Right now, magic power determines the damage from most non-melee damage sources. In particular, the damage from attack wands and squid bolts is based on the player's magic power. Of course, mages are the least reliant on damage from those two items, since they have their own attack magic. I'd like to see the impact of magic power be limited to spells cast by the player; spells cast by items should have their damage determined from other stats (or be fixed per-item). For example: * Wands: damage based on wand affinity, naturally. Thus characters taking wand lore will not only get more shots per wand, but also more powerful shots. * Squid bolts (and acid/poison bottle bolts, and acid/poison flasks, etc.): fixed damage, invariant of stats * Player-laid traps: based on trap affinity (players with high trap affinity are better at laying traps). Currently I do feel like mages have a bit too much going in their favor -- melee may be viable, but mages have miles more flexibility and usually don't have any concerns about getting hit. Switching more items to not depend on magic power slightly weakens mages and makes those items more useful to other classes, which sounds like a net win to me. Any other places where magic power's influence is a bit too pervasive?
Sounds good to me. Maybe trap damage should be based on tinkering or trap affinity, whichever is higher.
So from the looks of things, a lot of the traps in Dredmor's Dungeon that scale directly with Eyebrows's magic power. Spooky. In order for your idea to work, they'd have to recode traps to differentiate between player-laid traps and, er, Dredmor-laid traps, which they might be disinclined to do. However, it is a bit silly that highly-armored melee warrior types who would be better protected from damage regardless take less base damage from traps than squishy caster types.
Traps are already differentiated: you only gain XP from picking up dungeon traps. When the devs implement this change I'd like to make a suggestion: instead of hardcoding this can you expose a 'factor' attribute in the XML? Example, instead of this: Code: <damage explosive="1.0" explosiveF="0.5" /> Where explosiveF is hardcoded to use either trap affinity, wand affinity or magic power, I'd much prefer this: Code: <damage explosive="1.0" explosiveF="0.5" factor="7" /> Where factor determines the secondary attribute that is used in the calculation. This would let mods create spells that are factored off melee power, magic resistance, etc.
