High element reform

[fizzix]

I agree with Raccoon that TOME handles buffs and debuffs very well. It's a very different style of game and it's very interesting at that. Getting debuffs turned off in TOME is incredibly dangerous, and debuffing enemies is incredibly profitable. The problem with TOME is that there are way too many types of everything, but luckily we aren't going to run into that problem.

@Derakon: Yeah, I'd even be able to get behind permanent stat scramble as a chaos effect. This is mainly because chaos breathers come much later when you should be detecting them. The problem with nexus breaths is that they appear way too early in the dungeon, often before you have the means to detect a nexus vortex.

Personally I think time is stupid, I'd vote for the elimination of that element, but that's going to not sit well with a lot of people. It'll also obsolete the trivet by SO made me which has 4 time hounds on it. (in ASCII...) But I'm ok with that.

[wobbly]

I agree with Raccoon that TOME handles buffs and debuffs very well. It's a very different style of game and it's very interesting at that. Getting debuffs turned off in TOME is incredibly dangerous, and debuffing enemies is incredibly profitable. The problem with TOME is that there are way too many types of everything, but luckily we aren't going to run into that problem.

The other problem in TOME 4 is that it's very often a case of 1st stun (/confuse/etc.) wins, which can become tedious & robotic very quickly. Otherwise I like it's system, I just wish it was less extreme in it's implementation.

[Nick]

Well, I guess that had the desired effect

There are some interesting points raised, some of which I'll address.

Moving the stat scramble from nexus to chaos makes rather a lot of sense (and I still kind of like my "timed and possible rescramble" idea). It possibly makes nexus a bit dull; I'm not completely averse to the timed random teleport effect.

The damage increase effect for nether I was thinking of as fairly gradual, and not expected to get above about 20-25%. For example, perhaps an unresisted nether attack for 200 damage would set the timer to 20, which would give 2% increased damage - but obviously the precise numbers would have to be determined. the idea is that continually fighting undead and racking up extra damage increase is unsustainable in the long run. This feels right to me as an effect by undead. I'm inclined to agree with Timo and others that adding it to the cause wounds spell is a bad idea.

Possibly a save and the varying of disenchantment effects would mean there's no need for extra artifact protection.

As for the general use of timed effects over permanent, I think mostly that makes more sense in a game with immediate escapes.

Also, I continue to be amazed at how opposite fizzix' tastes are to mine - I think time, poison and shards are all great

[Derakon]

Moving the stat scramble from nexus to chaos makes rather a lot of sense (and I still kind of like my "timed and possible rescramble" idea). It possibly makes nexus a bit dull; I'm not completely averse to the timed random teleport effect.

Replace nexus with randomly phase-dooring the player for a short duration ("your position becomes unstable" or something). Not being able to control your exact position is a hell of a debuff. But make the teleport always happen immediately before the player takes their turn, to be fair.

[Raccoon]

Replace nexus with randomly phase-dooring the player for a short duration ("your position becomes unstable" or something). Not being able to control your exact position is a hell of a debuff. But make the teleport always happen immediately before the player takes their turn, to be fair.

Agreed 100%.

[Bowman]

Make high resists cut a bit more damage, and be a bit more predictable

I definitely agree with making it more predictable, since in the present case, I just completely neglect considering my resistance when judging the damage I might take because I find it too confusing to remember which fractions are for which elements. Something simple like light/dark/shards/sound reduced to 50%, nexus/nether/disenchant/chaos reduced to 75% would be great.

Corollary request, though, to keep the maximum resisted damage in the 400-500 range. The damage potential that those elements have currently feels decent to me, so I'd rather see it be more punishing to lack resistance than easier when you have resistance.

