Class/magic feature branch

[Pete Mack]

@Derakon--true, with one exception. Playing artifactless, Gloves of Combat are the obvious choice for CON-handicapped mages. Those two points are a big deal, after 6 for a ring, and 2 for armor.

[Derakon]

The priest blunt-weapon penalty is clearly supposed to be an analogue to the mage icky-hands penalty. The main problem there from a gameplay perspective is that the vast majority of attractive late-game glove options give either FA or a DEX boost, meaning all arcane casters can use them without penalty. But most endgame weapons are not blessed. Granted that using an unblessed sharp weapon is not as crippling as using icky gloves, it's still weird that arcane casters mostly get to ignore this class feature while priests have to cope with it for the entire game.

Relatedly, have you considered making nature casters be penalized for wearing leather?

[mrfy]

If we're going to keep the restrictions on priests and sharp weapons (which I agree with) then we should include bows, crossbows, arrows and bolts.

[EpicMan]

"For reasons long forgotten, all priestly orders dictate their adherents are forbidden to shed blood with weapons - swords, daggers, and polearms. Since the dictates specifically mention blades and polearms, it leaves a loophole for blunt instruments such as staves or even maces and flails, and priests feel perfectly justified in slaying foes with such weapons, regardless of whether or not blunt impacts actually shed blood."

[Sky]

I say, a solid effort there, ol chum.

[Moving Pictures]

The new spellbooks are breaking the econony for players that like Angband the way god inteded it to be: with selling enabled.

I did not know that God intended free-market capitalism. But then, God says I'm supposed to kill things, as a priest by smacking my enemies to death with blunt instruments, but can wander into a locker of nasties and drop dispel evil until the little buggers pop out of their own skins and leave orc/ghoul/troll/dragon guts all over the place. In short, I think God's been nipping at the funny mushrooms, and his/her/them/they are kinda giving whackjob directives.

How's *that* for tying together two completely disconnected post topics?

[Gwarl]

I think DnD got it from a medieval joke:

Another weapon, the holy water sprinkler (from its resemblance to the aspergillum used in the Catholic Mass) was a morning star used by the English army in the sixteenth century and made in series by professional smiths. One such weapon can be found in the Royal Armouries and has an all-steel head with six flanges forming three spikes each, reminiscent of a mace but with a short thick spike of square cross section extending from the top. The wooden shaft is reinforced with four langets and the overall length of the weapon is 74.5 inches (189 cm).[5]

The term holy water sprinkler is also used to describe a type of military flail, this being the name for the weapon in French (goupillon).[6] It was (according to popular legend) the favored weapon of King John of Bohemia, who was blind, and used to simply lay about himself on all sides.[citation needed]

It is popularly believed that maces were employed by the clergy in warfare to avoid shedding blood 2 (sine effusione sanguinis). The evidence for this is sparse and appears to derive almost entirely from the depiction of Bishop Odo of Bayeux wielding a club-like mace at the Battle of Hastings in the Bayeux Tapestry, the idea being that he did so to avoid either shedding blood or bearing the arms of war.

I enjoy the trope because the term 'holy water sprinkler' is awesome

[Sky]

In dnd its because they are not allowed to draw blood
Thus only blunt weapons are allowed, such as slings and maces. Its part of them being holy, imposed by the god that grants them spellcasting abilities.

Ignore the fact that blunt weapons draw blood aplenty. Also, this has been changed in newer releases.

[wobbly]

I think I'd be less irked by "priests aren't swordsmen" then "priests don't like blood unless it's a crossbow or bashing things to a pulp". Random idea give them mage level melee with non-blessed sharpies & take away the spell penalty. That gets rid of swap to cast

[Whelk]

I'm not so sure - I actually kind of like the way [sharp weapon restrictions for priests] works. What do others think?

I'd love to see it re-evaluated, explained, re-factored, tweaked, expanded on, or if nothing satisfactory can be come up with, put up for removal consideration. I never understood it from either a thematic or a mechanical/balance standpoint. What about it do you like? I just don't understand why it was ever there in the first place, other than it's apparently some nostalgic hold-over from D&D, which was itself pretty much made up for the sake of adding a little flavor to the Cleric class, but without any real basis or explanation.

