Off-the-wall ideas

Discussion in 'Suggestions' started by jawdirk, Sep 27, 2011.

  1. jawdirk

    jawdirk Member


    I don't really expect these ideas to be implemented, but maybe they will provoke some thought:

    1. Have different experience profiles for different skill sets. Imagine how fun it would be to be a sneaky rogue who gets experience for every square of the map revealed instead of killing.
    2. Make the best items in the game come from crafting... and allow everyone to attempt crafting! Your success rate is based on your crafting skill vs. the difficulty of the recipe (down to 5% for hardest recipe and no skill). If you fail, it destroys all the ingredients and the tool. There should be more ways of getting small amounts of crafting skill like the goggles.
    3. There should be a way of getting a random skill not on any of your skill trees. It should be rare enough that it only happens a few times per game at most. E.g., maybe some very rare artifacts impart a skill while they are warn/wielded.
    4. There should be more ways of failing spectacularly when you use something outside of your skill. Shoot arrows the wrong way. Weapon slips out of your hand and flies across the room. Wand explodes. Mushrooms make you hallucinate.
    5. There should be more weird interactions between items. The most fun I ever had in DoD was the time I put a Lutefisk Cube inside of another Lutefisk Cube. You should be able to go mad scientist and throw random stuff into any of the crafting containers, and occasionally get a random bizarre object.
    6. Anvil should always give BOTH (+) and (-). They should give more of BOTH the deeper the level, e.g. +5/-5 on levels 9 and 10. All (+) on one stat, and all (-) on a different stat. That way, the artifacts you create with the Anvil are both powerful and debilitating, and force you to play to your strengths and avoid your weaknesses. Health/mana regen should come from something else, because they are too powerful (and crucial in GR).
    7. It should take a turn to change what you are wearing/wielding. This will stop the boring management of switching all your gear for every move.
    8. Fountains should have some extremely good effects, but mostly bad effects. The bad effects should be annoying but not too deadly. As they are, fountains hardly ever help; I have stopped using them. The bad effects should last until you drink from another fountain!
    9. Your health/mana regen should be much higher if you do nothing at all. Not so high that you can ignore a monster hitting you, but high enough so you never have to hide for 300 turns. If you do nothing at all, you should get back at least 1/40th of your total health and 1/40th of your total mana.
    10. And the number one off-the-wall idea: Lutefisk platemail!
     
  2. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Long post so I'll try to answer some of those.

    1: Cool idea, though I'd expect it would be a big amount of work and require a lot of new code.

    3: You can sort of do this with anvil procs since they're all random equals to some skills classes have.

    6: This is interesting, but the problem is that it only takes a few negatives to make your character near useless, in DoD. It would be even more of a crapshoot than it is now and I doubt many people would use them.

    7: Agree there mainly because that's always been a roguelike standard.

    8: Completely agree there, fountains as they are now aren't worth using.

    9: There's been a lot of discussions about health regen since beta, there even was a game version where you had no regen at all, haha. Bottom line is they want food to be the main way to regen.

    10: I approve. You could mod it in ;)
     
  3. competentfake

    competentfake Member

    4: Totally agree. It is a bit silly that the penalty for using a weapon you aren't skilled in is so trifling that if you find a really good unskilled weapon, it's better to equip it. Where is the picture of a puzzled Mr. Eyebrows holding a Crossbow the wrong way round?

