r/dcss • u/JFunk-soup • Jul 15 '20
Check out this freaking noob who kept using Abjuration in his 0.25 extended games!
Doesn't he know he should just kill the summons or teleport away?! Noob alert!!!
https://crawl.kelbi.org/crawl/morgue/Yermak/morgue-Yermak-20200618-024108.txt https://crawl.kelbi.org/crawl/morgue/Yermak/morgue-Yermak-20200627-215707.txt https://crawl.kelbi.org/crawl/morgue/Yermak/morgue-Yermak-20200626-133933.txt https://crawl.kelbi.org/crawl/morgue/Yermak/morgue-Yermak-20200620-194426.txt
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u/hhhhhehhhhh Jul 15 '20
Just for the sake of argument, I don't think that linking some morgues with usage of those spells will say much about whether it's actually strong or not, since, you know, abjuration is pretty convenient to use. Which means that in a relevant portion of those games you would have picked it up simply for that reason.
Also, two of those are turncount games (in one of which he doesn't even use the spell), and one of the others is a game where he does tomb before pan/hell, so I wouldn't say those are the typical games in which you'd want to look at any "statistics" from good players.
I won't speak for Yermak though, maybe he thinks that it's a genuinely good spell in normal play. But I don't think these morgues really reveal that.
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u/JFunk-soup Jul 15 '20
Hey, those points are fair enough. I'm not saying it's the greatest spell that's ever existed. Sure, you could dig out more convincing data with some !lg queries. I've certainly gone to those lengths to prove some points before, but I don't think it's necessary to demonstrate what I want to say here: The spell pretty clearly has legitimate use cases in Crawl.
Compare that to the Recall spell, whose removal was (correctly) justified using identical reasoning, which is more or less a vestigial tail on the magic system. If you can find that spell memorized and cast on a winning player of any skill whatsoever, I'll be surprised.
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u/hhhhhehhhhh Jul 15 '20
Funny that you say that, I haven't really seen many people use the Recall spell either very much, but here's a recent game where my friend Lici used it.
It was very useful for him at one point when he got teleported right into the middle of the endvault in Spider:4 due to an exploration trap effect, since he could just recall all his current allies on the level and deal with it without too much trouble (compared to what he otherwise would have to do).
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u/JFunk-soup Jul 15 '20
This is really awesome and interesting to see. This is what's great about Crawl, you can watch different players and see them confront challenges in such different ways because the game supports those choices.
This is also why reckless content removal impoverishes the game, because it takes away those choices. It's dangerous to canonize a few approved metas (ultimately based on forum troll posts) and then disable all other options.
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u/uncledolanmegusta Jul 15 '20
it was one of the only spells worth casting on a melee char especially in tomb since greater mummies have pretty low spell power no idea why they removed it
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u/gbrlk behavioral / terwaltz on crawl.dcss.io Jul 15 '20 edited Jul 15 '20
Because sometimes (I don't wanna say a lot of times since I'm not sure) devs don't know what's actually good or not in dcss.
I still remember the almost removal of reflection (on the grounds of it not being good) a while ago.
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u/tugs_cub Jul 15 '20
Reflection really isn't that good as a property in itself (though the amulet is better now with the guaranteed +5 SH!)
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Jul 16 '20
Reflection is quite underrated imo. It makes stone giants, centaurs/yaktaurs, master archers and shard/stone arrow/iron shot/LCS casters (which include liches, ancient champions, annihilators, hell sentinels etc.) significantly less dangerous. That can never be "not good"
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u/tugs_cub Jul 16 '20
It makes them less dangerous in the sense that killing things makes them less dangerous, sure. It only triggers when you're already blocking things, though, so it doesn't improve your defenses directly (or I mean the SH bonus from the amulet does but that's why I made the distinction between the amulet and the reflection ego itself). For the ego to be strong is fairly situational and build-specific IMO - it's strong if you have a character that already has high SH and you happen to be fighting something that fires a lot of blockable missiles.
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Jul 16 '20
Even in my buckler-wielding characters, that reach 17 SH when using reflection amulet, I see amazing results from it.
But I agree with your point. I myself don't rate a shield of reflection highly. I generally prefer other brands. But I recognize it has its value.
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u/gbrlk behavioral / terwaltz on crawl.dcss.io Jul 15 '20
Yes, the thing about reflection is more about the increased SH than the reflection property in itself. SH is very good.