[*]Make artifacts immune to disenchantment; make the "damage gear" effect only one of a number of possibilities for what a given disenchantment attack will do, with others including remove buffs, charge drain, mana drain

Maybe make "cannot be disenchanted" as a equipment property of similar depth/weighting to free action (and obviously add it to a select number of standarts)? Honestly, it'd be a weak enough effect that you could probably make it equivalent to slow digestion without any real balance impact, but I'd guess that it should be showing up around when Khim/Ibun do so that it might be of some use. Although, personally, I'd say just leave it as is.

Definitely in favor of a secondary effect to disenchantment. Remove buffs + charge drain would get my vote (mana drain seems too weak since it's very rare to see disenchant breath so the effect ought to be something that can be meaningful against melee-focused characters).

[*]Make nexus stat scramble a timed effect; additionally, while the timer is running, every turn there is a chance for the stats to rescramble

I'd agree with the suggestion to move stat scramble to chaos. Delayed teleport as an additional effect with nexus sounds fun. Maybe also consider alter reality, although that might open the door for silly scumming of nexus breathers.

(Favourite, left until last) Replace the XP drain from nether (and probably undead life-draining melee) by a timed "damage increase" effect; this would make attacks taken by the player while the timer is running do extra damage, proportional to the current size of the timer

It's not a bad idea, but the concern that I have with this is similar to my complaint about the variable effectiveness of current high resists: it's going to be too much effort to not just estimate potential incoming damage with the worst-case penalty. I prefer the idea suggested earlier about reducing the effectiveness of healing temporarily instead ("An air of death surrounds you!"), maybe by something like 50% so that there'll be a meaningful difference between quaffing !*healing* or !life while it's in effect.

As far as other thoughts on the high elements,

• Shards has a very weak effect as it is now. I'd say give it a chance of causing -1 speed ("Debris encumbers you!"), stacking up to -5 max (so that it's still not as bad as inertia/gravity but can be very dangerous to ignore).
• Ice's side effects can stay with cuts since it also has others, although I wouldn't be opposed to changing it to a minor slowing as well.
• It might be worth changing gravity's effect from phasing to being unable to move (you could still attack, cast spells, use items, or dig, but you just wouldn't be able to walk), to help differentiate it from nexus, but the fact that it also causes slowing might be enough for that already.

I like time as it is right now. In fact, I'd prefer to just get rid of stat sustains and make all of the other stat drains as timed effects, with time's stat drain being left as permanent (since, you know, it's time...).

Also, kind of tangentially related, can water vortices/hounds be renamed to something other than "water", to avoid confusion with that element when what they breath is actually acid? Something like caustic vortices/hounds would be clearer for new players, I think.

[Monkey Face]

One thing that bugs me about the idea of nether damage increasing enemy attack damage is that it means that the order which monsters move makes a significant difference. For example, in your example where the 200 point damage nether attack increases damage by 2%, say you are facing Morgoth and a 200 point nether breather and both get a move between your turns. If Morgoth goes first, he can mana storm you for 600 and then the nether breather hits you for another 200 making a total of 800. However, if the nether breather goes first, he hits you for 200 which also increases Morgoth's mana by 2% to 612 for a total of 812.

Maybe it's just me but something seems wrong with that juxtaposition.

[brbrbr]

make high resists cut a bit more damage, and be a bit more predictable

+1

disenchantment.... Remove buffs, charge drain, mana drain

+1

moving the stat scramble from nexus to chaos

+1

priests and mages should not be so vulnerable to mental attacks, but should be vulnerable to stuns and poisons

+1

i would really like disenchantment to be replaced by a complete debuff

+1

moving the stat scramble from nexus to chaos

+1

[Bowman]

Oh, one more thing about making the element effects more interesting. Right now, light is basically just a rarer version of dark. What about if, instead of blinding, it caused a debuff to stealth?

[wobbly]

Regarding reliability of damage reduction I'd prefer going the other way: making the base resists less reliable but the main thing I think is being consistent. Either all Resist Elements give reliable damage reduction or not.

[Nick]

Oh, one more thing about making the element effects more interesting. Right now, light is basically just a rarer version of dark. What about if, instead of blinding, it caused a debuff to stealth?