    8: Drinking a fountain full of acid is a death sentence early on, and annoying in the endgame. Who in their right mind would just quaff from a fountain they know might be full of acid without dropping a piece of Lutefisk in it first to see if it dissolves? Even if it isn't acid, potion buffs in general are weak, don't last long enough, and don't scale as you descend into the lower levels. Here's a few scenarios I played through a lot before I started ignoring the fountains:
    -"Acid! Ewwwwblarglewargle...." Thump! Gravestone reads: 'What kind of dumbass willingly drinks acid?!'
    -"Yay, health regen! ...oh, I'm at full health already."
    -"Yay, hyperborean! ...oh, I already killed everything in the room, and the next door is 30 squares away."
    -"Yay, a fountain!" *eyes it warily as I sidestep around it, taking another mouthful of brandy, which has never burned my guts out from the inside.. yet...*
    Past level 6, I generally sell/cube any potions I find except for health / mana / regen / replenish / purity / invis. I would like to see more potions like Dire Empowerment & Steeling, that last for a certain number of hits instead of an arbitrary number of turns. 75 turns may sound like a lot. It isn't.
    Oh! *flash of inspiration* Alchemists should be able to identify fountains and bottle their contents!!!

    Two Additions of my own:
    11: Food should give an instant health benefit and then a short heal over time. If food is your only healing source, it's extremely difficult to create enough throughput to annihilate a monster zoo (even if you only have them one at a time, ranged attacks nonwithstanding) if all you have is a few scattered potions to toss in with your cheese and crackers. I realize there are six skills (Psi/Vamp/Fung/Alch/Wand/Fleshlawlz) that provide healing, but most of them have annoying upkeep and/or are ineffective at higher levels for melee skillsets. You should be able to beat the game without being nailed down to taking one of them. If food is to be the primary source of healing for melee characters, please give it some oomph!

    12: In a similar vein, I propose the following fixes to the skills with healing powers:
    -Vampirism: Should scale from damage done, not spellpower (sure this has been suggested elsewhere, just restating).
    -Fungal Arts: I tried to like this skill, I really did. It's super useful and will carry you through most of the game, but there just comes a time when I feel like Harvest Moon has made its insidious presence felt in the dungeons, and I just can't take the drudgery of planting spores. Fungi should sprout from monsters you walk over, with a small chance of failure. Simple, easy, no mindless tedium. If I want to be bored to death by a video game, I'll pirate the Sims. Moldsmith is broken; you can save all the useless mushrooms you get until level 8, then mass-transmute a stack of 130 shrooms until you get Greedy Blungecaps, and perma-vamp yourself. I don't have a snappy fix for that one, only thing that comes to mind is the possibility of turning them into Lutefisk by accident.
    -Alchemy: I've waxed eloquent on this subject in another thread.
    -Fleshsmithing: Knit flesh is just terrible. Really, really awful. The whole skill is just horrible, more so because the theory is so damn AWESOME!
    -Wand Lore: Jacking off a Coral Wand every 80 turns for a 10-turn, 20 health regen will, as with most of these skills, get you through the first few levels just fine, but with a roomful of Octos, all it gives you is carpal tunnel and a painful death.
    -Psionics: Never messed with it. From all I hear it's pretty good (i.e., its heal isn't dependent on spellpower...but why take Psionics if you plan to drive your mana regen into the basement with a bunch of heavy armor?)
     
    Marak likes this.
  4. Derakon

    Derakon Member

    Psionics goes well with anything. Here's what you get with it:

    * A spell from level 1 that is arguably good enough to carry you through to level 2, with careful play.
    * A spell available with 1 skillpoint that knocks back everything in a 3x3 square. This is absurdly useful for playing keepaway, knocking traps out of the way, knocking artifacts off of islands, etc. And it's bloody cheap.
    * A spell available with 2 skillpoints that gives you 36HP for, at most, 14MP. That's cheap enough that you can trivially chain-cast it with booze support; no need to worry about mana regen. The only drawback is that the spell is hard to use while in a fight, but that's true for all healing spells, and thanks to the current bug where monsters heal you when they walk on crystals, it's easier to use than most.
    * A spell available with 3 skillpoints that lets you stunlock just about anything, if you want extra cheese with your crackers.

    Psionics spells are universally cheap and get cheaper if you do happen to have high magic power. I wouldn't say it's a broken skillset (though I haven't abused Nerve Staple), but it has two spells that are readily-accessible, cheap, and useful throughout the entire game to just about any build.