Banishment kills

Atan · Post by **Atan** » Sat Nov 13, 2004 8:24 am

An even simpler suggestion than cavesomething's :

just make a threshold to the rod level one is allowed to use, based on the use magic skill, say rods up to double the skill level. This would btw make the skill useful in an obvious way.

Examples:

player has level 7 in use magic skill -> he can use rods/staff/wands of up to level 14
monster of global level 12, with no detailed skills, is assumed to have a level 11 use magic skill and use rods of up to level 24.

Of course for this to work one needs to have lots of low-level rods/staves/wands around for players to be able to train their use magic skill when it is low.

Ryo · Post by **Ryo** » Sat Nov 13, 2004 11:02 am

Monsters just fire rod - they don't need Pow, or whatever

I'm not even sure their Pow does have any impact....

Casper · Post by **Casper** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 3:21 am

Ryo: I believe they were fixing a general rods issue rather than a banishment specific one. Rods are too powerful and need to be made less so. I think the ideas above are very interesting, but there is a seperate thread that adresses rods in general as opposed to banishment rods - undead too easily killable, which is discussed here.

Undead were always easily killable, but until monsters started to cast banishment this was not really an issue, so no one minded. I now see that a cloak of +95 would not fix the problem, as it is not good enough to protect the wearer, and a cloak of immunity to most gods would make it unbalanced, as Salathar suggested. Undead are undead, and are hurt by all kinds of banishment.

I like the idea of only giving monsters low level rods though, and making those slow to recharge. Caper at lvl114 has been known to survive a lvl 20 cast (just to be killed about 1/10th of a second later by a second cast). If the rod was a lvl 5 and was only fired once I would have had a much better chance. Combined with the cloak I already introduced this may fix the issue.

Cowboy · Post by **Cowboy** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 4:13 am

I havn't experienced this banishment kills yet,
but making rods slow to recharge makes sense to me.
Other games I've seen that included rods, had them set to something like
one charge every 5 seconds, or more.
(I think it was mangband that had that, can't remember now though).
This still made the rods useful, but if you wanted them to be devastating,
you had to find 4-5 of them so you could be constantly firing.
Wands/staves didn't have this limit, but had their own drawbacks
(finite number of charges)

bort · Post by **bort** » Wed Dec 15, 2004 12:26 am

Would slowing down a monster help too?

Avion · Post by **Avion** » Wed Dec 15, 2004 5:16 pm

Atan wrote:An even simpler suggestion than cavesomething's :

just make a threshold to the rod level one is allowed to use, based on the use magic skill, say rods up to double the skill level. This would btw make the skill useful in an obvious way.

This is an excellent suggestion. Please submit this to the sourceforge RFE or the dev mailing list.

Mith · Post by **Mith** » Wed Dec 15, 2004 9:54 pm

Avion wrote:
Atan wrote:An even simpler suggestion than cavesomething's :

just make a threshold to the rod level one is allowed to use, based on the use magic skill, say rods up to double the skill level. This would btw make the skill useful in an obvious way.
This is an excellent suggestion. Please submit this to the sourceforge RFE or the dev mailing list.

I suggested something like this in an other topic (inspired by Atan's idea) to cap the spell to use magic item skill lvl + 10 or so.

This way there is even a reason to lvl use magic item to lvl 100, and newbs still can use rods with some result, namely starting lvl 10.
Besides, even a lvl 1 char can use lvl 110 banishment rods, but only at lvl 11 or 12 (depending on the use magic item skill)

This way, monsters (a wizard for example) wont ever fire rods at lvl > 29 (iirc)
Atan's suggestion would lead to lvl 36 (again iirc) so there is no big difference at mid lvl, but a huge difference for low and high lvl.
(take in mind there are not much high lvl monsters and many high lvl players using rods)

cavesomething · Post by **cavesomething** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:28 am

Avion wrote: This is an excellent suggestion. Please submit this to the sourceforge RFE or the dev mailing list.

That is what I get for replying to posts before reading all the new ones....

I'll try and dig up the attempt made by Salathar and me. (assuming I still have it...)

On second thoughts we had a problem with segfaulting, so best to wait until I have time to check that servers won't die everytime a rod is cast....

Found the file we were playing with, probably won't get time to test properly until the weekend though, I need to remove the attempt at smiiting at least....

bort · Post by **bort** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 5:51 am

Is there a way to implement like: Only undead players can be killed by Gaea?
That would help, because it makes it about 1/9 chance instead of 95% chance of being blasted, because many rods are fired with gods rugilli, mostrai, etc,.

Valderan · Post by **Valderan** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 4:32 pm

Bort Im not sure I see what your trying to say.. because arent undead and unnatural the only things to get hit by Gaea anyways?