Basically, it comes down to “I thought that Troll Leather Armour was the dominant light armour?” Ever since Regen+ was buffed a while back, I thought this way.
Regen is good in combat. I would argue +0.8 HP/turn is roughly equal to the+3-4 AC or so from Swamp scales. 4 AC protects from 2 HP/attack, but Regen still works if you evade. block, or run away. +7 Swamp might beat +4 TLA, but this assumes you have ?enchant armour to spare. (Obviously ignoring the rPois)
Fire scales / Ice scales are where their AC starts to get significantly better (IMO). But these are rarer, have a vulnerability, and have significant encumbrance.
Regen is great when you can’t safely rest. Casters have more trouble when they can’t rest. Think of Vaults:5 or Abyss, as well as shafts / teleport traps. While TLA won’t recover MP, the HP buffer is quite valuable.
I can’t say as much about Archmagi, but DCSS is generally a game that favors defense over offense. At 50 base spellpower (around where L6 spells are first castable), you’ll get stuff like:
3d11 → 3d14 on Fireball
2 x d41 → 2 x d50 on Lightning Bolt / Plasma Beam, plus to-hit boost
9d5 / 9d6 → 9d7 on Iron Shot, plus to-hit boost.
More importantly, there are many viable killing spells like Freezing Cloud, BVC, Poison + Ignite Poison, which don’t care (as) much about power.
Overall I think the benefits of archmagi are low compared to armours like TLA, I don’t think there is as much need to “encourage mid-range armour”. The comparison would be closer to TLA v FDA than Archmagi v FDA. Maybe archmagi is more helpful than I’m presenting it?
(Also ignoring hexes / tmut / translocations, since they don’t have a staff)
The examples you list are a 25% damage boost, approximately. That’s a colossal boost, especially since for casters, the MP to enemies dead ratio is pretty important. It also boosts spellpower on defensive spells like Ozocubu’s Armor and Statue form, allowing them to make up for the defenses you’re losing directly.
I don’t think anybody is debating that regen isn’t good, but casters usually die when they run out of MP. Archmagi directly helps you not run out of MP, and it does this by boosting all of your spells, not just ones that deal direct damage to enemies.
This also doesn’t remove archmagi completely. It’ll still appear on artifact robes, so it can still generate in games, but I think it was pretty frequently the correct choice if you were a caster. My tier list was always Archmagi > Swamp > Acid > TLA > Steam > Ego robes/leather.
I think it’s definitely a change worth testing in trunk and seeing how it feels.
Fireball doesn’t scale super effectively with spellpower, but Plasma Beam would go from an average damage per cast of ~41 to ~50 (assuming both bolts hit) with one spellpower enhancer in your example. Between that and the higher accuracy, that’s going to be about a 25% boost in damage from a single spellpower enhancer. Similarly, Leda’s Unmaking going from 9d5 to 9d7 would be a very large increase; going from an average damage per cast of 27 to 36 is 33% more damage per shot.
The bigger issue is with schools that don’t have easy enhancer access. With Archmagi no longer being a thing, it is now incredibly difficult to find any spellpower enhancer for Hexes, a school where several of your top spells are single-school and are very spellpower reliant to defeat enemy willpower consistently. With the stabber archetype being probably the weakest one in Crawl currently, and one that is heavily biased towards the lightest of armour, a nerf like this is not really warranted. Transmutations has the same problem, which is especially problematic when several transmutation forms are heavily spellpower reliant in some fashion (like Statue Form’s extra AC or Storm Form’s everything).
The extra benefit of spell enhancers is such a big deal that Archmagi robes were my “go-to” for almost literally any caster in the game. Basically the only times I didn’t were if it never showed up, or maybe if I found early pearl dragon scales on a character with enough Str to avoid that much of a penalty.
The “compensation” in trunk is that randart staves now exist that can potentially enhance multiple schools at once, but from testing it’s not a good replacement. First, you have to find a randart enhancer staff (which are rare enough that you might not see one the entire game to begin with), then it has to at minimum boost one of your focused schools, and then it needs to not be kneecapped by some garbage like -4 Int or *Corrode. You’re replacing a rare but usually present at some point robe ego with hoping for a randart staff to make up the difference, or hoping for a randart robe to spawn with that ego in place.
The Transmutations problem at least will be resolved relatively soon with the planned Transmutation form overhaul, but the issue with Hexes will still remain. Maybe a staff of hexes or making orb of guile more common could help compensate?
There’s basically no scenario where I would use archmagi robes long term, but perhaps it had an interesting niche early on for say hexer or summoning characters. I’d usually prefer something with more AC like steam, TLA, acid scales etc. Also, even if I was going to use a robe early on I would prefer a different ego such as resistance. One case where I would value it more highly though is on a Naga.
What Lightli said, but also: can you please stop with the “we’re nerfing x in order to encourage the use of y” thing? It sounds at best patronizing at best and, at worst (and indeed most commonly), a rather disingenuous way to sweeten the deal of a potentially unpopular nerf.
In the case at hand, for example, the kind of player who correctly evaluates the usefulness of archmagi is generally the same kind of player who correctly evaluates the usefulness of troll leather or steam dragon armor or whatever else might be a suitable alternative for the kind of character who would wear archmagi. No “encouragement” needed there. Meanwhile, the less experienced player who overlooks archmagi because they haven’t pored over spellpower and damage formulas and such probably tends to overvalue elemental resistances. Would you then consider nerfing the availability of elemental resistances in order to encourage the use of other, overlooked armor egos? I doubt anyone would come to that conclusion.
If you want to nerf something, please do so on the actual grounds that led to that decision without trying to justify it with ad hoc reasoning that no one actually belives.
Ah, I suppose I just didn’t think too much when posting. I didn’t consider that it was that big of a percentage.
My logic right now is:
In a “mundane” situation, an average caster doesn’t need much more power. Magic already has high damage/turn. Stairs are OP, so you can recover MP easily.
In an emergency (dangerous) situation, TLA / scales offer what Archmagi doesn’t, which is raw survivability. +Power helps less if you need to teleport away, as an example.
So, in the late game, Iron Shot / OOD / etc. are good enough to win you the game, even without a (second) spell enhancer. Ergo, I would rather use something that helps in emergencies. Archmagi does help, of course, but not as convincingly.
Simplest way to solve the proposed problem would be to give a {Hex+} ego to leather (and/or ring mail or robes). Maybe give it Stlh+ to make it not entirely useless for non hexers.
Staff of hexes won’t happen because daggers exist. Guile is funny but having Will-- is stupid scary.
Personally I have never felt like archmagi moved the needle on damage enough to be worth the loss of AC. I usually go for swamp dragon scales or fire dragon if it doesn’t impede spell casting too much and I have a source of rC+ to prevent getting rC-.
I’ve died to hubris in situations where rC- was pertinent, my lesson was to not trust myself with casual vulnerabilities.
…can you please stop with the “we’re nerfing x in order to encourage the use of y” thing? …If you want to nerf something, please do so on the actual grounds that led to that decision without trying to justify it with ad hoc reasoning that no one actually belives.
I’m sorry that it came across as condescending, but it was completely sincere. The decision was made for the exact reason that was listed in the commit.
The kind of player who correctly evaluates the usefulness of archmagi is generally the same kind of player who correctly evaluates the usefulness of troll leather or steam dragon armor or whatever else might be a suitable alternative for the kind of character who would wear archmagi. No “encouragement” needed there.
I think you’re misunderstanding, sorry. The argument isn’t that players are making poor decisions; the argument is that we’re not offering interesting decisions to players.
