Class/magic feature branch

[Sky]

remember when *destruct did not affect artifacts?

i used to use it to sort them out from the rubbish.

[fizzix]

Just to frame the "no banishment in vaults" discussion. It used to be the case that artifacts were not affected by *Destruction*. So a common technique, when the only gear you really needed was artifacts, was to go to a vault and destruct all the monsters and uniques. and then claim the one or two artifacts. When we changed the behavior of *destruction* to also remove artifacts there were a lot of complaints that are eerily similar to the current complaints about banishment.

Personally I think a lot of things are conspiring here. I'm going to write down some of my thoughts on this, but maybe it's useful to put them in a different thread, since it's not particularly related to the feature branch.

[Thraalbee]

... It always felt wrong to me that you could do it, but it looks like the weight of opinion is against me. I will revert for now.

I'm with Nick on this. But most people seem not to be, and it's not like we have to use it just because it is there.

[Nick]

Functionally identical to confining it to vaults, since the vast majority of vaults where you'd want to [ab]use banishment are greater vaults.

My point here was that a lot of the complaints are about not being able to tell what's a vault, and it does seem a bit silly to forbid banishment from interesting rooms.

What is the goal of preventing banishment in vaults?

It always felt wrong to me that you could do it, but it looks like the weight of opinion is against me. I will revert for now.

[emulord]

If vaults had special floor tiles that mean "unbanishable square" I feel like it would be more obvious. Then we could create vaults that are selectively banishable too.

[Derakon]

There has certainly been a lot of whingeing about the banishment issue (some of it not from you ); how does confining the banish ban to greater vaults sound?

Functionally identical to confining it to vaults, since the vast majority of vaults where you'd want to [ab]use banishment are greater vaults.

What is the goal of preventing banishment in vaults?

[Ingwe Ingweron]

I've always viewed the vault-banishing thing as something that you're either spending rare consumables on, or only able to do because you're a high-level mage who's already found the last spellbook.

I agree. Apart from the Morgoth fight, I don't use banishment, EXCEPT for what appears to be a very lucrative vault, and then only for getting rid of Q's, v's or Z's that are always awake and going to breath or summon or scream, waking everything up. Vaults are dangerous enough without the Q, v, and Z (sometimes a ,) to deal with, even though they are comparatively low-level monsters in their own right. If I wish to use a valuable resource to deal with those critters, I think I should be able to. And a mage, I see it as one of the compensations for the great difficulty in keeping the mage alive until that point.

Not being able to tell an area is a special room that is banish immune was also a pain, resulting in wasted otherwise precious end-game items.

And now, Morgoth must not be fought in a vault, because of his summons and the inability to get rid of them.

[Nick]

Don't know that I like the general philosophy underlying many of the feature branch changes, now that I've done a paladin and rogue runthrough. Relying more on devices and consumables is all well and good, but it just means playing more like a warrior. And I think the distribution of some of those consumables/devices needs to be looked at. (E.g., stone to mud seems very rare deep in the dungeon.) The inability to Banish or Mass Banish in vaults or special rooms (often difficult to identify, resulting in wasted scrolls, charges, or mana) is what, supposed to "balance" the game? It just makes the game more tedious.

Thanks for the testing and the feedback.

I see your point about using devices and consumables. The aim here is to make the magic realms feel a bit more different from each other - it seems to me that in current V there are a bunch of spells that everyone gets for basically "he gets it why can't I" reasons. It's likely that I've overdone this a bit. And drop rates certainly need to be looked at.

There has certainly been a lot of whingeing about the banishment issue (some of it not from you ); how does confining the banish ban to greater vaults sound?. I think there are actually a few issues with vaults in 4.1 - there are still too many occurring, and Gwarl has kindly pointed out to me how much more sensibly they are handled in his variant. So I probably want to do a bit of a rework anyway.

[Derakon]

This is the kind of thing that is usually solved by just going and winning already. Or alternately, by playing ironman, so you can't scum infinitely for vaults to loot.

That said, it might be worth removing Staves of Banishment, or making them impossible to recharge, since they're currently the only way non-mages can (theoretically) get access to unlimited banishment. I've always viewed the vault-banishing thing as something that you're either spending rare consumables on, or only able to do because you're a high-level mage who's already found the last spellbook.

[Pete Mack]

Philip--yeah, that can be boring. But it can be exciting too. Say, if you have 370HP and 3 base speed at DL 70+

[Philip]

Personally, when I ran a mage through the deeper levels in V, and would mass banish every critter from a vault, TO the uniques I didn't feel like killing, kill the rest, and loot the vault, it felt very tedious. Superficially rewarding perhaps, but tedious. The only challenges I couldn't easily remove entirely were uniques, and they were quite easy to remove temporarily. Not to mention they are generally fairly weak outside of potential for burst damage, so even the challenge they provided was not impressive. Even Morgoth eventually went down like a chump, which was rather disappointing. This does somewhat suggest that banishable vaults are not the (main) problem, that being that the deeper levels are boring outside of a couple uniques who any character who made it there is at liberty to ignore anyway, but I feel like it's at the very least worth a try.

By contrast, in O/FA, which has vaults immune to banish/destruct, vaults are a place where stealth can suddenly matter, calculated risks and difficult decisions are made.

It would however be nice to have some form of visible distinction between vault tiles and non-vault tiles (even for teleportation purposes).

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Finished second run-through in the feature branch. This time with a High-Elf Rogue. Don't remember once successfully stealing from a unique (have they been made immune?).

Don't know that I like the general philosophy underlying many of the feature branch changes, now that I've done a paladin and rogue runthrough. Relying more on devices and consumables is all well and good, but it just means playing more like a warrior. And I think the distribution of some of those consumables/devices needs to be looked at. (E.g., stone to mud seems very rare deep in the dungeon.) The inability to Banish or Mass Banish in vaults or special rooms (often difficult to identify, resulting in wasted scrolls, charges, or mana) is what, supposed to "balance" the game? It just makes the game more tedious.

If the reason for rune-id, trap and door changes, streamlining ignore, etc., was to make the game far less tedious, the whole Banish prohibition just serves to make large steps in the opposite direction. To a lesser extent, so does the new consumables/device reliance "balance". My feeling so far - playing the feature branch is just tedious. The completely new classes might be interesting (have been working through the changed classes first), but, all-in-all, it's more fun playing Vanilla than suffering the tedium imposed in the feature branch.

[Nick]

Any logic to the distance the Cloak Colannon activation teleports @? Namely, "about 60137074270f the largest distance you can go".

I think that's self-explanatory

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Any logic to the distance the Cloak Colannon activation teleports @? Namely, "about 60137074270f the largest distance you can go".

[Ingwe Ingweron]

One of the oddest bugs I've ever encountered. Playing the feature branch on angband.live. Returned to the game where I'd left off, on DL35, but the Phial of Galadriel no longer provided light. @ wasn't blind, and the activation still worked. But walking around, no light. Then @ read a scroll of word of recall (while standing in a lighted room, since @ couldn't "see" in the darkened hallway), but instead of being yanked upwards, @ was yanked downwards 5 levels just like a deep descent scroll. Confirmed the message history and inventory, and there was no doubt the scroll was Word of Recall. Gwarl confirmed he'd made no changes to the feature branch.

On the new level, Galadriel again provided light, and a couple levels later, upon finding a Word of Recall scroll, recall again worked properly. *Very Strange*