Angband Philosophy II: Magic

[Estie]

It is possible to use the existing infrastructure for melee damage and "simply" apply its benefits to spell damage in some way. For example, a ring of damage +8 also increases magic missile damage by +8 (yes it would be imbalanced if done exactly this way; ideas first, balance after they are decided).

This would change the price to pay from "a new set of useless items" to "unintuitive mechanics". Whatever it is people imagine makes spellcasters more powerfull is not usually the same that makes swordfighters better.

[Carnivean]

Whatever it is people imagine makes spellcasters more powerfull is not usually the same that makes swordfighters better.

Tropes around mages and increasing magical power usually involve "artifacts" such as crystal balls or amulets or charms, or more usually a staff. All the wizards in the LOTR movies had nice wooden staves, even the tiles in game show blue mages wielding staves.

Angband currently uses staves to store specific spells, which is also a trope, but less common that the staff as source, booster or anchor of the mage's power. I'd prefer to see the current staves turned into a different spell storage device, and mages given staves to hold in the melee slot. This would power their magic in various ways (focus for cast %, power for damage boost, etc) while preventing them from turning into melee guys at various points in the game. This would be Nick's arcane magic realm, where the player is a pure wizard. Other realms could work differently, with Nature being more buff related and melee attack oriented (thus fitting more to the Ranger class).

[debo]

Y'all really should have played the most recent competition.

[Tibarius]

re Carnivean

Yeah, +1 from me!

Maybe abolish spell books and store spells in a staff? And you can only cast those spells the currently wielded staff holds. Ideas first

[Thraalbee]

Things I like for High mage in the current poscheng compo:
1) Any Wizardstaff will reduce mana consumption so this becomes preferred weapon for mage
2) Eat Magic (regain mana from rods/staves) eliminates boring tele+wait and is well balanced against !Mana which is much better especially later in the game
3) Gravity bolt/breath enables a mage to keep many monsters out of melee range
4) Reflection (chance to deflect bolts) protects some monsters as well as player with certain items/artifacts

The key events however were finding book 3 and then book 4. Maybe it would be more fun if more granular and the order of spells received were more randomized?
What if instead the player would get new spells one-by-one through searching a new terrain type, bookshelf (mage), alternatively praying at new terrain type, altar (priest)?
The results from a search/prayer would be either "you find nothing of value/get no reaction" or "you find/receive a new spell."
New spells has to be transcribed into spellbooks carried in the inventory to become usable (spell limits apply as usual).
I am thinking we would still have four (poscheng) flavours of empty spellbooks but would allow some customization so that some spells could be transcribed into any of two or more book flavours whereas others would only fit in one specific flavour.
Shelves/altars could have one or more "uses" like forges in Sil with default 1 for most of them, but a grand altar or super shelf could allow more than one attempt.
The town would have a basic shelf/altar service with the minimum set of spells always available

The advantage is that you need to play with what you have. Today you only use the best spells of each book. Also it makes rising in power more granular.

[Estie]

3) Gravity bolt/breath enables a mage to keep many monsters out of melee range

This is the second and, as I see it , more profound aspect than giving mages more tools to play with:

The defensive properties, unlike melee damage, do not allow for much variance. I think changing this would be a good idea: noobs who dont understand still buy basic armor with their first money even though the effect is little; why not change it to the state where you DIE in melee unless you have sufficient protection ?

Breath weapons that kill you off screen abound, and thats needed to keep the difficulty up; why not have melee be more dangerous than ranged combat ?

Imagine an orc 1-hitting a low level character in melee unless same character has a certain amount of AC. You are wearing a robe +0 and nothing else, you die; you wear armor giving ~20 AC, you lose 1/2 health.

The gamplay could revolve around warriors trying to get enough armor to survive, and mages avoiding melee with their superior utility. Surely having a ?phase land you near a deadly melee monster isnt as bad as getting breathed at offscreen for instant death ?

I think that allowing defense to matter beyond a simple shopping list of "need to cover for endfight" would be a good idea. Offense is currently the only variable, you can kill M in 20 or 50 turns depending on gear, as long as you have to survive a couple of his actions its fine. So require a certain amount of defense to survive, but more is better. He has melee and ranged attacks. Require a certain amount of AC to survive 1 round of melee, and a certain amount of resistance to survive his ranged spells. Have the required AC/resists in the available loot, but have them compete with the offensive mods that reduce the duration of the fight.