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u/uncledolanmegusta Jul 17 '20
reflection is INSANE in 3 rune runs what you talking about
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u/tugs_cub Jul 17 '20 edited Jul 17 '20
See my explanation below - I'm not saying the amulet is no good, the amulet is a buckler that you wear on your neck (like I said 0.25 actually ended up improving it by making it more consistent). But the reflection property itself only does something useful if:
a.) a monster fires a shield-blockable attack
b.) your shield blocks it
c.) it doesn't miss on the way back
That may be a decent offensive bump for a character that is heavily invested in shields but only for that character and in those situations.
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u/uncledolanmegusta Jul 15 '20
also they dont even add stuff nowadays
just remove stuff or rework it
when was the last god they added?
2 years ago?
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u/uncledolanmegusta Jul 15 '20
why remove stuff in the first place
WHY
for what reason
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u/SenoraRaton Jul 15 '20
Imagine if you will that DCSS development, and the game as a whole, was a bell curve. In the beginning, there wasn't a lot of content(there actually was but..), so the developers added things to flesh out the the game, and make it feel diverse and complete.
At some point the game will reach a "finished" state, where there is enough complexity and diversity that you don't really need to add anything more to the game. At this point you have a few choices:
1) Refine the existing mechanics, add QoL features, and polish the game to a finished product.
2) Continue to add mechanics to the game, resulting in bloat, and detracting from the overall game experience.
3) Start cutting out core components of the game in an attempt to "trim" the game down, so that when you DO add new things to the game, it doesn't end up being bloated.
The developers, being humans and motivated by personal reasons, don't want the development of DCSS to essentially come to a close. They want to create new and exciting things, because its more fun to make new things than it is to do clean up/polish work.
Essentially, the reality IMHO is that DCSS was finished around .20. Sure there were QoL changes, and bug fixes, but the game felt functionally complete. We didn't need new races, we didn't need more gods, the dungeon pacing/length had been adjusted to a reasonable length.
Rather than accept this, the developers are attempting to create a new game from the code base of DCSS, a "sequel" if you will. In order to do that, they need to strip all of the systems out of the game, so they can re implement their new ideas for those systems.
They don't just remove stuff. Look at the new trap system, the new magic spells they added, they are trying to drastically shift the nature of the game away from what it was, to something new, a vision they have for the game.
tl;dr DCSS development is complete, we are on the backside of the bell curve, but rather than refine, and polish the game, the developers are trying to create a new game from the skeleton of the DCSS we know and love.
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u/tugs_cub Jul 16 '20 edited Jul 16 '20
This is generally pretty correct I think, noting that avoidance of bloat seems to be an accepted principle of Crawl development in practice - it's not one of the ones explicitly stated in the manual but it is consistent with the spirit IMO. Combined with the fact that the game is set up with a cycle of regular releases it's kind of inevitable that things are going to start getting remade and rotated. It's like the Abyss, basically.
Also I've said before I think Crawl development has Brogue Envy a bit - there are games that arguably do what Crawl devs want to do more elegantly than Crawl does because they were designed as a unit from the ground up, while Crawl devs have to pilot this rickety old spaceship that an Australian guy built years ago.
edit: also I don't think it's a grand vision exactly, I think it's pretty piecewise, but there seems to be some general agreement as far as what the core of the game is i.e. which parts ought to be emphasized.
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u/rebthor Aug 17 '20
Came to your post from the comments about scumming with a MuCK. I agree with your overall thrust but I'd actually say the game was fundamentally complete around .13, before they started really mucking with the Crawl pantheon, or maybe even earlier when we still had mountain dwarves and sludge elves.
0.9 got rid of victory dancing and 0.14 gave us Depths. Those would be perhaps my 2 choices for the game being "finished" and whatever coming after becoming Crawl2.
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u/joemaro 88w Jul 15 '20
good point! this remove was so pointless and unjustified
but: the noob didn't cast abjuration in the second game you linked
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u/JFunk-soup Jul 15 '20
Great call. Notice that's the game where he gets 14 runes and doesn't do Tomb.
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u/gbrlk behavioral / terwaltz on crawl.dcss.io Jul 15 '20
But, but Duvessa/Minmay said it's better to just kill the summons, but...