Replace the stat values of dagger, crossbow and assassination by those of ESCRII. I haven't red enough of the ESCRII script to say what other changes could be made without drastically changing the balance of the core game. Also dagger suffer from too many active, I don't remember if ESCRII solve this. Add cutoffs to the loadout of the crossbow skill. I love parachute pants but it's a bit too much. I would love an alternative but it would need to create a new item and I can't bother with that right now. Create a throwing weapon that deals no damage but places caltrops trap(s). In skillDB replace <!-- Asrologer --> by <!-- Astrologer -->
The problem with this one is that then, traps would also do more damage to the player based off of those skills.
That would only be a problem if you were a blacksmith wizard with no trap sight radius. I should have wrote "to all traps".
The problem with this solution lies in the fact that sometimes it's not a matter of lacking necessary skills to see the traps, but rather being unlucky and getting into them by accident and/or having our cat jump on the keyboard and move our characters in such a way (cats don't know how to play rogue-likes) and/or anything else of this sort. Your idea looks fine on paper (or on an internet forum, in any case), but in order to implement it in a balanced way a lot of time would have to be spent testing it and adjusting values. If anything, I think that if traps were to be modified to scale with something, then some of them should scale with tinkering (those traps that you can make but that are rarely, or better not at all, found in the dungeon) and some with class levels (warriorness, roguishness, and wizardliness), with the traps on later floors being not more severe but rather more varied and the scaling providing for the difference in damage.
As I'm probably using 1.1.4R2 now I wouldn't be against testing it myself. But adding tinkering scaling to the DL1-3 traps wouldnt hurt, with all the flyings and the tough monsters. Right now the ones that are the best with traps are mages, which doesn't really make sense. That would make rogue wizards the best at traps but they'd have to be less magey and more roguish, sounds like a fair trade. Also trap affinity wasn't the best choice, you can easily get 10+ trap affinity, you'd have to make it scale poorly because of that. On a side note I tested puffballs a bit, and they are totally overpowered. Huge AoE with a DoT, goes through blocks (including monsters). It's better than any bolt at clearing a room (even Mass Destruction when you take into account how hard it is to craft). Going through blocks is fine by itself but the AoE DoT is too strong. Open door, throw, close door, wait, ton of xp.
If you really have time for that, it will be appreciated. I do see the point. Though scaling it all to trap affinity was the "safe" option so it was the obvious choice of stat for scaling. I might be wrong now, but I think their purpose was AoE confusion with no DoT and meagre damage. Which was enough to make them useful. So yeah, I agree.
There's an old joke that goes like this: Why do women close their eyes when you make love to them? Because - they can't stand to see a man enjoy himself. Cats are very much like this. What I'm saying is that they DO know how to play roguelikes and they follow their perverse nature by deliberately sabotaging games. Personally, I think the existing traps in the game should be left as they are. Instead, there should be a ton of unhidden recipes that allow a character with tinkering to craft traps out of all the garbage found in the dungeon. Virtually anything could be used for a trap - food could cause poison damage, potions some effect based on their normal use, weapons do damage that scales heavily with tinkering. As this would make tinkering even more powerful than it is now, crafting bows and bolts (plus the current tinkering encrusts that affect them) should be moved to archery instead. This would give people a real reason to choose archery and make tinkering less of a no-brainer, all while expanding the options the player has. I'd personally love to play a stealthy, classic rogue who wins his way through the dungeon by turning everything he encounters into traps.
I have time but I'm starting to think that it won't be possible. Everytime I create a character just to test something i actually get better drops than when I'm aiming for Dredmor. My last test character ? Find a crossbow +3 piercing right at start, then a cybercone, two necro tomes later on and an artifact crossbow with righteous damage and a burliness buff to top it all ... Or I find a weapon that 2-shot everything with an armour good enough to tank everything for at least the two next floors. And when I don't it's door 1 : 5 lil'batty, door 2 : Deth and a Siegfried. Oh but wait, I create a new character just to see if things are working as intented and bam, Wind-Up Double Plus crossbow right at the start. I think I will get crazy before I see the end of this. Edit : Hmm ... Could this be related to the expansions ? Apparently it happened mostly before installing the expansions, mostly the third one. An archery craft tree would be very interesting alas I have no idea if it is possible without requiring more work from the devs than what they can actually afford (probably not). Traps on the other hand are totally doable by the community though I don't agree that the existing traps should be left untouched. It wouldn't be fair to give to the player traps that have a good scaling with tinkering and traps that only scale with magic power. Scaling wise I'm thinking that the best choice would be to make every trap scale with both magic power and tinkering but not in the same proportions depending on the trap.
It's related to expansions, but it also depends on your luck. On a lucky run you'll get everything you need and then some, whilst on an unlucky run you'll be struggling with supplies until a certain point. Which is why no single attempt is sufficient to test anything of this sort. It would be, if one was to make enough recipes to cover all of that. Admittedly it is not an optimal way to do it is possible.
At some point, once we have 1.1.4 out and Essence gives us the go, we will probably merge ESCRII - or at least some parts of it - into the game. But that said, those conditions have not yet been Met.
Do we want to know why "Met" is capitalised, Sir Nicholas? Or does this way lie madness and suffering?
