Darox posted:

Frail is somewhat high priority and while -4 Str/-2 Dex isn't backbreaking it's probably costing you multiple points of evasion and shielding so those combined justify purging. Unless you're seriously starved for mutation removal go ahead and clean them.

The rest of them are pretty irrelevant to a heavy armour fighty dude. Dropping slow regen would be a minor plus.

Speleothing posted:

Always ignore minmay/duvessa

Darox posted:

I liked the idea suggested of a rising hard cap to go alongside the existing apt scaling. Whenever you hit level X in a skill you get bored and the skill is locked and golden, as if you had hit L27. When you invest enough experience across all skills you regain interest and the max skill level rises. Start at 6 and increase the cap by 3 each time all the way to 27, something like that. Ideally the experience required for increasing the max level rises much faster than exp costs with each iteration so that it quickly becomes impossible to raise it by only focusing on 4-5 skills.

Obviously this is a very heavy-handed way to create skill diversity, but I don't think such an approach (especially as a racial choice) is necessarily bad.

Mu. posted:

Nosre posted:

cleared my mutations, then ran into 5 orbs of fire on the very next level, eventually dying to that 5th since the previous four had given me "wands/pots don't heal you" among a pile of other things

How is a melee character supposed to deal with that quantity of those, they resist/dodge all my half-trained ranged options

Is there a spell I don't know about?

Nosre posted:

Oh, got a link? I found http://git.develz.org/?p=crawl.git;a=shortlog and http://crawl.develz.org/trunk/changes.txt, but they're both pretty rough to understand the state of trunk

Nosre posted:

cleared my mutations, then ran into 5 orbs of fire on the very next level, eventually dying to that 5th since the previous four had given me "wands/pots don't heal you" among a pile of other things

How is a melee character supposed to deal with that quantity of those, they resist/dodge all my half-trained ranged options

Is there a spell I don't know about?

FulsomFrank posted:

He's just saying that mutation potions are different in trunk.

No more BenMut, just straight up Mutation potions but... They kind of cycle what you've got at the moment. Not sure the exact numbers but they basically add/remove/shuffle a bunch of current mutations and you can get more good or more bad. It's extremely okay and you still really only chug mutation when you get a lovely one from eating purple or getting looked at the wrong way by mutators.

FulsomFrank posted:

He's just saying that mutation potions are different in trunk.

No more BenMut, just straight up Mutation potions but... They kind of cycle what you've got at the moment. Not sure the exact numbers but they basically add/remove/shuffle a bunch of current mutations and you can get more good or more bad. It's extremely okay and you still really only chug mutation when you get a lovely one from eating purple or getting looked at the wrong way by mutators.

Araganzar posted:

I feel like your running hurt into a Zot 5 lung like a magpie after a piece of foil then spending twenty straight turns backing away from a frigging OOF without doing a single thing to heal, escape, or mitigate damage might be more of a factor in your death than your lack of ranged options.

Nosre posted:

Glad mutations are being looked at!

Nosre posted:

Dang, dude. I didn't know people could view such a detailed log, where is that?

Anyway, obviously there were specific things I could have done differently, but I was tilted over using Cure Mutation pots literally two minutes before then immediately getting malmuted to gently caress

quote:

araganzar: !lg nosre -log
beem: 40. nosre, XL27 FoFi, T:101134: http://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/nosre/morgue-nosre-20170410-160631.txt
araganzar: !lg nosre -tv
beem: 40. nosre, XL27 FoFi, T:101134 requested for FooTV: telnet://termcast.develz.org or http://termcast.develz.org.

duvessa posted:

