled in the monster visibility code, and dwarf treasure detection is a massive kludge in the main dungeon() loop. We would need to modularise this and call out from the main loop to process always-on effects, but IMO this would be worth doing. I'll open a ticket for it.

[Derakon]

Something like Holcolleth sleep suddenly becomes a powerful activation with this. I think banishment or mass-banishment as duration-activation is a bit too much though.

Even with a range of 1? Possibly...maybe if it only actually did the banishment every 5-10 turns even when activated. Frequent enough to make wading through chumps faster, not frequent enough that you can afford to ignore summons entirely.

[fizzix]

Even with a range of 1? Possibly...maybe if it only actually did the banishment every 5-10 turns even when activated. Frequent enough to make wading through chumps faster, not frequent enough that you can afford to ignore summons entirely.

I look at it the other way. You essentially would not be able to melee anything with celeborn on. That's no fun at all. I think the change for the palantir is good, but that goes in more to the separation of telepathy vs esp. If you do that, the palantir gets something like +10 to both telep and esp, and the activation is eliminated.