I'm big into the nuts & bolts of DoD. I love checking out the numbers for every spell & ability - looking for synergies. A BIG part of my strategic considerations is the "scaling stat" for various abilities & spells. When Shield Bash scaled to I made builds to maximize that. When i scaled to I made different builds. Knowing that the Charlemagne skill scales to influences my decision to take the skill or not. But here's a problem - most players have no idea that various skills & spells scale to different stats. Here is my proposal - display the icon for the relevant scaling stat within each skill / spell's description text. So when I mouse over my potential skills I can see that Charlemagne scales to , or that my attack wands scale their damage with , or that Warlockery scales damage to . This changes nothing - it just gives casual players the chance to experience the same amazing synergy concepts that many of us already enjoy. If we could include attribute icons in description text, I would be happy to do the work of implementing this.
I don't like the idea, since roguelikes are just about discovering things hidden in the game, should they be potion, ability effects or different kind of monsters with strange abilities, or rooms. So putting the relevant stat near an ability helps figure what it does (an effect which adds and , or a spell which is linked to , are just easy to figure. No surprise at all). Also, it will become a game of numbers, which isn't exactly the funniest thing. Yes, you CAN try maximizing your character by putting every single skill point in a fruitfuly manner, but there is the wiki for this things, and also the relative xxxDB.xml. A casual player, instead, by definition doesn't care much about inner mechanics, he just want to enjoy the game as a relax between more other things to do. Also, I sometimes (lot's of time) take skills which doesn't synergise well, and I don't want a constantly reminder about how foolish was I for not taking Magic Training instead of Archery.
I personally like the idea. It makes it a lot easier to know which skills scale to what without having to alt-tab to the wiki every 5 minutes.
I mean, the thing is that this already exists, but irregularly. A lot of skills which were changed to scale to not-magic-power when non magic power scaling was first implemented say "this scales to ____" in their descriptions. For instance Thibault's Trompement says "Damage scales to nimbleness". But you also have weird cases like Shield Bash, which claims it scales to Stubbornness but actually scales to Block Chance. And then you've got Puissant Touch, which you'd assume scales to Magic Power but (when you look into the code) actually scales to max mana! So yeah, I'd love to see, if nothing else, a bit of consistency in this.
The way I see this implemented is if skills on the skill bar can be flagged to "Scale with" certain stats. I don't think it'd be worth it to write some code to parse the spelldb.xml for references to one particular scalar or another. Alternatively, you could just update all of the skill descriptions so that they mention any scaling factors
I am gonna have to disagree with vitellozzo It is pretty darn hard to 'discover' anything when there is no stat log at all with regard to spells. Even knowing what damage types exist from spells is iffy at best.Going to a third party webpage for discovery is no longer playing any rogue like.. nor is digging through an XML file. Back before there was google a good rogue like let you discover stuff by opening up combat logs or other nifty information. Being the natural evolution from text based games, it is kind of natural that good solid text information was still readily available when playing. They would have failed miserably had there been little or no written explanation to how you died.
Firstly, there isn't a good way to "discover" scaling stats in game unless it's stated so in the tooltip. Who could possibly figure that Charlemagne scales to ? Not that you get it for the damage, anyway, but it's a Rogue skill that scales to a Wizard stat. Much the same, a few CK skills scale to which isn't exactly intuitive (even if it makes perfect sense.) Secondly, this is a game of numbers, much like all roguelikes. If you're an optimizer, you're gonna hit Dredmorpedia and figure out the numbers anyway. If you're not? Seeing numbers won't change your mentality much anyway, though you might be led to make smarter choices about gear and skills, and might potentially have More Fun by seeing your abilities Do More. Remember, that while Losing Is Fun, winning is still just as much fun, if not moreso, even for the casual gamer. Casual gamers just don't want to have to spend as much effort to win (and thus play on easier difficulties.) This is how I'd like to see this work, borrowing from League of Legends in its display of stat scaling (which many think is quite easy to read.) First, you have the base damage in colored text according to its type, and then you have the scaling percentage in a color appropriate to the stat. Here are some examples: 15% chance of Pedantic Beating when you hit in melee Damages 4 + ( 0.50 x ) 50% chance of Paralyze for 2 turns 21% chance of Sneaky Shiv when you hit in melee Damages 1 + ( 0.33 x ) Starts Bleeding 50% chance of Paralyze for 5 turns Now, I've posted about this before, and some complained that this would lead to cluttered tooltips and UI. This is easily solved; create a checkbox option in settings for "Detailed Tooltips" to enable or disable this functionality. Thus, this wouldn't really remove any gameplay or detract from the experience. It can only help out, and give the player relevant information to make smart choices, which can only empower them and enhance their enjoyment.
I never saw a roguelike which did tell you what to do to maximize your power. Much more the opposite. Also, if you write the effect of the ability right away, it just becomes clear to everyone. And I didn't know what last level of berserk did, until I got the possibiity to throw a skill point into the final stat. BUT I strongly support this.
I support this and think the idea of a checkbox to enable/disable such information is wonderful, but I can't help wondering just how much work this would mean to implement?
It's not very hard to display a single stat icon with each skill - the hard work is going through every skill and assigning the proper data to that field. If we wanted to do a longer "full information" solution as Nikolai suggested (which I don't support) it would be much harder.
Perhaps it'd be harder, but it would also look a lot better in my opinion. Then again, my opinion may be biased, as I am very used to the League of Legends layout.
The difficulty is that, as new types of effects are added, the display system would almost certainly break. J-Factor's Dredmorpedia suffers from this - it was made to show all the data on skills, equipment, etc. Then they added some new skill types, and the whole thing broke down. Obviously not impossible - but it's work. I think a single icon per skill would get us 50% of the benefit, for much less work.
Perhaps you're right. And I suppose since it's a roguelike you aren't supposed to know the value right off the bat.
