Stat drains affect the physical body, performance enhancers are just that. It is easy enough to avoid these so-called stat-drains.

I am all for nerfing stat drains in general, which punish melee chars too much IMHO, for reasons that I explained in some other RFE thread. This is one (albeit very slight) nerf, so I vote yes.

If we implement this change, can we also make the stat-drain spell a ranged attack? ;)

You guys are going to think I'm a wimp for saying this, but stat drains in general aren't very much fun to me. I admit they rarely happen (even to a player with abilities as limited as mine), but it's just kind of discouraging how permanent they are.

Isn't it fair to say that dooming and cursing are easier to reverse than stat drains? I mean, they can be removed if you have a good enough relationship with a god, but stat drains require finding a potion of [stat] or waiting a very long time until they (allegedly) wear off.

What if we just made them last a shorter amount of time? Like a few days, maybe? Or is there some way that they could be removed when the character was close enough to their god, like dooming/cursing?

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know how long stat drains currently last? I thought they were all supposed to be temporary. I don't even think the game displays them as temporary stat changes on the character sheet, does it? Doesn't the base stat just change?

Stat drains are a permanent -1d3 to the base score of a random attribute, as far as I know.

I despise them, especially when it's a hard to train one like Learning that is touched. I even recall cursing loudly at my computer once after taking several in a row once. But that's how ADOM is. "You can't melee everything" is a basic survival rule. A reasonably armored player with positive Luck can ward off most stat draining hits. Things like lich kings and minotaur mages use magic and either require a different approach or that you put your stats on the line.

How do you feel about the idea of the drain being semi-permanent, though? Like, lasting days to maybe even weeks of game time? It seems like you could come up with a length of time long enough that it would force players to use strategy when dealing with stat draining enemies, but still not make them feel like your character was ruined if they did get drained.

Anon, Couldn't you be open to the idea that after some finite amount of time, however long, the drained stats should recover?.

Like I said before, there's also an argument that permanent stat drains are internally inconsistent with other game mechanics. Don't you think it's kind of strange that it's harder to reverse stat drains than to reverse dooming? If nothing else, "dooming" certainly sounds a lot worse than "stat drain."

It also seems kind of inconsistent that your character can recover from being almost dead in hours, but (s)he can apparently never regenerate that one point of strength.

By the way, I do know stat drains don't ruin a character, but the point is that they make it feel that way sometimes.

[Edited because I cannot properly punctuate]

I fully agree with you. Stat drains are frustrating, and while there are many frustrating things in ADOM and that's great, stat drains are the wrong type of frustrating. The not fun type.

Late game dooming can be reversed. Early game dooming often can't be reversed and it is a death sentence, but it's exciting, challenging and fun to fight a world suddenly becoming much more dangerous and conspiring against you. Stat drains are not fun. They don't kill you, they probably don't affect your total win probability much, they don't make you take any action immediately, they just set you back and make you (the player) frustrated without adding extra challenge.

I'd much rather have monsters stat drain you for more points, but temporarily. Imagine that a shadow can drain you of 5 points of St for a bunch of turns. That would actually be exciting, especially if it happens twice and you are now overburdened and have to drop almost everything and flee like a coward because you can't even damage your foes. It wouldn't necessarily make the game easier, maybe the opposite (I know I'd treat the chaos archmage with more respect than now), but it would be much more interesting!

Stat drains are fun because they add to the feeling of exploring a hostile, magical world full of potential harm. Sometimes you don't get away with a scratch; sometimes you're left with painful scars and memories of how things used to be. You used to be the strongest Barbarian in the entire chain - but you got too confident and as your muscles feel diminished and weary now you have no choice but to still press on. And press on you do, because power is not measured by whether your strength is 26 or only 23 now. Power lies in perseverance, power lies in cunning and experience - those are the kinds of power you cannot take away. But everything else? The PC is only mortal.

I have never once felt even a shred of animosity at the game itself for throwing stat drainers at me. I don't enjoy having my stats drained, but I enjoy being afraid, I enjoy changing my tactics around the fact that it might happen, I enjoy hating the sonsofbitches that do it to me, and I enjoy flipping the bird to their corpses as I press on to win the game despite what they tried to do to me. The funny part is that stat drains don't even matter very much at all. Players tend to get so invested in the heights they pump their stats at every opportunity that they don't realize that even losing three in every stat won't affect them all that much in the grand scheme of things. The higher your stats are, the lower the relative impact of stat drains - and the lower your stats are, the easier they are to train.



Also, like Stingray said: Stat drain attacks attack the PC itself, their magical essence, their body, or their mind. They don't attack whatever magical forces affect the body at the time. Why should a shadow or minotaur mage or what have you bother with draining the magical forces that are hanging onto the PC granting them temporary power, when they can go for the juicy physical or magical core? When I cut open a Tour de France cyclist, do they bleed doping substances first, then blood?

