Feather Falling?

[prh182]

So maybe its just that I've never lived long enough to care ...but what it the point of feather falling? I mean how often do you really fall in a pit and how bad is it really when it happens. Is feather falling good for anything else, like gravity hounds or something? Thanks for the input

[Derakon]

Featherfall is as you noticed almost useless as it stands currently; the only times when having it could be tactically important are before you have access to it. ISTR there being threads discussing how to make it more interesting or what to replace it with, but nothing came of them. Personally I'm against it mitigating gravity attacks, just because gravity hounds are utterly terrifying and that's awesome.

[Magnate]

Featherfall is as you noticed almost useless as it stands currently; the only times when having it could be tactically important are before you have access to it. ISTR there being threads discussing how to make it more interesting or what to replace it with, but nothing came of them. Personally I'm against it mitigating gravity attacks, just because gravity hounds are utterly terrifying and that's awesome.

In variants like O, S, NPP etc., FF allows you to choose not to fall down a trap door (i.e. it's actually levitation, not FF). This makes it highly useful, albeit in a niche circumstance.

[fizzix]

In variants like O, S, NPP etc., FF allows you to choose not to fall down a trap door (i.e. it's actually levitation, not FF). This makes it highly useful, albeit in a niche circumstance.

I'd rather not gimp the one interesting trap.

[perdaniel]

The items that just have feather falling are items that you can find pretty early in the game, and most of the early items are not very useful. I think that the powers that be should be careful about modifying FF, so that they don't make it overpowered.

[fizzix]

The items that just have feather falling are items that you can find pretty early in the game, and most of the early items are not very useful. I think that the powers that be should be careful about modifying FF, so that they don't make it overpowered.

I wouldn't worry too much about that. If feather falling gets replaced with something else, all the items that have it will be scaled accordingly. However, right now =feather falling and slow descent boots serve a purpose in the game. They are early, useless items that dilute the pool of useful items. And they come early enough that identify is still somewhat interesting. Finding a pit to test whether your boots are slow descent, stability, or free action is somewhat fun.

Feather falling as an object ability serve to dilute the number of useful abilities and lower the probability of a super ego with telepathy. So in a sense, feather falling is useful by what it doesn't do.

[EpicMan]

Wouldn't that function be better served by making ego/artifact generation rarer to compensate? Right now a given % of ego items are functionally no different than (+0, +0) ones. I would prefer to not have useless egos and to reduce the number of egos/artifacts to compensate.

Now that we have statistics on item generation, perhaps we could calculate the % of ego/artifact items that are useless egos (feather falling mostly) and replace them with a failure chance on ego generation:

That is to say, if X% of all generated ego items (or all generated ego/artifact items) are feather falling, remove the feather falling items and add a X% chance for ego item generation to just create a mundane item.

There are also rings of feather falling, which you could replace with 'brass rings' or 'rings of adornment' or something suitably named to indicate it is not magical or enchanted in any way.

Mostly, I just don't like that some "excellent" items are actually vendor trash / junk for pretty much the WHOLE game. I don't dislike that items which may be very useful during parts of the game (early artifacts, westernesse weapons, 'average' DSMs, etc) are outclassed later, but items which are never useful to begin with add no value to the game, other than flavor (and I don't get a lot of flavor out of FF items). Yes, they do reduce the number of good items, but I don't think crowding good items with junk is a great way to do that.

[fizzix]

How do you determine what egos are useless and what ones are not? It's situational. A slay troll weapon could be useful at dlevel 40 if you just detected a troll pit. You won't be carrying it around, but for a brief blip in time it is useful.

How much +dam would you trade on a gondolin sword in order to get rstun instead of feather falling? What about regen? player light? I'm pretty sure at dlevel 20 you'll like any gondolin weapon regardless of what ability it got.

There are also differences between ego items and flavored items. Flavor items are not a problem because squelch makes them easy to ignore. You only have to identify =FF once, usually by buying it from the magic shop, and then you can ignore it for the rest of the game. Exactly like "charisma or =searching. If a decision is made to hide flavors on detection, then this will need to be reevaluated. But for now, I'd rather have many different flavors of items rather than less.

[UglySquirrell]

Maybe make falling through trapdoors, and pits more damaging, if yore low on HP or have low hitpoints a fall could kill you. I'd really like to see more traps that affect the dungeon, Earthquake traps, explosion, alter reality, create walls, disintegrate- destroy everything in an aoe spell including walls.

[Max Stats]

Maybe make falling through trapdoors, and pits more damaging, if yore low on HP or have low hitpoints a fall could kill you.

These could have a chance to knock you unconscious for a few rounds. This would be worse with trapdoors, because you might be falling into a dangerous area.

[UglySquirrell]

These could have a chance to knock you unconscious for a few rounds. This would be worse with trapdoors, because you might be falling into a dangerous area.

Or stun, or even have a chance to reduce a stat, broken arm dexterity/strength, internal bleeding constitution, fell on you're head intelligence

[Max Stats]

Or stun, or even have a chance to reduce a stat, broken arm dexterity/strength, internal bleeding constitution, fell on you're head intelligence

Not to mention fell on your face-->charisma.

[Narvius]

Not to mention fell on your face-->charisma.

Unless you get a sexy scar as a result, then it's +charisma.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Trap door of neutering

[Hudstone]

In Chengband (which I tried due to a recent comp and really like) wilderness encounters with Giant Eagles or Gwaihair the Windlord. The nasty bugger will swoop down, grab and drop you from great height. Hit me twice in a round with that, lost about 200hp so I 'ported to the other side of the screen.
Anyways, FF/Levitation would have been really handy. Will be sure to carry it if I go on another walkaboot.

but in a single dungeon? I agree that dilution is its main ability