As you may or may not know, spell success only changes at intervals of 0.5 effective spell skill. For example, if your Spellcasting skill is an even number, then having 0.9 Necromancy is exactly the same as having only 0.5 Necromancy for the purposes of Animate Skeleton success. If you have 11 Spellcasting, and 11 Ice Magic, having 12.3 Necromancy is the same as having only 11.5 necromancy for the purposes of Simulacrum success.
This affects my skill training quite a bit, especially at higher levels since skills are very expensive and the differences between breakpoints become quite large. It's also something that very few players are even aware of.
This happens because of the very imprecise calculation of spell power. All the relevant code is in spl-cast.cc:

code:

/**
 * Calculate the player's failure rate with the given spell, including all
 * modifiers. (Armour, mutations, statuses effects, etc.)
 *
 * @param spell     The spell in question.
 * @return          A failure rate. This is *not* a percentage - for a human-
 *                  readable version, call _get_true_fail_rate().
 */
int raw_spell_fail(spell_type spell)
{
    int chance = 60;

    // Don't cap power for failure rate purposes.
    chance -= 6 * calc_spell_power(spell, false, true, false);
    chance -= (you.intel() * 2);

    const int armour_shield_penalty = player_armour_shield_spell_penalty();
    dprf("Armour+Shield spell failure penalty: %d", armour_shield_penalty);
    chance += armour_shield_penalty;

    static const int difficulty_by_level[] =
    {
        0,
        3,
        15,
        35,

        70,
        100,
        150,

        200,
        260,
        330,
    };
    const int spell_level = spell_difficulty(spell);
    ASSERT_RANGE(spell_level, 0, (int) ARRAYSZ(difficulty_by_level));
    chance += difficulty_by_level[spell_level];

    int chance2 = chance;

    const int chance_breaks[][2] =
    {
        {45, 45}, {42, 43}, {38, 41}, {35, 40}, {32, 38}, {28, 36},
        {22, 34}, {16, 32}, {10, 30}, {2, 28}, {-7, 26}, {-12, 24},
        {-18, 22}, {-24, 20}, {-30, 18}, {-38, 16}, {-46, 14},
        {-60, 12}, {-80, 10}, {-100, 8}, {-120, 6}, {-140, 4},
        {-160, 2}, {-180, 0}
    };

    for (const int (&cbrk)[2] : chance_breaks)
        if (chance < cbrk[0])
            chance2 = cbrk[1];
    chance2 += get_form()->spellcasting_penalty;

    chance2 -= 2 * you.get_mutation_level(MUT_SUBDUED_MAGIC);
    chance2 += 4 * you.get_mutation_level(MUT_WILD_MAGIC);
    chance2 += 4 * you.get_mutation_level(MUT_ANTI_WIZARDRY);

    if (you.props.exists(SAP_MAGIC_KEY))
        chance2 += you.props[SAP_MAGIC_KEY].get_int() * 12;

    chance2 += you.duration[DUR_VERTIGO] ? 7 : 0;

    // Apply the effects of Vehumet and items of wizardry.
    chance2 = _apply_spellcasting_success_boosts(spell, chance2);

    if (chance2 > 100)
        chance2 = 100;

    return chance2;
}

int stepdown_spellpower(int power)
{
    return stepdown_value(power / 100, 50, 50, 150, 200);
}

int calc_spell_power(spell_type spell, bool apply_intel, bool fail_rate_check,
                     bool cap_power)
{
    int power = 0;

    const spschools_type disciplines = get_spell_disciplines(spell);

    int skillcount = count_bits(disciplines);
    if (skillcount)
    {
        for (const auto bit : spschools_type::range())
            if (disciplines & bit)
                power += you.skill(spell_type2skill(bit), 200);
        power /= skillcount;
    }

    power += you.skill(SK_SPELLCASTING, 50);
    // Brilliance boosts spell power a bit (equivalent to three
    // spell school levels).
    if (!fail_rate_check && you.duration[DUR_BRILLIANCE])
        power += 600;

    if (apply_intel)
        power = (power * you.intel()) / 10;

