Acid & Drain Re: [CF-Devel] DB's wish list

[Mark Wedel]

David Hurst wrote:
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      Ok, I was just fiddling with the gods abit more, and I have run into the wall that is devourers and gnarg =). I think the problem lies mostly in the numbers of enemy monsters a god has, and how powerful attack type and spells are. In the case of gnarg, everyone of these points is on the bad side =). Added to that devourers has the nastiest negatives in the game, - fire resist and no fire spells.
     
     
 The enemies problem can be fixed somewhat by making sure there are enough
enemies of the god.  But I have a feeling the problem isn't as much that there
are not many enemies to the god, but that they don't appear on enough maps in
enough quantity to be useful.


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      I think devourers really needs to either get a better attacktype and dump drain, or fix drain. My wish list for this would be, to make drain take award 100% of the exp it steals to the attacker. If this is a monster, that exp is added to the monsters at some rate (possibly not 100%). If a player all that it means is you start getting the exp before you have finished killing it, sort of useful. Currently, devourers players get 1/3 or is it 2/3's of the exp they deserver cause most of it is lost in the drain attack. This is seriously dumb.
     
     
 I'm pretty sure that 'bug' comes into place to prevent player to player
draining (eg, player 1 has lots of exp but wants more of it physical lets say,
so player 2 comes and drains him and player 1 drains him back and now its in
physical (note that in effect, more of player 2 exp is also in physical unless
he used a spell to drain).

 I think this might have been more a problem when drain might have depended more
on level.  I don't see much problems with players getting their values
re-adjusted as above (since the amount drained and amount awarded is already
adjusted for resistance, no problem about someone getting lots more if they are
90% resistant to drain).

 I notice that there is also code to gain hp if you drain.  However, for this to
hpappen, you need to be higher level than that you are beating up, and even
there, there are some different odds.  Personally, I think removing that level
comparison and also adding mana drain could be interesting (in the case of mana
drain, you gain a mana point and the creature does lose a mana point).     Makes
it more difficult for the creature to cast spells, and easier for you.  Every
hit shouldn't necessary award mana or hp, but maybe 1 in 5 or something (easy
enough to adjust that value).

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      It is generally agreed that acid and drain are the two most annoying attack types. Both can cost you a very large deal of permanent damage in a few short seconds. Forget your drain protection once when fighting a wizard, and zip there goes 30+ levels =). Fight some acid monster without your acid prot (and in lythanders case any acid protection) and zip all your items are permantly damaged.
     
     
 Too many creatures probably have drain and acid.  Back in the 'old' days,
pretty much only grim reapers had drain, and only a a handful of monster (acid
sphered, black puddings, and acid blobs) had acid attacks.   Grim reapers
disappear after 10 hits I believe, so in most cases, if there was only one grim
reaper, that meant 1 or maybe 2 lost levels.  The acid creatures tended to move
slow enough that you could run away after perhaps getting hit with it once.

 Problem is more that lots of monsters have gotten acid and drain attacks to
make them tougher, and in some cases, I don't think they make a lot of sense.  

 Note that many of the really good items don't have a material, and thus don't
get affected (eg, dragon armor, artifact weapons, etc). 


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      I wish that a smith could repair damage to a weapon at some cost (it may not be linear). I also welcome some serious suggestions as to fixing these seriously broken gods, they aren't fun and they attract newbies like moths to a candle. I am currently in a developing mood, so if people don't response I shall consider this an invitation to implement it =\.
     
     
 The thing that always made repairing items more difficult is that you need to
know what the original value of the item was, which means that needs to get
stored away.

 Now, we could make the improve weapon scrolls similar to the improve damage,
eg, it just increases the + of the item and nothing else.  Right now, however,
the code i such that the max enchantment on the scroll is based on the person
using it.  Thus, a level 20 person can only make it +3, but a level 50 person
could make it +6, and then give it to that level 20 person without a problem. 
That seems a little odd (power of a scroll should really be independent of that
using it.  The weapon improvement stuff falls into that category - you can
improve a weapon beyond your ability to use it.

 I think a more interesting approach would be to remove such a cap, but perhaps
make a chance of an item being destroyed.  Maybe allow all armor up to +2 and
weapons to +4 for sure, but after that, impose some percentage of failure (like
15) for each plus.  So to make that armor +3 implies a 15% chance of failure. 
To make it from +3 to +4 means 30%, etc.  This effectively puts a cap on it at
+9 (but you had a 90% chance of failure to go form +8 to +9). It gives players
with lots of money something to try for if they want.

 But it does mean that if a player wants to make that +4 longsword, and have a
+2, they can do it reasonably easily at low level (just need a couple improve
weapon scrolls and hope your lucky).  

 Alternatively, you could make nothing except +0 a sure thing, which explains
the rareness of the items in the dungeons (harder to do and most don't make it
to that point).  but this is all just a variation on the same concept, but that
concept would allow you to potentially repair your items (or you may just
completely kill them, but you could at least always bring it back to be just
+0).