Class/magic feature branch

[EpicMan]

...And so this 26-year old hobbit kid, with wavy brown hair, decided to go off and become a necromancer, learning to dispel life, turn into a vampire and spread darkness. "You are a credit to your family" ?!?!

It didn't say it was a nice family...

[Ingwe Ingweron]

It didn't say it was a nice family...

Tha Addams Family.

[Huqhox]

I think everything Voovus said is very sensible; playing a necromancer is very different because of not worrying about light sources and as stated I think that needs to be pushed more to differentiate. I was playing a human nec so relied on infravision a lot and tried to play without a light source. Maybe a spell to cancel the light effect would be useful so you could still carry e.g. the Arkenstone or other artifacts that have a light effect but temporari;y remove it for battles to give you a bit of edge.

[Nick]

This seems to have gone very quiet. Nick, here are some comments on the Druid and the Necromancer. I completed the game once with each. Feel free to ignore the suggestions - I don't know whether you find "it moans" (without suggestions) or "it messes with your mind" (with suggestions) more annoying. And apologies for the length...

Don't apologise, this is very helpful.

The druid was a lot of fun. I played before the removal of +5speed to the fox, so these comments may be out of date. I spent 99% of the time in fox form, and biting Morgoth's head off as a fox is perhaps a little silly. But if you're planning to nerf the fox, please strengthen the bear correspondingly (and maybe put it at the start of book 2?), as the fox had roughly the appropriate strength for a melee character. The "+1 attack/round" is also an interesting dynamic, as it makes heavy weapons useful in the early game that you'd never use otherwise. And Glaive of Pain was great! In fact, a "+2 attack/round" (say, for the bear) could make the melee-based druid feel even more different from warrior & the usual gang. What would also have been very convenient is if one could drop and pick up items while shapeshifted.

Being unable to use items at all while shapeshifted was a deliberate drawback. There's certainly scope for playing with the balance of the shapes. I'm envisaging that some races will be better for melee-druids and some for caster-druids.

The necromancer seems to need quite a lot more work, I'm afraid.

This is unsurprising - I had a clear theme, but a lot of the spells were new and my attempts at balance were largely guesswork.

Darkness: I really like the idea, and the different feel it gives to the character from the rest. However, the tiny vision radius is frustrating, and as soon as I found the Phial I immediately switched to using a light source and spamming light area with the phial or a rod. Any chance of increasing the Nec's sight radius in darkness to, say, 2 base + 1 per 5 levels, i.e. 2 at the start and 12 at the end? A bonus of +4 Con in darkness, instead of +3 Stealth, would also be a much better incentive not to use a light source, especially for high level characters, since the difference between 18/160 and 18/200 Con is massive. Equivalently, it could be a -4Con penalty in light. This would also make the Nec vulnurable to creatures that have a light radius, like druids, priests, paladins, the ainur and fire-based monsters.

I like the increasing sight radius; the light/dark difference being CON not stealth I think is genius, better both thematically and for gameplay.

Disenchant: this is effectively the Nec's Orb of Draining, and I spent most of the game throwing it at everything in sight. Virtually nothing resists it, Annihilation is only 50% more powerful but costs 3 times as much and doesn't even affect everyone, Unleash Chaos has nasty side effects (waking everyone and possibly polymorphing something into a time vortex, gravity hound, shrieker mushroom patch etc). The de-magicising effect is a nice touch and a nice bonus. I found Storm of Darkness also fairly decent.

OK, I didn't expect Disenchant to be quite that effective, but I think I'm mostly fine with that. Annihilation should be worth it at least some of the time, and Unleash Chaos was meant to be more fun than useful If someone thinks of a better chaos spell, I'd be happy to go with that; the polymorph effect is amusing, but tends to reduce the utility of chaos as an attack element.

Curse: tried a few times, but didn't find it powerful enough to justify the hp cost. How much damage is it actually meant to do?