[Derakon]

Imagine an orc 1-hitting a low level character in melee unless same character has a certain amount of AC. You are wearing a robe +0 and nothing else, you die; you wear armor giving ~20 AC, you lose 1/2 health.

The gamplay could revolve around warriors trying to get enough armor to survive, and mages avoiding melee with their superior utility. Surely having a ?phase land you near a deadly melee monster isnt as bad as getting breathed at offscreen for instant death ?

How is this not a complete power upgrade for mages? They never get into melee (so needn't dedicate anything much to armor anyway) and monster ranged attacks are nerfed? Contrarily, how is this not a complete nerf for warriors and other characters that must engage in melee? They must dedicate far more of their equipment/consumables to defenses without gaining much of anything in return.

I mean, a hypothetical system which overhauls everything could of course make melee (even more) dangerous and nerf ranged attacks, but we need to be careful when we propose one-off changes to the existing system that we aren't just tilting the balance in favor of certain classes and to the detriment of others.

In any event, monsters capable of one-shotting the player, by any means, must be loudly signposted somehow. In general, though, if we're overhauling everything then I would tend to favor making one-shot deaths far more rare in general, to the extent that you have to be making an effort to get in over your head. Ideally the game should be lost over the course of several turns (and should be visibly lost as such, i.e. the player is taking more damage than they can mitigate) rather than all at once.

[Estie]

How is this not a complete power upgrade for mages? They never get into melee (so needn't dedicate anything much to armor anyway) and monster ranged attacks are nerfed? Contrarily, how is this not a complete nerf for warriors and other characters that must engage in melee? They must dedicate far more of their equipment/consumables to defenses without gaining much of anything in return.

I mean, a hypothetical system which overhauls everything could of course make melee (even more) dangerous and nerf ranged attacks, but we need to be careful when we propose one-off changes to the existing system that we aren't just tilting the balance in favor of certain classes and to the detriment of others.

In any event, monsters capable of one-shotting the player, by any means, must be loudly signposted somehow. In general, though, if we're overhauling everything then I would tend to favor making one-shot deaths far more rare in general, to the extent that you have to be making an effort to get in over your head. Ideally the game should be lost over the course of several turns (and should be visibly lost as such, i.e. the player is taking more damage than they can mitigate) rather than all at once.

What ?
Monsters who can 1-shot you from off screen without warning have been in the game since ever; but if if they can do so in _melee_ range, it needs to be warned against ?

Seriously, reconsider your stance.

Anyway, my point is that it should be possible to protect against melee insta gibb by gettig AC, which makes AC valuable unlike in the current game. _OR_ use phase door and hope (with some reliability) to not land next to monster.

In the long run, mage needs to be able to survive 1 round of melee. Barely. That lays out the amount of AC protection, does it not ?

Edit: typo

[Derakon]

What ?
Monsters who can 1-shot you from off srreen without warning have been in the game since ever; but if if they can do so in _melee_ range, it needs to be warned against ?

Seriously, reconsider your stance.

I'm not a fan of one-shot ranged deaths either, note. They're kind of difficult to disentangle from everything else, but they're not a great design concept. Hence why I said that any deaths the player experiences really ought to be the culmination of several turns of things going wrong in obvious ways.

Anyway, my point is that it should be possible to protect against melee insta gibb by gettig AC, which makes AC valuable unlike in the current game. _OR_ use phase door and hope (with some reliability) to not land next to monster.

AC is valuable. It's just not obviously valuable. The difference between 100 and 200 AC would be quite noticeable if you spent the time to compare them, but nobody's going to do that, and it's hard to calculate the difference by hand. It's very easy to calculate how valuable, say, fire resistance is -- take the monster's HP, divide by 3: that's the damage without resistance. Divide by 3 again: that's the damage with resistance. Very binary, simple, relatively easy to optimize for. How valuable is increasing your AC by 10? By 50?

We had discussions awhile back about making most armor slots give no AC value (and basically just being items you could attach abilities to), with the goal being of making AC more "chunky" and thus easier to quantify. Still worth considering IMO.

