[CF-Devel] poisoning & demonologic tower

[Andreas Vogl]

Mark wrote:
>
     
      I guess I could look at the code, but how does resistance to
     
     >
     
      poison affect it?
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      Does it just reduce the likelihood of being poisoned?  If so, thats not
     
     >
     
      very useful if your fighting a monster with poison attacks, because you'll
     
     >
     
      get hit by it so much, your going to fail one.    Reduced duration may
     
     fall
>
     
      into a similar case.  Sure, duration being really short is useful if your
     
     >
     
      just hit by a poison cloud, but once again, if your fighting a monster,
     
     >
     
      you'll probably get re-poisoned before it wears off.
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      I really don't know how poison works, but it could very well be a case
     
     where
>
     
      getting 90% may not help out a lot in the above circumstance.
     
     
Poison resistance affects both likelihood of getting sick and the poison
damage. I think high level poison hurting that much has three reasons:
First, most players don't wear any poison-resist usually.
Second, once a player is sick, the poison strikes at rather high frequency.
While other attacks (fire, cold, physical...) hit at lower rate due to
the players' ac, poison is not affected by ac (once the player got sick).
Third (and most important), the player looses stats while sick, and he
receives both poison attacks and the "ordinary" attacks from monsters
all whith reduced stats.

There's plenty of ways where poisoning could be adjusted. But I find it
quite difficult to see what mixture of duration, damage and contagiousness
(relative to resistance) would be best.
The current scheme doesn't seem extremely bad to me though.

>
     
      As said, protection potions for most attacktypes could be added
     
     >
     
      (confusion/slow/paralyze being another - maybe a potion of free action?)
     
     >
     
      what about potion protection from drain, which is 100% protection, and
     
     >
     
      reducing the current items to 90%?  I think that would be 'more balancing'
     
     >
     
      - right now, everyone gets 100% immunity to drain fairly early, and never
     
     >
     
      care about draining monsters again - I would like to add that fear back in
     
     >
     
      the gain.  At least with 90% resistance, you have enough time to say
     
     >
     
      'oh $@!$', run away, and drink your potion before coming back.  The math
     
     on
>
     
      this gets tricky, as the grimreaper tries to take 10% of your exp at that
     
     >
     
      time, modified by your resistance. but if you have 90% resistance, even if
     
     >
     
      you get hit all 10%, your not losing too terribly much (although, the way
     
     >
     
      the levels are, at higher levels this could be more a pain)..
     
     
I definitly don't like the idea of draining resistance 90%. It's similar to
the issue with acid corrosion. The main problem is that a player has no way
to determine a monster's attacktypes. You would be surprised to know how
many special monsters have draining attacks.
I just can't imagine players being happy about loosing loads of their
hardly gained levels, before realizing they found another draining monster.

About resistance potions for paralyze, confusion and slow:
The problem is that these resistance don't really work. Since these
attacktypes
inflict "effects" rather than damage, there's no true partial resistance.
The effect can be ON and OFF, similar: A player can be immune or not,
basically.
That's the reason why 100% resist. on equipment exists for these
attacktypes.
And while these exist, potions don't make a lot of sense.

If we want to change this, we should first try to tweak the attack-routines
to give more visible results for resistances to paralyze/confusion/slow.

Andreas V.