Getting out of touch with everything.

[Phoobnahr]

Not really sure what's happening to me... never seen it before and can't determine any reason for it...

My level 26 hurthling ranger is experiencing a very significant mana burn... it started immediately upon entrance to the ToEF, and has continued since I cleared the tower... I've received the message "you are getting out of touch with everything" at least six times in the span of 4 or 5 game days... I'm now down to a whopping 4 mana.

Overall its not a tremendous burden... my character was born illiterate and took until very late in the game to locate Thrundarr's requested berserker prince, and so my literacy is only up to 64 or so... I have a giant pile of spell books from accidentally hostiling a bookshop keeper in the levels above the high king's tomb, but the only spell I've memorized is frost bolt (which came in very handy in the tower).
As I say, its not much of an inconvenience to be a basically magicless character, I just found it curious that I've lost so much mana so quickly. Does anyone have any experience with this, or know of likely reasons I could be abusing my mana?

P.S.
I would have asked about this on the IRC channel, but don't seem to be able to connect properly... I launch megaIRC, and it says I'm in the #adom channel, but I'm the only one there and none of the commands respond... I'd try reinstallying megaIRC, but it launches from the executable, so I have no idea.

Thanks

[Maul]

Stop casting spells from your HP (like how you presumably did in the ToEF with your only spell Frost Bolt). That abuses mana. On the other hand, casting spells from your PPs without tapping into your life energy trains your mana. (If you even have enough PPs left to cast a Frost Bolt...)

[Silfir]

I don't know of any way you could lose Mana points other than casting from HP - so if it's not that, it's a mystery to me.

[gut]

we all see you on irc. that is odd

[gut]

17:05 <phoobnahr> anybody know why I would be losing mana over and over again? I've lost like 6 points since entering the tower.
17:05 * phoobnahr quits (Remote host closed the connection)
17:09 <ignacio> hmm
17:09 <ignacio> weird
17:09 <ignacio> r/c?
17:09 <samim> he left 4 seconds after asking...

[anon123]

Considering you're playing a non-spellcaster who had no more than 10 Ma in the first place (with the corresponding low PP amount), it's got to be excessive HP-casting.

[Phoobnahr]

excessive hp-casting it is. Never knew that abused the stat, although it makes perfect sense... Wonder if I'll bother trying to train it up again or if I'll just cast from hp as a matter of course... I don't have concentration, so if I intend to cast for basically anything other than emergencies it pretty much has to come from my HP...

Thanks for the answers, and forgive my IRC woes, sometimes myself and my laptop really require a good boot to the motherboard.

[Aielyn]

Am I the only one that thinks that abusing Mana by casting from HP doesn't really make much sense, and really makes the balancing worse for spellcasting?

After all, the higher your Mana is, the easier it is to cast from PP, and thus the less likely you are to abuse Mana by casting from HP. On the flipside, if you have low Mana, you're going to end up casting from HP more often, and thus abuse Mana more.

To me, it would make a lot more sense if casting from HP abused your Toughness, rather than your Mana, since you're sucking lifeforce out of your body. And that would make casting from HP more risky for spellcasters, who tend to be more frail to begin with, thereby helping to balance the game out a little more.

[Silfir]

Mana represents your connection to the astral, arcane or mystic powers that lie behind everything ("more in touch with the world"); casting beyond the strength of that connection will strain and eventually warp it. That seems to make perfect sense to me, and I think it's the fluff Thomas intended when he made casting from HP work the way it did.

As for balance - I think there's an open issue in the issue tracker about it. A Toughness penalty seems not too far-fetched, though it should be kept in mind that taking damage doesn't abuse toughness as a matter of course - otherwise, a high Toughness would be pretty useless in the long run.

[Aielyn]

Mana represents your connection to the astral, arcane or mystic powers that lie behind everything ("more in touch with the world"); casting beyond the strength of that connection will strain and eventually warp it. That seems to make perfect sense to me, and I think it's the fluff Thomas intended when he made casting from HP work the way it did.

As for balance - I think there's an open issue in the issue tracker about it. A Toughness penalty seems not too far-fetched, though it should be kept in mind that taking damage doesn't abuse toughness as a matter of course - otherwise, a high Toughness would be pretty useless in the long run.

I understand the fluff explanation for the mana abuse, but it seems to me that casting from HP is completely ignoring the astral component - that is, it shouldn't be warping the connection when you're not using that connection. It certainly shouldn't train mana, but I also think it shouldn't abuse it, either.

And the difference between taking damage and casting from HP is the nature of the HP hit. When you take damage, your body is experiencing a hit, and your lifeforce is acting to compensate, thus the HP hit. When you cast from HP, you're sucking the lifeforce itself from your body, a lesser version of what a vampire, wight, wraith or spectre does when it drains Toughness.

Where your lifeforce acting to protect your life can be seen as training your toughness, sucking the lifeforce itself out, to me, would abuse it. On the other hand, I'd think that teleportation would screw with your connection to the astral plane (since you're travelling through it, pretty much tearing a path through that plane), and that otherwise, lack of use of mana would abuse mana.

In fact, that could be a way to help to balance teleportation usage - make teleportation abuse your mana stat (perhaps it could be restricted to on-demand teleportation, not applying to teleportitis). Alternatively, limit it to instances of teleport control (and allow the user to specifically cancel the control). That way, there's a risk to using teleportation too liberally. Anyway, just a thought.