All XP Evocations
Currently evocable items use three exhaustion mechanics:
- XP recharging (Lightning Rod, Tin of Tremorstones, Phial of Floods, Horn of Geryon)
- Consume on chance (Box of Beasts)
- Consumable (Phantom Mirrors, Wands)
The consumable items stack, leading to a power spiral issue: strong characters can amass large stacks of wands, mirrors, and beasts, and with some training these can be spammed effectively unlimitedly in the late game. Weak characters that lean on their wands throughout the game are left without this option and left weaker. Monster wand usage is also a soft form of item destruction.
XP charging doesn't have this issue—an XP charged evocable is a permanent boon that isn't always available and has a max availability at any given time. XP charging also makes evocations more distinct from magic: instead of evocations providing magical effects always available, an All-XP charged evocations model means that a player using evocations heavily has access to a variety of powerful effects from a single skill but in any given combat may not have their full repertoire available.
Switching all evokers to XP charging does have some effects that need to be considered, both on a per-item and global basis.
XP evokers provide a permanent benefit to characters that can use them, and are quite common (as are wand charges). The biggest culprit for this is gadget shops, which would be removed in this model, making them much rarer. If that doesn't sufficiently tune rarity, their drop frequency and item levels can be examined and reduced.
Recharge times are modulated by XP gain but currently late game they tend to come quickly. This might need some balance adjustments, but with everything on an XP curve it gets easier to tune.
Other than the change to enslavement this start would see a buff, in that it starts with several permanent benefit items. This is not unlike book starts, which often come with spells that remain useful throughout the game with training. It's not clear as of this writing if that's a bad thing, but is something to keep in mind.
Monster wand usage is one of many monster item interactions; unlike weapons or armour which more often provide noise than any significant threat change, monster wand usage can turn a "trash mob" into a serious threat. Unfortunately it also forms a kind of soft item destruction. The specific item changes are discussed below, but in this model wands (not misc evokers) would remain usable by monsters, who would either have a per-monster charge pool or unlimited charges—decoupling monster usage from the player resource.
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, with the mechanics working almost the same for wands and misc evokers, the only serious distinction is monster usage. Here, there's an opportunity for some clarity: wands carry effects monsters can use, misc items do not.
The following wands and consumable evokers work well in the game as is, and just need XP charge counts, suggested first draft numbers accompany each.
- Acid (6)
- Box of Beasts (3)
- Disintigration (10)
- Flame (15)
- Iceblast (6)
- Phantom Mirror (1)
sdynet's PR 1310 proposes combining these three hex-effects into a single "random debuff" evoker, tentatively called random effects, which has a chance of buffing the monster as well. This effect isn't the best for a monster to have (roll haste and you steamroll them, roll para and it's less good), so this new "random effects" could be moved to a misc evoker. We have the old Pieces from Xom's Chessboard tiles and this effect fits that flavour very well. Charge count TBD but probably 10-15.
ebering continues his war against cone targeters. Monsters aren't good at using cloud wands, though they've now learned how to use them they often just cloud the player at the edge of the cloud then wander into their own clouds and die. The cone targeter for cloud cone is the last remaining cone targeter, and as discussed in positional magic and elsewhere cone targeting doesn't work great on crawl's grid.
Independent of this broader plan, ebering would like to move clouds to a flavour tbd evoker that places 3x3 clouds on monsters within its range (skipping the player), in the 1-3 charge range.
Clouds type breakpoints are also an issue (not training evocations past a certain spoiler point to avoid negative energy clouds while under a good god); this can be addressed either by smoothing the cloud tier chances, or removing negative energy clouds from the cloud list.
The discussion of PR 1310 also contains some discussion of this wand. Player polymorph is an interesting effect from time to time since suddenly finding oneself in a bad form makes for a rapid tactical change. Monster polymorph is a spoiler laden mess, its effect scales with HD (hidden from the player) and the possible resulting monster is also hidden.
Depending on what the result of the polymorph re-think is, it may need to move to a misc item instead of a wand. Some kind of shape-shifting thread modifying effect is desirable in evocations scale quantities, so this will need further work. gammafunk has promised some further elaboration here.
XP-gated access to unlimited digging is uncomfortably close to unlimited digging, but with a small charge count might actually be better than the current situation (only having 2-3 digs in a given tactical situation where those digs are critical). I (ebering) am not worried about luring to pre-dug corridors on different levels that much; if the crowd being lured is large enough that the pre-dug location on a different floor is the best terrain to get there, it's not likely to be an easy crowd to lead through the stairs.
If XP-gated digging ends up being too many digging charges, digging can become a consumable again.
Actively evoked equipment can remain as-is since it must be equipped to get an effect. There is some desire from ebering to try to move these things to passives but it's not urgent and there aren't concrete plans at present.