To use your analogy:
If they're blood doping(putting their own saved blood back into themselves), they still have their normal amount of blood even after they lose the excess, and yet the blood doping is a temporary effect that wears off over time.


Edit:
I suggested this as a way to take an existing, useful item(well, for the useful stat boosts anyway), and add another use without necessarily increasing the power of that item much. I finished a ULE recently and had 4 potions of boost strength and 2 boost toughness at the end of the game for AD, having saved all of them until that point. It's not like I was rolling in them.

I understand that is a valid opinion, but I would still like to hear you and the others who are in favor of the current mechanics respond to the inconsistencies of these mechanics with the other aspects of gameplay that I pointed out.

I don't know that analogies with real world physiology are going to work well here, though. I don't think that bleeding a cyclist would cause them to lose any "stat" permanently. They could recover from the anemia in a relatively short amount of time (which is the way I wish stat drains worked). I also think (although I am not sure) that it may be harder to raise drained stats back to their original values through training. If that is the case, it seems rather odd.

Also, if stat drains really are currently "no big deal" then why not implement Al Khwarizmi's idea and make them have a more significant (albeit temporary) impact on gameplay?

What inconsistencies? Dooming and cursing aren't temporary, and they don't even affect any of the PC's stats. Lorewise, we're talking about entirely different things. The PC's stats roughly represent the abilities of his physical self walking on the earth. A dooming or a curse doesn't affect the PC's self; it affects how the world around the PC works. Why can a deity remove dooming with the snap of a finger, but won't restore the stats permanently drained by undead life-draining magic? Because they are not all-powerful, and can only interact with the physical side of the world in specific circumstances, but they can affect whatever is causing the world around the PC to turn on them. They can clear the gloom hanging over their heads. Does that mean they *have* to be able to restore the life force taken away from you by dark, unholy magic? No, it does not mean that. One thing doesn't have to do with the other.

What *would* be inconsistent is if a temporary stat boost would protect the PC from permanent stat drains. "Boost" means that whatever benefit the potions provide is going to vanish over time. If it protected from permanent stat drains, that would be a permanent benefit. The potions that provide a permanent benefit already exist, though, and they're different ones. Not every potion needs to do have dozens of different obscure uses.



I dislike Al-Khwarizmi's idea because I think shadows are currently just as tough as they need to be. If you quintuple their stat draining powers, then you've got either walking death machines or you force the player to discard half their equipment every time they fight a shadow; or they get killed outright because depending on the PC there might be little you can do at a Strength score of one, as temporary as it may be. (Two or three points, maybe not too outrageous, but that belongs in the discussion on stat drains in general.)

I am perfectly satisfied with the impact stat drains have on the game at this very moment. They lend a sense of dread to the game world by affecting the character permanently, something that very little threats in the game ever do, while giving the PC a chance to survive any individual encounter.

I actually like that explanation a lot, Silfir. I guess I always assumed that the gods didn't give you much help because they were haughty, aloof beings, but I think maybe it is more rational that they don't do more because they can't do more. It is consistent with the behavior that they exhibit. They can summon creatures or give you items, but they usually don't exert any direct effect on the PC's body. I guess getting hit with a bolt of some sort if you make them angry is an exception to that, but for the most part it seems you are right.

As much as I hate stat-drain, I had to vote against this one. It seems to me to be *too* much of a change to how it works. I would much rather go for the items to protect against drain, or having a way for your God to return lost stat points to you, or perhaps 'Potion Of Restoration' in the same way you have 'Potion Of Youth'. If anything, the last one would be the one I'm most appealed by: stat drainers, for me, would feel a lot less frustrating if I knew that by hunting potions, I might find one that would give me back some/all of my lost points. But simply having my boosted stats protect me against the drains of an enemy? Yeah, it just doesn't feel right to me.

I have recently cleared D:46 GUV with a ratling duelist meleeing everything, including emperor liches.
Not a single stat drain, I was aged once by a ghost lord. I don't think stat draining is that much of an issue when you're careful and time your attacks just right, plus use your every item advantage, high DV etc.
I'm against this, stat drains have always been a part of this game and I got used to being careful around undead, greater demons, and other suckers.
Oh, excuse the thread necromancy too, but technically this suggestion is still open.

I think it is perfectly alright and encouraged to add your opinion to RFEs. Especially now that more people are becoming aware of the resurrection effort, they should not feel it inappropriate to comment on older RFEs. This game can only become even better if we briefly share our views.

You're right, it's time to equip my virtual pickaxe and have my forum alignment drop all the way to C- due to multiple acts of thread necromancy and burial desecration of old posts.

Try not to wake up an emperor guardian of tedium and annoyance in the process :)

not a great example using the most powerful melee class by a fair margin.

9/10 you have to keep moving on a GUV simply due to the stat draining.

With the change to potentials making stats harder to train naturally the stat draining doesn't really make much sense, and as mentioned its another example of melee chars being disadvantaged.

Stat drains have no effect on your potentials.