It's 5dS (6dS from CL48) where S is 50 + %HP the monster has lost - so it gets more powerful as the monster gets more damaged. Should be good for finishing things off.

Note that pretty much all the necro spells have high variance; playing a necro is meant to feel risky.

Vampire form: nice idea, but I found it impractical. There are too many creatures out there that can take off >400hp without first asking you for permission, so the 50% life cost is a possible suicide.

Maybe cut the cost but also the HP recovery?

Undead: in the early game, undead are some of the most dangerous opponents for the Nec, which seems silly. The problem is that they are immune to Nether Bolt, some are immune to Sleep Evil, and the Banish Undead spell doesn't teleport them nearly far enough for the mana cost. I'd suggest the rather extreme solution to make Banish Undead actually banish them, "Banishment"-style. It would mean that the Nec would never have to fight non-unique undead, which would make the class much more special... and make the Nec the only one happy to see graveyards.

Yeah, this is a thorny one. O necromancers have Dispel Undead, and that always felt to me like the opposite of what they should be doing. The "delete" meaning of Banish is certainly a possibility, although would just increasing the teleoport distance and/or cutting the mana cost be enough?

Bat Form: the +3 speed often gets effectively lost due to overweight caused by the loss of strength.

Bat was kind of meant to be intro to shapeshifting for necros, plus the odd bit of situational utility; I see the point of speed vs STR making it a washout. Maybe lose the -STR and instead have a bigger minus to combat stats.

Noxious Fumes: found it too weak to be useful. Kobolds are immune to it, and orcs are too strong.

More powerful but also more damaging to the player, then?

Shadow shift: is this in every way worse than phase door, or have I missed something?

It's meant to be an escape rather than a tactical fighting move; maybe it should be longer distance and less mana.

Dispel Life: nice to get rid of hordes of nonsense in the late game, but has too high fail rate early on to be a proper battle spell. I played with max possible starting Int (18/50), but even so couldn't sensibly use it before raising Int a couple of times.

OK, will dropping the fail rate fix it? Is the mana cost OK?

Warg form: Nec is very bad at melee, and the temporary berserk boost isn't sufficient to fix it. But then, maybe my character was just too magic oriented.

This might be another case of some races/builds will love this and some won't. Maybe necro melee being too weak is the problem.

Crush: Um. No disrespect, but when running around 4000 feet down in Angband, my Nec would like to instantly get rid of ancient dragons, not metallic centipedes...

This was meant to be how you described Dispel Life - useful for clearing the field. Looks like it's not powerful enough - maybe double the player's level? Or is it just too weak and too similar to Dispel Life?


Thanks for all the comments, that's really useful. Part of the quietness on this thread is because I'm taking a long time getting the Command spell in the form I want it. The upside of that is that to do so I'm having to write into the game the capacity for monsters to be able to attack other monsters, which is something I can see being useful in other (strictly limited) places.

[PowerWyrm]

The upside of that is that to do so I'm having to write into the game the capacity for monsters to be able to attack other monsters, which is something I can see being useful in other (strictly limited) places.

You could check how I implemented that for Necromancers and Summoners in PWMAngband.

[Antoine]

"Curse" needs a new name I think

[Voovus]

Thanks for the nice response, Nick. (Not to mention for all your work!)

Thanks also for the data regarding the Curse spell: that really clears things up. Incidentally, as we're in play-testing mode, could you possibly add such data to the spell descriptions? This would be particularly useful for the shapeshifting spells. For instance, you mentioned that Pukelman gives poison immunity: this is very powerful, but not something that's easy to randomly spot (...unless you let a Drolem breathe on you while not having any poison resistance). It would also be very nice if resistances granted by shapeshifting would show up in the character stats screen, though I appreciate that this might not be easy to do.

Shapeshifting: I was really just referring to dropping/picking up items, rather than using them. It's a little tedious to go in and out of fox form every time I'd like to pick up a potion, scroll etc.

Vampire form: maybe inflict massive bleeding on the player, instead of the direct hp cost?