I'm glad you mentioned that. I've actually been considering the possibility of making light a positive force and dark a negative force (a little like Sil does) - so monsters would not have light attacks, and some monsters could do things like shrouding themselves in darkness. It's not very well thought out yet, and I'd be interested to hear from people who have played more Sil than I have how they think this sort of idea might work in Angband.

[fizzix]

Nick, you think poison and shards are fine? The effects are indistinguishable and don't do anything. You could remove the poison and cut counter altogether and the game wouldn't differ at all.

Here's what poison should be. It should be a low initial damage, but a high damage over time. You get breathed on for 25 poison damage, then your poison counter is at 25. Next turn you take 25 damage, then 24 and so on. New breaths stack on. While poisoned, you have no regeneration (although maybe having +regen could reduce the counter faster) Curing potions shoudn't do jack for poison, but they should restore hitpoints. You need neutralize poison or !healing. Stuff like air hounds should only be breathing for 3-5 points of poison. Get breathed on by 10 of them and your counter is at 30. You're dead unless you can cure the poison.

Poison resistance should allow a saving throw, and if failed, halve the counter.

Shards is more of a problem. When's the last time you were worried because you were "bleeding" from cuts. I have no idea. Those status effects remove themselves so quickly it's dumb. What can we do about this? Maybe steal a mechanic from DCSS which has a monster (manticore) that can give you the barbs status. When you have this status you can still attack and cast spells but if you move a square you take a lot of damage (the game warns you about this). After a couple turns of no action you automatically remove the barbs and go off on your merry way. Shards can be this, or something different, but we shouldn't pretend that it's "fine" how it is. It's a disaster of boringness.

[Rydel]

For poison, I like the idea of taking a percentage of the poison counter in damage, then reducing the poison counter by the damage you took. The damage coming in faster makes it more dangerous, but the fast that it doesn't last as long makes it less annoying when you try to rest.

I dislike the Nexus damage increase idea for the same reasons people have already stated: more mental math and making monsters' relative turn order matter when it's not as visible to the player.

For artifact disenchantment, perhaps make it so that enchantment scrolls, when used on artifacts, will enchant up to their original value instead of up to 15. That means there's a way to repair the damage, but you have to live with it a bit, since you have more useful things to do with enchantment scrolls then hoard them.

I also like the temporary stat scramble idea.

[Bowman]

Poisoning feels consequential early on. It just becomes easy to ignore once you're mostly past the point of being threatened by creeping coins. I'm okay with it as it is, although making it more of a heavy DOT effect might be interesting, as long as it doesn't turn drolems into jokes.

I'm not the most experienced Crawl player by any means, but barbs never felt like a significant debuff there. It might be interesting if the walking damage is high enough to matter, but with the prevalence of phasing and teleport other in Angband, it seems like most characters could deal with not being able to walk fairly easily (for all that I proposed a rooting effect on gravity, a fairly weak effect is fine there because gravity also has slowing). Aside from the mini-slow idea I mentioned before (which might be too much of inertia-light, in retrospect), another thing that comes to my mind is making it destroy walls in the area of effect (or just radius 1, if that is too much). Debuffing attack speed might be interesting, too, though it'd be meaningless to mages and priests.

[fizzix]

although making it more of a heavy DOT effect might be interesting, as long as it doesn't turn drolems into jokes.

Well let's do some math. Currently drolems breathe unresisted around 600 and resisted around 200. Let's cut it by 6 and make it delayed damage. That means a drolem breath unresisted does 100, and if untreated will do 5050 points of additional damage (death without a lot of healing or a neutralize poison). If you resist poison, the breath only does 50 damage, and 1275 over time if you fail your saving through (but maybe that should be reduced so that anyone that resists poison gets a more significant reduction.)

So, yeah. Poison will still be deadly and carrying neutralize poison would be a necessity.