[Balance] Make teleport control harder to acquire
issueid=1206 08-24-2012 04:45 PM
LFk LFk is offline
Senior Member
Number of reported issues by LFk: 1
[Balance] Make teleport control harder to acquire
If you find one blink dog, you've found 'em all.

EDIT: Augh! I meant to make this a "Feature" but the option is greyed out now.

I recently had a discussion which I stepped out of due to improper forum to be talking about it, so I'll continue it here.

Teleportation is an overpowered feature, this much is hard to argue with. However, there are 3 facets that make it so, which is the spell Teleport, the ability to control it, and the huge well of PP (their HP) that casters have.

I'm still against hard class-balance, but it wouldn't be bad to tweak some mechanics to avoid making teleportation into a walk replacement (often, anyway).

So my thesis: Teleport control intrinsic is entirely too common. If you find a single blink dog, which you typically do in one of the VD/DD, PC, and UD, you can just trigger his spawns and give yourself an extremely high chance of getting a corpse.

If teleport CONTROL was harder to get, teleport would be somewhat less useful, and certainly less convenient. Combined with the idea of making HP casting more punishing, so one can't just spam the random teleport until the desired result is acquired, this would make teleport much less of a common walk replacement for caster classes.

- Make blink dog *summons* unable to drop a corpse / or make Blink Dogs only drop a corpse if killed prior to casting summon.
- Make eating the blink dog corpse grant a small chance of granting TCtrl, ~10%.
- Make blink dogs no longer summon.

This would force PCs to use the ring/ammy, which aren't guaranteed, or turn to pool sipping, which can be dangerous on top of non-guaranteed.
Issue Details
Issue Number 1206
Issue Type Feature
Project ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Category Windows 7
Status Implemented
Priority 7
Suggested Version ADOM 1.1.1
Implemented Version ADOM 1.2.0 pre 7
Milestone (none)
Votes for this feature 2
Votes against this feature 17
Assigned Users (none)
Tags (none)




07-01-2013 04:44 AM
Member
More importantly, I don't think I've ever had a problem with running out of teleports in a game. I don't really have any sympathy that you couldn't cast teleport twice. There's a guaranteed wand of teleport in the VDDL that solves all your teleporting problems for the rest of the game. You can get enough booze to last you through the whole game fairly quickly. I've done this basically every game I play (since I rarely play casters anymore) and I've almost never had a problem.
I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the end. I propose we simply eliminate the teleport spell from the game since wands and booze are more than enough. If that's too extreme, we can keep the spell but only allow a single casting to ever be learned from the book; I have no sympathy for being unable to cast teleport twice. It's a sure-fire way to stop casters from abusing teleport and it apparently presents no balance issues whatsoever.

I'm not arguing about whether there are alternatives (e.g., scumming for potions of booze) or whether the circumstance comes up often. This nerf has, for PCs with rudimentary spellcasting abilities, made one of the most valuable spells in the game worth as much as a single blessed potion of booze or, if we're generous, a single uncursed scroll of charging. The implementation of this RFE has been like a blunt instrument instead of a scalpel. Another question arises: does this problem exist with *all* spellcasters, or primarily wizards and priests? The culprit here might be the fact that their class powers reduce the PP cost of all spells when they really should apply to "most" spells, i.e., every spell but Teleport. That seems a far more precise solution than hitting the already underpowered classes with the nerfbat for no discernible reason other than "handicaps can be overcome!"

To be honest, I think this nerf is fine as it is. A fighter or a duelist isn't supposed to go around casting teleport spells left and right. There is a guaranteed wand of teleport for emergencies, and if a melee character really really wants to cast teleport, he can. It will just take some effort.
You're ignoring race. A Troll fighter or duelist isn't supposed to go around casting teleport. A gnome or grey elf fighter or duelist should certainly be able to cast teleport at least once. A Mist Elf fighter or duelist? They definitely need to have some casting abilities. Look at their stats. They were built to cast spells. A single casting of Teleport like it is now is a disgrace. So much for playing a hybrid PC. What was the point of putting up with garbage stats like 11 Toughness with Potential Max of 13 if not for some small spellcasting abilities?

11-17-2014 10:34 AM
Ancient Member
Excuse the thread necromancy but I think I have to say this:

When you are a gray elven wizard, you can still substitute walking with teleporting.
I do that all the time, I just run out of pp sooner, then pray to get recharged and continue on.
The cost of gold needed to sacrifice in order to get enough piety isn't that big.
Last time I played a wizard, I used prayer 25+ times just to replenish power points and continue teleporting around, no big deal.
Acid ball a few dragons in BDC and poof - 100k gold ready to be sacced for another batch of 30ish prayers.
sytar6 was right - this RFE only really affected occasional tele casters, namely melee oriented classes.
With my increased interest in playing non-caster classes, I discovered I can rely less on the power of teleport than I used to in older versions, but for wizards it remains pretty much the same.