Undead: thorny indeed. In terms of the game dynamics, teleporting them far away should be sufficient. But, thematically, it might make more sense if necromancers would regard the undead as friends rather than enemies, which is why I suggested banishing them completely. If you call the spell "Undead Pact" or something else that's undead-friendly, it might suggest that the undead agree to leave the player alone, rather than get disintegrated by holy fires. (If necromancers are morally meant to be part of the "Let Undead Live" league, you could even stop all undead from spawning in the game in the first place...)

Noxious Fumes: probably increasing damage and poison to player would do the trick. This spell relies on the player having a way of getting rid of poison, which makes it different from the usual lot. I haven't tried, but I guess that kobold necromancers should love it.

Shadow shift: ok, for an escape spell a longer teleport distance would be good, so as not to be overshadowed by phase door scrolls. As a side note, nowadays you can presumably make a buff that dramatically increases walking speed (say, by factor 10 for 2 turns), which could be the basis for an alternative type of escape mechanism.

Dispel life: my guess is that dropping the fail rate should fix it. The mana cost felt about right. In the late game, you can get rid of trolls with a few casts of this, but not really of anything more powerful. So there's still space for an effective Crush.

Crush: personally, I'd like this to be much much stronger, possibly for a higher mana cost. However, that could be a side effect of my personal play style. Something like: kill anything whose natural depth is at most 2 x Clvl - 50? In other words, necromancers of level 35, 40, 45, 50 would crush creatures from depth 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, respectively.



Things to look forward to as a druid shapeshifter: "You bite the hairy mold." Ewww.

[Nick]

New builds are up on the build page for Windows and MacOS, with changes being:

• Commanded monsters now melee other monsters
• Changes to necromancers along the lines of my recent discussion with Voovus upthread

Note that I have not yet made shapechange properties appear on the character sheet, and have not done all the fixes (Banish Undead is unchanged, for example).

You could check how I implemented that for Necromancers and Summoners in PWMAngband.

I was already part way through my own plans, so just continued; I wonder how different the two are?

[Voovus]

Game crashes very quickly with the new necromancer. (Windows version, gec620583.) Haven't encountered the crash with other characters, but only tested it for a few minutes.

[Nick]

Game crashes very quickly with the new necromancer. (Windows version, gec620583.) Haven't encountered the crash with other characters, but only tested it for a few minutes.

When doing anything in particular? My initial guess is it's related to the Command spell.

[Nick]

Crash found and fixed, will do an update a little later.

[Nick]

New Windows and MacOS builds now up on the build page, with these changes:

• Crashes fixed
• Player can learn about shape properties as they would for object properties
• Shape properties now appear on the player resist screen

Probably worth noting how necromancers and darkness work now. I went with -2 CON in light (ie player is carrying a light, standing on a lit grid, or next to lava or a monster which gives off light) and +2 CON in the darkness.

[PowerWyrm]

I was already part way through my own plans, so just continued; I wonder how different the two are?

Summoners have pure summon spells, so you get different "pets" from different spells (golems, vortices, hydras...). Necromancers have "control" spells, which only work on undead, so you find an undead monster, use a control spell on it, and make it your slave.

[jevansau]

One odd bug I think I've seen with build 110 is that breaths that should move the player - gravity, inertia seem to be moving the breathing monster instead. I've definitely seen it with kavlax (in a vault if that matters), and I think with Inertia hounds. I don't currently have a save in a position to reproduce the issue.

[Nick]

One odd bug I think I've seen with build 110 is that breaths that should move the player - gravity, inertia seem to be moving the breathing monster instead. I've definitely seen it with kavlax (in a vault if that matters), and I think with Inertia hounds. I don't currently have a save in a position to reproduce the issue.

Confirmed, but I haven't worked out what's causing it yet.

EDIT: Found it, the teleport effect is getting the wrong parameters and blinking the monster instead of the player. Will work out the best way to fix it.