I'm taking the position that the teleport spell was overpowered relative to its PP cost. I don't see this as melee nerf at all.

I recommend a couple of deep breaths and maybe a stiff drink.

Non-casters trying to learn and cast complicated spells such as Teleport was always supposed to be impractical, but possible. Did it get harder in 1.2.0? Probably. Is that a balance issue? No. They're non-casters. As long as spellcasting is still impractical, but possible, nothing significant has changed with regards to game balance.

You're making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill. I can certainly sympathize with the fact that it's your molehill, since you don't play casters, but do expect to be able to cast Teleport with a certain degree of ease - but it's still a molehill.

I agree with it being a molehill. I honestly expected people to help come up with better ways to accomplish what needs to be accomplished, i.e., prevent casters from using Teleport as a replacement for walking - or at least make the case that there might be no better way to accomplish this. I'm really surprised that people are sticking to their guns with the "melee was overpowered before this nerf" line which frankly seems a little disingenuous at best. Like, really? Really?

I don't believe that anyone is arguing that this is the case. Hence why I called it a strawman earlier.

You can't both believe that the nerf helped balance melee and believe that melee was not overpowered before the nerf. It's, by pure necessity of logic, one or the other.

No, the nerf helped balance casters. It has no appreciable effect on melee.

The nerf wasn't intended to balance melee and it didn't, in either direction. This is what people have been trying to explain to you for pages upon pages.

I think melee is almost unchanged by this. Previously their ability to teleport was dominated by wands and scrolls, and this remains the case. I appreciate there are some edge cases where hybrid spellcasters will suffer more, but I don't see this as a major issue.

You are forcing me to post again. Corruption removal is not guaranteed. A spoiled guaranteed wand is. I suppose Mana Battery is too rare.

But melee classes don't need emergency teleportation. Only overpowered spellcasting classes may have it.

Logic has no place here.

All melee classes in 1.2.0 that can cast teleport (have Concentration) will have enough PP to do it, what are you talking about? My 1.2.0 duelist has 120 PP on level 20.

Abusing teleport with spellcasters is not only moving around to get to places, but to teleport from place to place and use ranged magic. Melee classes don't need this because they are frigging bad with ranged magic. Melee classes should use melee, that seems obvious to me.

Please, sytar, acknowledge the fact that you cannot use your favorite tactics and try to adapt to the game changes. It brings variety which is nice. I, for instance, started actually dying to bosses in prereleases, which normally didn't happen in 1.1.1, and I'm quite fond of this.

I'm talking about being surrounded by 2 ancient blue wyrms and six ancient blue dragons, while not having =Elec and not wanting your scrolls of power and HP reducing rapidly while only having one casting. Greater Daemons, unicorns, etc.

But no, travelling by teleportation is overpowered.

P.S. This is not for me, I can handle the change. It's for the maybe hundreds of unspoiled players out there.

I'm looking at my Mist Elf Duelist right now. He has over 150 castings of Teleport. It costs 96 PP. You know, because melee classes can't learn spells as well, the cost tends to be inflated over the "base cost."

You would be able to Teleport a grand total of once.

People have been flitting back and forth between three arguments (never happens, doesn't impact melee because of wands/booze, and melee was overpowered before the nerf) whenever it suits their needs. I debunked the "has no impact on balance" canard by suggesting that the Teleport spell simply be taken out of the game. Stingray1 debunked the "it never happens" assertion by pointing out that almost all of his winners learn Teleport.

You can't act like heavily nerfing or removing Teleport would cripple casters but then turn around and claim that it would have no impact on melee because they have access to wands and booze (as do casters) and/or they hardly ever get teleport.

I'm glad someone is at least making the "necessary sacrifice" argument. However, I think there should be some acknowledgment that hybrid spellcasters are no more edge cases than pure melee. It simply depends on a person's play style and preferences. Some people will tend to pick hybrids more than any other type. Some people will always pick casters. Some people will tend to always pick pure melee.

P.S. Like Stingray1, I can handle the change as well. At this point the game is easy for me, as it is for almost everyone else posting here.

Instant, controlled teleportation is super powerful. I feel like that sort of 'get out of jail free card' should be a very limited resource. If anything, I'd like to see the teleport spell nerfed further (severely reduce its range perhaps, if it's meant to be a caster's repositioning tool). If the change unfairly hurt character types which aren't overpowered, I'd prefer to compensate them in other areas.

Try reading your book some more. This is an intended effect and would happen even in 1.1.1.