I do enjoy when non-sharp weapons get some love, so a class that is encouraged more than others to use them is neat, and I enjoy flavor and lore in general, but this one just never clicked with me. Maybe if there were more explanation and lore behind it. As is, it's pretty much "Priests can't wield sharp weapons without serious penalties because we (the game designers) don't want them to be able to." Why? Is some god/immortal being decreeing this? Is it some rule laid down by a particular priestly order? What is the reasoning behind this restriction? Why only sharp weapons, while literally any other means of inflicting violent death is kosher? It's okay to bash someone's skull in and spread their brains across the pavement with a mace strike, but it's not okay to stab them with a knife?

And is there an actual need, mechanics/gameplay-balance-wise, for the priest class to have so many weapons made significantly less useful or viable?

The idea has just never reconciled for me, but I could well be missing an important piece to the puzzle. I think having this particular restriction for the priest class could be neat and interesting, if there were only a convincing reason why it was there in the first place.

[fizzix]

I think the biggest problem with the dispel spells is that they are costed for having strong effects and average damage. If you have 10 monsters in LoS they are reasonably strong. But how often do you have 10 monsters in LoS? Very rarely. A line of ghouls is one of the better scenarios, and spear of light is a better way to take care of it. The second problem is it uses dXX as damage which is horribly inconsistent. I really dislike spell damage that's just a random number between 1 and N, the variance is far too high for my liking. (This goes for monster spells also.) Turn undead was useless because OoD was a far better option, always.

I think the best solution for these spells is for late game efficient clearing. They are costed appropriately for that, but they aren't useful in the dungeon books.

I disagree with luneya. The problem is not that the priest needs a mass sleep spell that buys them 1 or 2 turns. In fact the 1-2 turn extra was precisely the problem with the old spells. 1-2 turns does nothing for a monster that moves faster than you. The problem is that they need a single target sleep spell that buys them enough turns to get far enough away so that the cat/hydra/beorn won't wake up and track them down. All groups of non-evil monsters (I think) have pack mentality. And since priests have call light, getting trapped by these groups is more your fault (blink dogs/phase spiders notwithstanding). It's the fast moving single monster that's the issue here.

As far as resist heat and cold, I start missing it around the midgame. Which is now for my character.

[Sky]

The new spellbooks are breaking the econony for players that like Angband the way god inteded it to be: with selling enabled.

[Carnivean]

I'm not exactly sure what to do about the proliferation of books thing. I think having the half-casters sometimes getting their own books is good for clarity, but it does create more useless objects. On the other hand, having the other class books around is kind of nice for promoting curiosity about classes you aren't currently playing (for players who haven't played all the classes yet).

While the motivation you mentioned makes sense, is it really worth the aggravation of all the wrong books? It also makes a mockery in some cases of the level feelings. The wrong dungeon book is either annoying or frustrating, or a case of making the user turn off a feature of the game.

Is there actually a solid case for the retention of wrong-class books in the object generation?

[luneya]

I've now got a priest to CL21, DL19.


I didn't have this problem, but OK. Sanctuary was always deemed useless, but maybe with the new status effects some variant of that would be good. More on the spell pacing later.


I'm not exactly sure what to do about the proliferation of books thing. I think having the half-casters sometimes getting their own books is good for clarity, but it does create more useless objects. On the other hand, having the other class books around is kind of nice for promoting curiosity about classes you aren't currently playing (for players who haven't played all the classes yet).

Sanctuary is useless because it only affects adjacent monsters. It really should affect everything in LOS, just like a staff activation. Perhaps make it low-level and cheap, but with the drawback that it only puts monsters to sleep lightly, so its main benefit is to buy time for escape by teleport spells that have higher fail rates. Or keep it as a higher-level and more expensive spell, but make it put the monsters into the deepest possible sleep state, so that a caster with decent stealth can proceed to fight other monsters without worrying that the slept monsters will wake.

On the book proliferation thing, how about having it so that each class has its own spellbooks, but only two sets of spellbooks are generated per game? For example, say I'm playing as a priest. I'll find my green priest books, and in addition I will find one randomly chosen set of red books. One game, those might be the mage books, next game they might be the rogue books, and so forth. If I were a warrior (and thus had no spellbooks of my own), both sets of books would be randomized. That way, we get the flavor benefits of having unique books for each class, and of people seeing all of the books without actually playing as every class, but there's no increase in junk over previous release versions.

[Nick]

I've now got a priest to CL21, DL19.