    // [dshaligram] Enhancers don't affect fail rates any more, only spell
    // power. Note that this does not affect Vehumet's boost in castability.
    if (!fail_rate_check)
        power = apply_enhancement(power, _spell_enhancement(spell));

    // Wild magic boosts spell power but decreases success rate.
    if (!fail_rate_check)
    {
        power *= (10 + 3 * you.get_mutation_level(MUT_WILD_MAGIC));
        power /= (10 + 3 * you.get_mutation_level(MUT_SUBDUED_MAGIC));
    }

    // Augmentation boosts spell power at high HP.
    if (!fail_rate_check)
    {
        power *= 10 + 4 * augmentation_amount();
        power /= 10;
    }

    // Each level of horror reduces spellpower by 10%
    if (you.duration[DUR_HORROR] && !fail_rate_check)
    {
        power *= 10;
        power /= 10 + (you.props[HORROR_PENALTY_KEY].get_int() * 3) / 2;
    }

    power = stepdown_spellpower(power);

    const int cap = spell_power_cap(spell);
    if (cap > 0 && cap_power)
        power = min(power, cap);

    return power;
}

The main culprits are the terrible resolution of raw_spell_fail and the integer division by 100 in stepdown_spellpower. The latter is what results in skills only applying to spell success in intervals of 0.5 effective level. (For breakpoints in spell power itself, the effect of intelligence etc. makes it more complicated; I just want to talk about spell success for now.)

chance_breaks then introduces additional breakpoints. There is a very close cubic fit for the points in chance_breaks:

Polynomial fit calculator that you can conveniently paste this right into:

code:

{45, 45}, {42, 43}, {38, 41}, {35, 40}, {32, 38}, {28, 36},
        {22, 34}, {16, 32}, {10, 30}, {2, 28}, {-7, 26}, {-12, 24},
        {-18, 22}, {-24, 20}, {-30, 18}, {-38, 16}, {-46, 14},
        {-60, 12}, {-80, 10}, {-100, 8}, {-120, 6}, {-140, 4},
        {-160, 2}, {-180, 0}

if you want to experiment.

I have tried a local branch with raw_spell_fail using floating point while computing the failure rate (only casting to an int at the end), using a separate power stepdown without the integer division, and with chance_breaks replaced with

code:

chance2 = 28.0+chance2*0.32+chance2*chance2*0.0016+chance2*chance2*chance2*0.0000038.

(larger constant than the "best" fit to avoid buffing general spell success).
Success rates are always very close to current ones, but with skill breakpoints gone. One great effect of getting rid of chance_breaks is that spells transition from 100% to 99% to 98% etc. etc. earlier, instead of staying at 100% for ages and then quickly falling. A 99% fail spell is still useless but it makes it much easier for unspoiled players to tell how close they are to getting it castable, compared to seeing both level 5 and level 9 spells as 100% fail.

I'm very pleased with the outcome and I think mainline Crawl should do something similar to get rid of these breakpoints. With the chance_breaks replacement I used, level 9 spells are slightly easier to cast than before but that can easily be changed; a nice thing about using an actual formula instead of a nonsense lookup table is that you can easily adjust the coefficients.

IronicDongz posted:

hark, a blue moon rises, and with it a duvessa post that is good enough it ought to be seen by more people: https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&p=310755#p310755


I had no idea that spell success had this sort of breakpoints, but it does explain the weird jumps in success as you level.

Some punter posted:

D-d-d-die rolls!!! In my roguelike?!

Serephina posted:

Up next: finding out Unique monsters generate based on items dropped in the previous level, and can be easily determined by observant players.

Serephina posted:

Yea, that's exactly what I was talking about before with the whole nested 1d(foo) stuff. But then someone goes and jumps on you like

and suddenly we see why devs might not like coming here.

This is an objectively great change, and I'm one of the unwashed masses who always thought spell success was smooth. I mean, why wouldn't it be? Up next: finding out Unique monsters generate based on items dropped in the previous level, and can be easily determined by observant players.