Making devices useful

[Derakon]

Some of the attack wands show up at a good time for mages, I'd say: they don't have the mana to be able to cast enough attack spells to take out big targets, but they can use the wands to good effect and save their mana for Recharging and mobility. Other classes have better sources of damage and thus have no need to rely on wands.

I guess if we want to make attack wands/rods more useful, we should make monsters that are explicitly hardened against nonmagical attack / weakened against magical attack -- vaguely like how the susceptibilities flags are currently only obeyed for spells, except I'd say it should be a blanket resistance to any attack that is not spell-like. This would tie in nicely with the absorption/evasion mechanic: monsters with high absorb might be better taken on with damage that is unabsorbable. Or with attacks that pierce absorption (i.e. relevant slays/brands).

[Philip]

Yeah, I do think we should just weaken everything else, and I think that rods should also be capable of doing damage and be reserve mana for mages, which can be only used for what it's called, basically. A mage would also have wands, but they would be for big targets, like uniques or that dragon or such.

[Atarlost]

I don't think devices are a good level to drop other things to. It would be an exceptionally elite player who could win without using anything but devices. Maybe if Morgoth didn't drain charges it would be more possible, but still much more difficult than pre-JLE (sans GOI) which seems to be the difficulty target.

[Derakon]

Remember that, as Magnate said, moving to evasion/absorption is going to be a big reset button for damage and monster stats. It shouldn't be hard to intentionally integrate device damage into that calculus if we're overhauling everything anyway.

[Philip]

True, all of this should wait until overhaul is done, but definetly something to think about.

[the Invisible Stalker]

I'm not sure if I play often enough to be a useful data point, but my current O character has run out of digits for rod macros, because he wanted to carry more than 10 different types. That certainly never happened to me in V. It suggests that O rods are more powerful than V rods, but I think it's more a case of everything else in O being weaker than in V. For my last V character, rods were simply a source of cash. It would nice to see them become more useful, relative to other options.

[Atarlost]

Everything else includes the monsters, which have a lot less HP than in V to go with the reduced melee, archery, and spell damage so relative to the HP total of any given monster O rods will be doing quite a bit more damage.