Thoughts on the Newer Versions from an Older Player

[Chud]

How about increasing the cost somehow?

Banish requires the sacrifice of an item of some minimal level of quality to work, say. Or, it has some percent chance to eat such an item from inventory (maybe you get to choose) in order to work, and always fails if you possess no qualifying item? Though by the time you get to levels where it matters you would surely have something, though probably not many that you want to sacrifice.

Or maybe give it a more significant hitpoint cost.

Or something.

[Timo Pietilä]

Actually me neither. The original poster seems to think this is a huge deal--but my winners didn't hardly use any banishment, but I think Mass banishment and Banish evil is pretty helpful...

If I have _banish I usually end up killing drujs in graveyards and Q:s in zoos to prevent teleport to/away from happening. Then I proceed killing the rest of the monsters there.

Some very rare case I have used it to kill some specific monster in GV that I couldn't handle at that time.

Not a big deal.

[buzzkill]

@ Increase the cost: Negative XP awarded for every creature banished, in addition to the current HP drain. Banishing nuisances wouldn't cost much. Banishing hordes of native DL98 denizens could set beck even a hard-core veteran some serious XP. I guess that would require re-working how drained XP in restored.

[Timo Pietilä]

@ Increase the cost: Negative XP awarded for every creature banished, in addition to the current HP drain. Banishing nuisances wouldn't cost much. Banishing hordes of native DL98 denizens could set beck even a hard-core veteran some serious XP. I guess that would require re-working how drained XP in restored.

No restoration obviously. Remove XP permanently. You think twice before using banishment...unless you are already at clvl 50 with huge XP buffer to lose before losing a level.

[SSK]

No restoration obviously. Remove XP permanently. You think twice before using banishment...unless you are already at clvl 50 with huge XP buffer to lose before losing a level.

I like it. Doesn't require some major overhaul, increases penalty for those using it wantonly and I agree after some thought of my recent games that I don't find that much desire to use it anyway.

Under those cond. I would be tempted to use it now under the following limited circumstance: I have a scroll or staff and I find a greater vault in the midgame where I really want some of the items but can't handle a number of nasties.

[EpicMan]

I like it. Doesn't require some major overhaul, increases penalty for those using it wantonly and I agree after some thought of my recent games that I don't find that much desire to use it anyway.

Under those cond. I would be tempted to use it now under the following limited circumstance: I have a scroll or staff and I find a greater vault in the midgame where I really want some of the items but can't handle a number of nasties.

What would make you more tempted to use it with the XP penalty than without?

[EpicMan]

What if all XP loss was permanent? This would make nether attacks/spells more powerful (less so against warriors than casters, since they won't lose spells/fail rates), and might make XP draining more of a penalty than it is now.

It would make the game harder in that it might make you scum a little bit each time you are drained a lot to recover max HP/SP, thereby increasing the time you have to make a mpoor decision and die.

Nether attacks side effects would no longer be mostly ignorable, making monsters that have them more dangerous.

[Derakon]

There are ways to make nether attacks more interesting, but IMO permanent experience drain isn't it. Experience drain in general isn't all that great, since it basically just slows down the game. We don't (or at least I don't) want to encourage grinding.

I made a thread awhile back suggesting that we could replace the current experience drain mechanic with one that temporarily decreases your level directly without touching your experience. Of course, that wouldn't work at all as a penalty for using Banishment. Which I still maintain doesn't need to be fixed, but whatever.