11-17-2014 01:01 PM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by Blasphemous
Excuse the thread necromancy but I think I have to say this:

When you are a gray elven wizard, you can still substitute walking with teleporting.
I do that all the time, I just run out of pp sooner, then pray to get recharged and continue on.
The cost of gold needed to sacrifice in order to get enough piety isn't that big.
Last time I played a wizard, I used prayer 25+ times just to replenish power points and continue teleporting around, no big deal.
Acid ball a few dragons in BDC and poof - 100k gold ready to be sacced for another batch of 30ish prayers.
sytar6 was right - this RFE only really affected occasional tele casters, namely melee oriented classes.
With my increased interest in playing non-caster classes, I discovered I can rely less on the power of teleport than I used to in older versions, but for wizards it remains pretty much the same.
In before you get bolted for two consecutive prayers.
Teleport around with HP-casting (your melee char will have about the same amount HP than a caster char PP), heal up with prayers and munch one morgia once it is all done (negative stat training does not stack - you can only get one decrease).

Except suddenly you run out of castings because you are a melee class. They are not meant to heavily rely on magic and pretty much all considerations concerning learning and using spells were not changed since 1.1.1 (if anything, I believe the overall reading difficulty was increased).

11-17-2014 03:05 PM
Ancient Member
With a wizard you at least retain your HP pool for emergencies.
Imagine draining the HP of a melee class through casting and then dropping next to a random greater moloch next to the staircase you just teleported to.
You get crited for 150 hp when you only had ~100 due to HP casting. Sayonara.

I was always of the belief that every class should be able to get at least somewhat proficient at doing things typically attributed to another class.
A wizard or an elementalist can melee pretty well, once you understand you need a lot more weapon marks.
Spend some time in gremlin cave and there you go - pole arms or whatever at lvl 9, off you go.
Be a duelist and you can still use missiles to a decent extent, I've been surprised how well actually, judging by what I've witnessed on the ancardia.eu server in the past couple of months, including Rehetep slain with black torc (cheers Heikki), though that might be a special case.
An assassin is a great archer and an archer can be a deadly melee class. Most classes can learn any other class' typical trade to a large extent.

Try that with magic - most of the above chars really struggle until the very late/end game with their handicap in the magic department.
Even if you were lucky with some spell, we're looking at very few castings of your favorite spells, high costs, low PP, quickly drained pool of available castings etc., not to mention how exceedingly difficult it is to learn any new spells, even if only the rudimentary or intermediate ones.
Don't get me wrong - I don't really see anything particularly wrong with this.
It's magic, it's the arcane art so it's bound to be accessed by the only handful few like wizards or necromancers and the like, who have studied it specifically their entire lives and are specialists.
But then I'd expect similar mechanism applied to melee and archery for classes that don't specialize in them.
I'd see wizards unable to advance past lvl 7 with any weapon proficiency and generally penalties to chance to hit and damage.
After all they spend their time reading books, not swinging a sword or shooting a bow; their ability to learn a different trade should reflect that.

The problem is - it doesn't, not nowhere near the degree of duelists or mindcrafters unable to effectively learn spells.
Making teleport have a higher cost achieved only one thing in my opinion - it further "elitized" wizards, as if they haven't already been the pinnacle of late/endgame power.
I love playing wizards so I'm not really complaining, just presenting my observations.

11-17-2014 04:27 PM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by Blasphemous
Excuse the thread necromancy but I think I have to say this:

When you are a gray elven wizard, you can still substitute walking with teleporting.
I do that all the time, I just run out of pp sooner, then pray to get recharged and continue on.
The cost of gold needed to sacrifice in order to get enough piety isn't that big.
Last time I played a wizard, I used prayer 25+ times just to replenish power points and continue teleporting around, no big deal.
Acid ball a few dragons in BDC and poof - 100k gold ready to be sacced for another batch of 30ish prayers.
sytar6 was right - this RFE only really affected occasional tele casters, namely melee oriented classes.
With my increased interest in playing non-caster classes, I discovered I can rely less on the power of teleport than I used to in older versions, but for wizards it remains pretty much the same.
I agree that this can be a problem, but I don't think it's a specific problem with teleport.

What you are saying is basically that you can get infinite PP at will at low risk and low cost, right? The fact that you can get unbounded amounts of PP is a balance problem, but not with teleport, it would still be a balance problem if you used it for any other spell.

I guess it's a matter of gold+saccing+piety being unbalanced. But wasn't the cost of repetitions of the same prayer exponential or something like that? Shouldn't the cost of getting more PP get into the hundreds of thousands when you repeat that prayer 20 or 30 times?

11-17-2014 04:45 PM
Ancient Member
I don't know, it is true I sacced in excess of 1 mil gold so I might have not reached the limit yet, even after 20+ prayers.
I know for certain that with a mindcrafter I played recently and that GTBed all the nasty stuff on D50, I had around 25 prayers used when I viewed the game summary.
Two have been used at the very beginning as far as I remember and the pre/post crowning and crowning proper apparently don't count as divine interventions.
So, in a worst case scenario, that was at least 20 prayers: 12-15 on D:50 alone, with the reminder used for mana temple, a greater vault and perhaps the maze.
I still had piety left for more, though how much more? I cannot say.

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