In the long run, mage needs to be able to survive 1 round of melee. Barely. That lays out the amount of AC protection, does it not ?

The thing I wanted to see clarified was how this proposed change affected the relative balance of the difference classes. If melee is made more lethal and ranged is made less lethal, then classes that can avoid melee get a significant effective power boost.

[Estie]

1_shot: the drolem is going to get you, unless you have poison resist. Getting poison resistance is hard, grind at low depth before descending. You dont want to and prefer to risk it ? Ok. Your choice.

My vision: The orc is gonna get you in melee, unless you have AC. Getting AC is easy for warrior, just buy a leather armor and stuff in the shop; its hard for mage, you can wear heavy armor but you dont want to because its penalizing your offense (in more ways than the current -mana). Again, the choice is yours, face orcs and hope for a bar chain mail to drop or descent with only a leather armor and face trolls who kill you in melee unless you have bar chain mail.

In this game, the only real threat is the 1-shot. While I dont like it on principle, same as you, I dont see how to keep a challenge without this threat hovering over the character.

I propose to include melee combat into the 1-shot range; as for now, its only breath weapons which threaten it. You can protect against 1-shot breath by means of resist; I want to be able to protect against melee 1-shot by means of AC. Furthermore, I want warrior to have AC as a matter of course and be able to enter a room filled with a bunch of physical damage enemies; whereas a mage should be reluctant to do the same and rather rely on mobility to avoid such a scenario.

As for the balance between warrior and mage, I am not worried at all. In ToME2, I found the sorceror easy to the point of ridiculous, "op", but other people didnt; their play style had them favour high hit point classes. I think its fine to just modify and see what happens, and if somehow the majority of people find one way (melee and defense vs ranged + avoid melee) vastly superior, then its time to think about adjustments.

[Derakon]

Okay, I understand your point now. Thanks for the clarification.

And yeah, I know about the Drolem Problem™. I'm not thrilled about it existing, but it ties into a lot of systemic "problems" with Angband like the ready availability of escapes, excessively high monster power that precludes fighting more than one enemy at a time, general tedium of actually fighting through 100 levels of dungeon instead of skipping to the end, etc. etc. etc. Hence why I said that fixing it requires a massive overhaul of just about everything.

[Timo Pietilä]

I propose to include melee combat into the 1-shot range; as for now, its only breath weapons which threaten it.

Melee is already kind of single-shot area, just not by pure raw damage (unless you manage to get crushed by earthquake twice). Paralyzing and confusing attacks can get you if you don't have protections, and grand master mystic KO is a bit surprise to first time "stunning, what's that?" newbies.

[MattB]

The Drolem Problem™

Sounds like a novel by John Grisham.

Probably made into a film featuring Julia Roberts.

But probably not as the drolem.

[MattB]

I want warrior to have AC as a matter of course and be able to enter a room filled with a bunch of physical damage enemies; whereas a mage should be reluctant to do the same and rather rely on mobility to avoid such a scenario.

Vanilla already has this.

[Estie]

Here is a crude, but simple change that approximates what I want:

To all physical attacks (melee and ranged), add a constant damage. Make this constant 2,5 x monsterlevel. This constant (and only it) is subject to reduction by AC; each point of AC reduces it by one, to a minimum of 0.
For the mage, make every point of base AC reduce the manapool by 1 (remove glove restriction for simplicitys sake). So a mage donning a soft leather armor [8, +5] would have their pool reduced by 8. Also, consider multiplying all of the mages spell damage by 2.

Some examples:

Snaga is level 6 and hits for 1d8. So he would hit for 1d8 + (6 x 2,5) = 1d8 + 15 now. A naked character takes full damage, one wearing soft leather armor [8, +5] would take 1d8 + (15-13) = 1d8 + 2.

Morgoth is level 100, so you add 250 to each of his attacks. With 250 or higher AC, the fight is exactly the same as before. With less, you take more damage in melee.

Uruk is level 16 and has a ranged attack that does 10 damage; it would now do 10 + 40, with the 40 getting reduced by AC.

A cave troll is level 33 and hits for 3d5/3d5/1d8/1d8. Each of these attacks would have 82 damage added.


This rule is not good enough for a global combat revamp, for various reasons. But I would like to playtest a modified game with a warrior and a mage and see how it goes.