It has no effect on melee balance. Yes, if teleport were removed from the game, it would have absolutely zero effect on most melee characters. That's the whole point. It does have an effect on caster characters. This is a caster balance issue, not a melee balance issue.

Most of mine don't, and I have more wins than Stingray1. I don't see that this sort of argument is in any way helpful unless you're looking at a large statistical sample. And yes, you will find that most winners probably had teleport, because ~50% of ADOM winners are grey elven wizards. Again, that's kind of the point.

Removing Teleport is a nerf on casters because casters get Teleport regularly, have more PP and more available castings on average, and can use Teleport in strategic ways that other characters generally cannot. I think you are misunderstanding the problem. If you're worried about characters not having enough PP to teleport away in an emergency situation, this isn't a problem. Most melee characters who can learn teleport have enough castings for a few teleports, or there are wands and scrolls. The problem is that if you have a lot of PP, you can teleport all the time. Any distance more than 10 squares, you may as well teleport if you can. With four or five teleports max, you can usually find the stairs on any level and clear it. In the time that it takes your melee character to walk from the stairs to the door of the first room, my wizard has already left the level.

I never said that, so don't put in it quotation marks.

You only need one casting of teleport to escape this situation. But, of course, using 10 or 15 castings combined with bolt or ball spells, you could also kill this mob without ever taking a hit.

1. Why are you getting in such situation with a melee character without enough PP to get out?
2. Why do you need more than 1 TP to get out of this situation?

1. How many castings of TP do you need for melee characters?
2. I'm new to this debate but I feel like some base things were not done:
What melee classes are we speaking about? What classes are "semi-spellcasters"? What is the preferred play style? Have you tried non-elven barbarians, beastfighters, trolls?
3. This issue-tracker is not optimal by far due to the consistency of people who use it. With that I can agree. Maybe suggest TB to mirror suggestions in the blog?

One teleport at a time is a lot for someone who has never actually studied magic and is occasionally sitting down to decipher dusty old spellbooks they scavenged off of some orcish scorchers while in the midst of a quest to save the world.

How many teleports do you need? As many as there used to be. Two. Two would be good. That's twice as many. Allows you to get through places like the Animated Forest with a good likelihood. Allows you to get out of most sticky situations even when your teleport fails because a monster is on the stairs. Allows you to get through twice as many levels of the ToEF without having to walk. Allows you to almost certainly get over rivers to the side of the stairs without waiting a ton of turns to charge your PP. The utility is vastly expanded by letting characters teleport twice.

Doubling the PP required has made the "melee doesn't learn spells quite so well and needs more PP to cast" situation drastically worse. This is about as good as a melee character is going to get it. I read it with a mist elf with high learning wearing +Le gear, with a blessed spellbook, after drinking a Potion of Learning.

This whole conversation is so bizarre. No wonder casters are so overpowered. Caster? Oh, they need to be able to cast like fifty teleports in a row. Melee? WHY DO YOU NEED MORE THAN ONE TELEPORT? Pay special attention to the reasoning for why casters should have so many Teleports: "because they're casters". That's not a reason or an argument. Melee needs to come up with specific instances in which teleport would be useful. Casters? "Fuck you for asking. Because caster."

The reason that teleport was nerfed in the first place was because casters shouldn't be able to cast fifty teleports in a row, because it makes for horribly imbalanced play. The point was to make caster teleportation more in line with what melee characters have access to.

What level were you at? A level 1 reader will have dramatically different experiences reading a book than a level 20 or level 50 with the same level of skill and learning. Looking back at some old YAVPs of mine, I see a level 34 monk with 220 PP and almost 400 castings of teleport--he also had it at +11 skill, so he was using it an awful lot, and had a lot more castings when he started. At triple the current cost, he could still cast 3 teleports on a single PP battery. I have a level 42 orc merchant has almost 300 castings and no concentration skill (and 163 PP), and another level 42 merchant with nearly 500 castings. If you're getting <100 castings, it's probably because you're too low level to learn the spell properly.

Which is the point I was trying to make. I was able to kill the mother and none of her children and maybe got hit by 3 bolts during the ordeal.

Most of my characters learned the spell, because I wished for Concentration and/or AoLS or visited the library. Looking for this spell. Why?, because it was a very cool spell.

I could cast it when I didn't want to traverse explored levels. Which was just neat. Now, I have to eat pixies, hope I get the corruption and wear items of teleportation.

I hope you can understand why I think this a bit silly.

...And that's why the spell is ridiculously overpowered and the PP cost of it was nerfed.