Bay 12 Games Forum

I shall send petition the Bishop (Piety 2, Etiquette 1) to aid Sir Kyle's proposal as well.

Is anyone else on the connection?

Name: Mehlenna Blusterant
Description: An paunchy woman who is both incredibly elderly and incredibly boring. Wears large glasses, a white beehive and prefers mauve dresses.
How she came to the court: Mehlenna is a long time civil servant, having started out as a lowly scribe. She got to her current position out of pure seniority, being the oldest and most foggiest in the entire bureaucracy.

"I suppose I did get a little carried away there. You have my word that I shall be more careful in the future."

MrVoid: If I ever do something that would destroy the world, please have my character change his mind as soon as he realizes. Unless I specifically say I want to destroy the world, I guess.

Tornos goes into the second dimension and explores the parallels between creation and destruction. If the Creators can change the form of a creation, then surely Tornos, the great Destroyer, can shape destruction just as deftly.

Tornos uses the power of the eternal darkness to attempt to protect a patch of land on one of the asteroids from the magic stone rain. Ideally by infusing the asteroids with the power to resist destruction themselves, or by creating a giant flaming barrier above it if the first idea doesn't pan out. 20 points toward both approachs.

Tornos will volunteer as much of his 100 Destruction as is required to seal off the remainder of the tunnels and use the rest to carve out new passages, ever closer to the planet's core.

To put it in perspective: If we assume that there are an average of 2 hard fights per floor, and a hard fight has an average of a 5% chance of killing you if you don't run away from it, then a character who does not run from hard fights has a 1-0.95^104 = 99.517% chance of dying to a fight they should have run away from on their way to getting a three rune ascension.

Evaporation would probably still be massively overpowered at 3.  It can mimic several (good) level 6 spells.

Realistically, at 3 mana, Evaporate is going to be used as a slightly more costly version of Mephetic Cloud or a really cheap version of Poisonous Cloud. While theoretically you could produce Freezing, Mutagenic and Flame clouds, in practice you weren't because you didn't have an unlimited supply of those potions. I can see the argument that 3 mana is too cheap for Poisonous Cloud, but you have to keep in mind that you're expending limited resources (poison potions) to pull that trick off. It's not like you could spam it freely at that price.

Dig is a situationally fun spell/ability. If you have some way to see through walls (Ashenzari, Deep Dwarf, a lucky Demonspawn mutation, or, more recently, Formicids) then being able to path through said walls is highly useful. If you don't have that ability, you're basically only going to use it for digging boltholes, which is less exciting, but still a valid tactic in my eyes.

Summon Scorpions was important for Venom Mages wanting transition into Summoning instead of Conjuration. It was also the go-to tactic for Summoners facing the Spider Nest, an early Ant Vault or Killer Bee swarms, given that it was the only summon with poison you're guaranteed to have access to. It also had the advantage of letting you put out a buttload of chaff at once, since it could do up to 8 scorpions.

Demonic Horde was the high level version of Summon Butterflies, Putting 8 imps in between you and the Executioner in one turn was much more useful than laying down 8 butterflies, since they had actual resistances and could occasionally take more than one hit to kill.

Shielding and Ugly Things, were admittedly, not very useful. I could see cutting them, if there really wasn't a way to make them useful.

It takes ages to get two stars with either TSO or Zin, I'm not sure if you'd even get that before temple.

You'd start with two stars of piety, just like Healers do.

This is weird because you haven't actually said what the problem with their current approach is, other than the fact that their approach involved changing a few spells.

The issue with summoning is that the dev team hates it when players use tactics to minimize their exposure to danger. They hate pillar dancing, they hate hiding in corridors, they hate attacking stuff that can't see you and they hate anything that can be used as a barrier between the monsters and the character. With summoning, that's all there is to the school. The whole point of summoning monsters is so that you can hide behind them and not get attacked, or use them to break chases, or get them to eat hits for you. Players want to use the spells for things the devs don't want the players to be able to do.

The current approach to "fixing" this appears to be: A] sharply limit the number of summons a player can have, and B] replace all of the good chaff summoning spells with silly gimmick spells like Guardian Golem and Lightning Spire. That doesn't really fix the problem at all, it just means that players need more spell types and to spend more mana to get the desired amount of chaff going. A better solution would be to make the chaff itself dangerous (disloyal summons), to introduce a choice between being safe and being able to kill things (summons that ignore you if you run out of mana) or to give players a reason to not treat summons as expendable (permanent costs for permanent summons).

I disagree!

With enemies that require specific counters (like flaming scimitars against hydras as a sword wielder, or some poison resist against killer bees, or negative energy resistance against shadow dragons) you're going to bring the counter, or you're going to die. That's not a tactical choice. That's just saying that if you want to do Swamp, you have to ditch some of your best items first. With ammunition, you're going to pick whichever does the most overall damage and take that. Everything else gets left behind if you can't carry it. Due to the food clock and out of depth spawning, you don't want to be running back to your stash for every situational encounter.

It's not even a balance question. Spellcasters get new abilities through weightless spells. Warriors get their new abilities through heavy weapons and heavy armour. Making item weight more meaningful sounds like it would make the game more interesting and tactical, but if you actually tried to implement it, you'd quickly realize that all you're arbitrarily boning non-casters.