rod of curing ... why?

[Sky]

i don't get the various rod / staff of curing, and how they appear deeper than potions of CSW / CCW. Don't potions heal AND cure?
It's not just that, but there's quite a few items that seem to show up way too late to be useful ... dragon armors, for example; have the AOE but no resists, by the time that you can find them, you'll generally have a +2 str/con with 2-3 resists. same for the big weapons, scythe and BoC, even with the +2 attacks, they have the same damage of many arti weapons, but none of the added bonuses, be they resists, speed, +stat ..
lanterns of true sight tend to show up after the phial. many artifact weapons show up after others which are stronger in many ways .. obviously your mileage may vary, but i've generally used a -thanc dagger until long way down, and then swap it with something better when i hit DL 40/50 and the stat potions come rushing in, since the daggers are still some of the best DPS until then.
(is potion of speed now native to DL1 ?? sure this item is a bit OP at such low levels ...)

[AnonymousHero]

Junk. Throw away. Always.

[Egavactip]

Rods of Curing are hardly junk

[Derakon]

Rods and Staves of Curing aren't that great, mostly because they're not reliable. If C*W potions were a lot more rare, then they'd be more useful. As for your other items:

* The lesser dragon armors can show up quite early, and their breath weapons are great for softening up targets. The higher-tier armors can still potentially be useful if they get a Dwarven or Elvenkind ego on them.

* SoS/BoC/MoD are potential Morgoth killers because of their high potential damage output. Absolutely not useless. If you're playing a melee class, then your weapon has 1 job, which is to do as much damage as possible. Everything else is just a bonus.

* Lanterns of True Sight are better than the Phial. pBlind is rare and the Phial does nothing especially important.

* The *thancs are kind of ridiculously good. They used to be 1d4 (+4, +6) and even that was quite useful for the early game (being a lightweight weapon with decent +damage and effectively 3d4 dice against most enemies). Their stats basically got doubled at some point and now they're entirely too powerful.

* Potions of Speed have always been native to dlvl1, but they're rare, so I've never really felt like they're unbalancing. They're borderline necessary for fighting Bullroarer on your first dungeon dive if you're unlucky enough to encounter him without a ranged weapon and a good stock of ?Phase. More generally they make it feasible to take on many of the early game uniques in melee the first time you see them, which is usually out of the question.

[Sky]

honestly, i dont remember very well, but i thought potion of speed started generating around level 10. the thing is, they trivialize most low level uniques, such as the various orc captains, which all move at speed 10, and last long enough for the whole fight, doubling your damage output; add a potion of berserker rage and you are there.

the rods and .. staff, of curing, seem completely redundant to me. after maybe my 3rd trip down to the dungeon, i can afford to stash 4-5K gold for CCW, some scrolls of satisfy hunger, drop to DL1, and rest long enough to stock 20-30 potions, not to mention another roll at the Black Market inventory stash. I've found *healing*, healing, pots of speed, rods of detection (frees up 2 inventory slot, as generally you have traps / items / doors), banishment, even a pot of experience that i could afford.
maybe ironman gear, ok, but even then it's an inventory slot for something which has limited use .. sure it can cure stun, but you would *still* need to heal those hp.

[wobbly]

I'm pretty sure rods of curing would be good if I could ever fit 1 in my pack. I mean it's something that takes a space that something else that I'm going to be dead with if I don't fill a space with....

[Derakon]

the rods and .. staff, of curing, seem completely redundant to me. after maybe my 3rd trip down to the dungeon, i can afford to stash 4-5K gold for CCW...

Yeah, like I said, if potions weren't so easy to come by, then the rods/staves would have more potential use. As it stands, there's zero reason outside of unlucky ironman games for the player to use a failure-prone item that IIRC doesn't even restore HP. Not that it should restore HP, it's just strictly worse in effect and utility than potions, because its only benefit, being replenishable, isn't relevant.

[wobbly]

honestly, i dont remember very well, but i thought potion of speed started generating around level 10. the thing is, they trivialize most low level uniques, such as the various orc captains, which all move at speed 10, and last long enough for the whole fight, doubling your damage output; add a potion of berserker rage and you are there.

The thing is a ?teleport & fight them later trivializes most low level uniques. !speed gives you the rush of taking them early, & it's a limited resource at that depth.

[Thraalbee]

Useful!

For ironman rods of curing are useful. I always keep them for a while. They allow you to take more risk regarding e.g. confusion without depleting resources.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

For ironman rods of curing are useful. I always keep them for a while. They allow you to take more risk regarding e.g. confusion without depleting resources.

+ 1 to that.

[Pete Mack]

Rods of curing were more useful in Ironman when there were still bronze dragons. Those guys were nasty

[Derakon]

Rods of curing were more useful in Ironman when there were still bronze dragons. Those guys were nasty

We could make chaos drakes more common! And add lesser variants so you have to deal with their effects earlier.

Imagine being confused, hallucinating, and drained of experience by a baby chaos drake at 400'. Sounds fun!

[luneya]

Or just cut the fail rate. If staves of curing were 0% fail for all character classes, and the rods something reasonably low, they would be useful but not overly valuable--they still only remove the common statuses, without healing HP or MP or curing the really nasty things, and so as the player advances in the game it will be more and more reasonable to dump them and just rely on CSW/CCW/heal potions. Or if you think automatic success is too powerful, how about making it so that the max possible fail rate on staff of curing is 5%, and the rod perhaps 10%? That would make these items at least reasonably useful without breaking anything in game balance.

[quarague]

after maybe my 3rd trip down to the dungeon, i can afford to stash 4-5K gold for CCW, some scrolls of satisfy hunger, drop to DL1, and rest long enough to stock 20-30 potions, not to mention another roll at the Black Market inventory stash. I've found *healing*, healing, pots of speed, rods of detection (frees up 2 inventory slot, as generally you have traps / items / doors), banishment, even a pot of experience that i could afford.
maybe ironman gear, ok, but even then it's an inventory slot for something which has limited use .. sure it can cure stun, but you would *still* need to heal those hp.

You certainly can play that way, essentially saying you expect to buy all consumables outside of the black market in unlimited quantities. Nothing wrong with that. But not everyone plays like that. Personally I find this way too tedious. When I play I just buy what's available and useful in town and that's it. If they don't stock something I want, I will have to do without it. This gives staffs/rods of curing a limited usefulness. I also play for low turn count, curing can help a little there as well.
That being said, I agree that the failure rate for these seems way to high. The proposal of bounding it above by 5% for staffs and 10% for rods seems very good to me.

[PowerWyrm]

For ironman rods of curing are useful. I always keep them for a while. They allow you to take more risk regarding e.g. confusion without depleting resources.

Exactly. For comp #194, I carried 4/5 of them almost till midgame to avoid wasting precious CSW then CCW to cure confusion or poison.