The early game for priests can be kind of brutal. Running into an OoD monster (like grip or fang) on dlevel 1 is usually a death sentence. In fact unless you are playing a strong class, it can be quite hard to kill anything until you get bless online. I would recommend having priests automatically start with bless, or if preferred, making bless the only level 1 spell. (I'd also lower the mp cost to 1).

Yes, fair enough.

Priests have a tough time with non-evil monsters, especially fast moving ones like cats. In the past this was mostly ok, because you got portal around level 7. But portal is now in a dungeon book and this makes the early-midgame very hairy. (In normal games you just buy _Tele, so maybe this is still ok) I would recommend giving priest a survival spell early. Something like hold monster or scare monster might be good enough. But if you wanted to be more flavorful, you could imagine a spell called "pacify" which is a single, smite target (ball radius 1) spell that causes any non-evil monster to be healed to full health and fall asleep with max sleep.

I didn't have this problem, but OK. Sanctuary was always deemed useless, but maybe with the new status effects some variant of that would be good. More on the spell pacing later.

Orb of draining is super powerful, but I think a priest spell that devastates undead/demons would be a very flavorful addition and would prevent them from being one trick ponies. Something like "bolt of holiness" which only affects undead and does a healthy dose of damage to undead and demons would be a nice addition. It would be in the town books and maybe unlocked at level 20-25 or so.

Dispel Evil and Dispel Undead are both too costly and too inefficient to be anything but mop-up spells in the late game. They have no business being in the town books I think.

I had intended for the Dispels to be staples, but you are quite right that they overlap too much with OoD and are too expensive. I wonder if cutting their mana cost to less than OoD's would be successful?

The pointy penalty is still annoying and frustrating. It seems to me that this is a good candidate to remove when doing a major class rebalance.

I'm not so sure - I actually kind of like the way it works. What do others think?

I greatly miss having access to detect doors and stairs and sense surroundings. There were many levels where I had to explore more than 2/3 of the level before finding a stairs. I had an especially frustrating cavern level, where I had to backtrack through the whole level to find the one stairs, since I was stuck with radius one light. (The cavern and labyrinth levels really need to be either redesigned or removed. They are not fun.)

I see the issue with detecting stairs, but I'm trying to avoid just handing out all the utility spells to everyone. Maybe a scroll?

As for level design, I haven't really played enough to get a sense. I just had a really fun labyrinth, but it was small - maybe restrict both of those level types in size.

I also miss (slightly) having upgraded bless spells that don't wear off after so few turns. These spells (holy chant and prayer) were problematic and somewhat pointless in the old version, but maybe we can improve them somehow.

Bless is supposed to scale adequately with player level - maybe that needs more work.

Another spell I miss is resist heat and cold. This was a very important spell for a low-hp class. I feel like priests should still have it.

I've tried make the resist spells a bit more thematic too, but maybe. When did you notice the lack of it?

Also what happened to cure/slow/neutralize poison? This isn't super important, but getting rid of poison helps a lot to avoid the tedium of waiting out poison so you can rest.

This is a thematic thing too - resist and cure poison I'm seeing as more nature magic things.

I can't cast it yet, but the Heal spell in the first dungeon book is super costly. Maybe this is for the best. If I ever get to the late game, I'll mention how this went.

I can't really tell yet either.

For dungeon books, it might be worth considering how DaJ did book drops. Basically it dropped, book 5, book 6, book 7, etc. and what book that was depended on what class you were playing. So if you got a dungeon book drop it was always for your class. The other dungeon books just didn't show up. Since we have many more book types, I think this would help cut down on clutter.

So there are several issues with books in this branch - proliferation of dungeon books affecting level feelings and just cluttering up the place; spells needed early being in dungeon books; mana costs and fail rates. I'm trying to attack them bit by bit. In particular, I think book 3 for mages and priests probably should be town books.

I'm not exactly sure what to do about the proliferation of books thing. I think having the half-casters sometimes getting their own books is good for clarity, but it does create more useless objects. On the other hand, having the other class books around is kind of nice for promoting curiosity about classes you aren't currently playing (for players who haven't played all the classes yet).

One possible bug in gameplay. call light should light up adjacent walls to stairs. I found that it didn't when I was trying to navigate without wielding a light (I've been having some light problems this game... another thing that only happens in ironman games)

OK, thanks.

This was all very helpful, thanks. All the new classes are really still fairly rough around the edges, but I feel like progress is being made.