Life Draining Question

[Scraper]

I just had a quick question about life draining. I wear some gear with sustain life etc. but some monsters still drain my life. I was wondering about the mechanics of it.

e.g. Does wearing sustain life (hold life etc)
a) reduce the amount of life drained
b) increase your saving throw
c) make only monsters of a certain level/ depth able to drain your life
d) any combination of the above

Do multiple sustain life stack? (I'm guessing not, but a definitive answer would be nice)

What effect does saving throw have on life draining?

The reason I'm asking is that in my current game I have it as a swap and it seems a little pointless to waste a (excruciatingly) valuable slot on a life draining swap when it doesn't seem to work very well. It seems more prudent to instead have a stack of !restore life and just chug them just before finishing off the nasty.

[Timo Pietilä]

I just had a quick question about life draining. I wear some gear with sustain life etc. but some monsters still drain my life. I was wondering about the mechanics of it.

e.g. Does wearing sustain life (hold life etc)
a) reduce the amount of life drained
b) increase your saving throw
c) make only monsters of a certain level/ depth able to drain your life
d) any combination of the above

Do multiple sustain life stack? (I'm guessing not, but a definitive answer would be nice)

What effect does saving throw have on life draining?

The reason I'm asking is that in my current game I have it as a swap and it seems a little pointless to waste a (excruciatingly) valuable slot on a life draining swap when it doesn't seem to work very well. It seems more prudent to instead have a stack of !restore life and just chug them just before finishing off the nasty.

Other than b) all of the above, and saving throw doesn't reduce draining.

With hold life you get draining reduced to 10% of what it would be without, and most of the time you don't get drained at all (don't know how high probability that is).

XP drain in general is minor inconvenience, even when drained you still gain permanent XP, only it is 10% of what it would be without draining.

[Scraper]

XP drain in general is minor inconvenience, even when drained you still gain permanent XP, only it is 10% of what it would be without draining.

Thanks for the info. So just to clarify. When you are drained, you gain 10%xp to permanent XP, but the total monster xp goes to replacing the deficit left by the draining/s?

[Timo Pietilä]

Thanks for the info. So just to clarify. When you are drained, you gain 10%xp to permanent XP, but the total monster xp goes to replacing the deficit left by the draining/s?

Yes, that's correct. 10% to permanent XP, full amount to fix drain (both, not 90% to fix drain and 10% to permanent, but 100% to fix and 10% to permanent).

[Magnate]

Other than b) all of the above, and saving throw doesn't reduce draining.

With hold life you get draining reduced to 10% of what it would be without, and most of the time you don't get drained at all (don't know how high probability that is).

It's 75%, but it'll be 100% next time the nightlies update, and you won't get the 10% drain either, which will make HL a little more valuable (but as you say, it's still no big deal).

[Derakon]

So with the new update, HL is 100% proof against experience drain? I had a bit of difficulty parsing your statements. Has life without HL changed?

[Magnate]

So with the new update, HL is 100% proof against experience drain? I had a bit of difficulty parsing your statements. Has life without HL changed?

Sorry, I wasn't clear. Yes, HL will be 100% proof against most draining (i.e. except from time attacks, of course). Life without HL will be unchanged.

HL was anomalous in that it was the only resistance flag which was inconsistenly effective. So we got rid of the 75% thing and made it work all the time (on the grounds that we didn't want to special-case it, it wasn't exactly overpowered in the first place, and it's nice that not all changes go in the same direction in any given development period).

The removal of the lingering 10% drain with HL is harder to explain. It's because draining is not a "projectable" attack form, and its damage is to xp not hp. Only the projectable damaging attacks have resistances which are partially effective (1/3 for rbase/pois, and x / (6+d6) for others, etc.). For other attack effects, there's either a flag which is proof against them completely, or a saving throw, or both/neither.

We can of course restore both aspects of the old behaviour if people find the new one unenjoyable. The next update to nightlies will be a while away anyway, because I've finally started the rewrite of obj-power to fix the pricing overflows caused by multiple pvals ...

[Netbrian]

I've been playing with an idea for life draining. Have we considered significantly increasing the amount of experience loss, but making none of the loss permanent? For instance, a player with drained EXP may gain twice as much EXP as normal until he or she is back at their maximum EXP.

The idea behind this would be to encourage people to keep playing after exp drain, instead of going back to town or hoarding restore life level potions. Right now, if you do that, most of the experience you gain will be wasted.

[EpicMan]

I used to do that, until I found out you still gain max XP (at 10% of the normal rate, but still, you are gaining something).

If you significantly increased the amount drained (say, drain in terms of whole levels instead of XP) that could change behavior. It would make undead more dangerous in a non-instadeath, summoning, or tunneling manner.

Losing multiple levels would reduce your max hp, which could make you need to escape or risk getting killed more easily, so it could add meaningful decisions.

Finally, it would hurt warriors the least, as casters could potentially lose access to certain spells as well as max mana.

I've also thought about temporarily reducing max hp from drain life/nether attacks, but upping the XP loss could do much the same thing (reduce max hp) and have other effects as well.

[Derakon]

I made a suggestion awhile back to change life drain into temporary level drain that went away naturally over time and didn't actually affect how much experience you gained. It didn't go over very well with the caster crowd for some reason.

[Netbrian]

I used to do that, until I found out you still gain max XP (at 10% of the normal rate, but still, you are gaining something).

Right -- my suggestion would be to gain max XP at the normal rate, so you could continue fighting at your drained level and eventually be put back to where you were before you got drained at all. To compensate, you might increase the amount of XP drained and/or make restoration rarer. I just got sick of recalling back to town or carrying a giant stack of potions whenever I fought undead.

[PowerDiver]

I made a suggestion awhile back to change life drain into temporary level drain that went away naturally over time and didn't actually affect how much experience you gained. It didn't go over very well with the caster crowd for some reason.

A long time ago I expressed a similar opinion, that new exp should add equally to current and max exp, but I required a magical restore to make them equal.

[half]

Right -- my suggestion would be to gain max XP at the normal rate, so you could continue fighting at your drained level and eventually be put back to where you were before you got drained at all. To compensate, you might increase the amount of XP drained and/or make restoration rarer. I just got sick of recalling back to town or carrying a giant stack of potions whenever I fought undead.

I think this is a great idea. As was removing the chance of hold life failing.

Now if only someone will also remove the random element in the high resists...

[Timo Pietilä]

I think this is a great idea. As was removing the chance of hold life failing.

Now if only someone will also remove the random element in the high resists...

Randomness is a good thing. I would prefer making basic element resist to have random factor as well, not the other way around (just not as random as nether for example).