The fact that in the early game you really value picking up heavy armor on a shapeshifter and just wearing that makes it so that it’s hard to transition into Maw form or Anaconda form as well, especially since any enchants you get are likely going on the piece of armor you can actually use if you’re sticking with beast form, so the player ends up being pretty motivated to drop the shapeshifting in a lot of cases.
Yeah, it’s a fair point that maw and beast are fighting with each other re body armour preferences. I like that different forms meld different slots, but it is awkward for the beast → maw transition especially.
I did think about this before implementing beast form. I’d considered making beast form meld body armour, but then I’d probably have to give it some fur AC for survivability, and then it would push players pretty strongly toward dex/ranged builds, which are much more OK with losing body armour. I’m not sure how to square that circle. But I’ll keep thinking about it!
I am a little confused about why it’s hard to transition into Anaconda form. Could you elaborate on that?
9 is a lot of skill for when training shapeshifting for beast form is pretty weak, which is most of the early game. Normally apts matter much less, but on Shapeshifters specifically I find myself just training more fighting and armour instead of wanting to get shapeshifting up to 9 and losing all the armour training I set up for beast form (which could be wrong! but that’s the direction I feel like the game is pushing me). That applies to both anaconda and maw form. And since I’ve been training armour in the early game for AC, I’ve been training less Dodging, which means that going into a form that loses a body armor ends up being even more expensive than it first appears.
Ooh, I’m glad you brought this up! This is one of my favorite topics.
So let’s imagine this scenario. Let’s say we had a mechanic where, any time you picked up an item, you had a 0.01% chance of instant death. (This is a real mechanic in roguelike Caverns of Xaskazien 2, btw.) If we removed this from the game, would you have lost something?
Or, back in Crawl, you can look at some of the other mechanics we removed, like “no zapping wands while transformed”, or “only ‘recommended’ background/species combos are allowed”. When we removed that, did players lose something?
In a certain sense, sure! Any time you change a game in any way, you lose the possibility for some experiences. If you remove a chance of instant death from item pickups, you’re removing the potential for a very memorable experience; if you remove the special mechanic of forms blocking wand use, you’re removing the special terror of being able to do very little about being porkified.
But you’re gaining much more at the same time. You’re gaining the ability to pick up items without getting stressed about maybe just dying instantly; you’re gaining more options in tricky tactical situations, letting you have the memorable experience of polymorphing Kirke right back; etc.
So, circling back, when we remove things like form spells, that certainly removes some experiences. But it also enables new ones. It makes people excited when they find a talisman, since you can’t enter that form in any other way. It makes Djinn players happier, because they no longer need to deal with getting form spells that are very rarely a match for their playstyle. It makes people have more fun when playing the game, because they no longer have to balance “do I want to maximize my chances of winning” vs “do i really want to keep recasting my form spell over and over again mindlessly.” And so on.
We love giving players more distinct archetypes to try, as I’m sure you expect.
It’s probably worth noting that I have spent many years thinking about how to make form spells and form switching more interesting. My first notes on the subject are from 2016 or so. Other devs have thought about it; other players have thought about it. No one ever made any meaningful headway on it. It’s a very hard problem.
Other forks of DCSS didn’t have any better luck - they just made forms last indefinitely via a different mechanism, described here.
This may help you understand why I’m a little skeptical of the idea that waiting and doing nothing would have resulted in anything. We tried that already.
My point was, it’s good to at least recognize that something was lost in the kind of removals we were talking about - those that players have an aversion to.
Of course the things you can add as a result of such a removal can have a lot of positive aspects, including talismans. Otherwise it’d never be a valid decision. Not sure what makes you think you have to spell that out in such detail.
You do mention peripheral benefits that don’t really require the removal of form swapping:
It makes Djinn players happier, because they no longer need to deal with getting form spells that are very rarely a match for their playstyle
Djinni could just not get form spells. Djinni could also generally be presented with a choice of two spells of different schools, instead of just learning a spell with potentially little use to them.
It makes people have more fun when playing the game, because they no longer have to balance “do I want to maximize my chances of winning” vs “do i really want to keep recasting my form spell over and over again mindlessly."
Yes, the form spells can be tedious. There are ways to work around that without removing their tactical form swapping completely.
We love giving players more distinct archetypes to try, as I’m sure you expect.
My impression is just that it’s primarily to provide replayability for the same kinds of people, as opposed to having different playstyles for different people. It’s a somewhat vague thing to complain about, I only added that for understanding. It’s fine, really!
I see. I’d be interested in reading more about that.
I think that the form spells and form switching already were interesting enough to exist, so if you can fix the tedium about them, there’s no problem with any urgency.
Sometimes trying to come up with an all-encompassing solution on paper isn’t the right approach. There’s also the incremental, experimental approach - add something and see if it has some interesting emergent gameplay.
I know that wiki entry. There are ways to work around the problems you name in that section.
For example, they could be low-level spells that are easily casted by anyone, but whose usefulness requires enough spellpower. Having to meld heavy armour could hinder the form itself. Too low spellpower could result in very low max health or some other downside that makes it unworkable.
This may help you understand why I’m a little skeptical of the idea that waiting and doing nothing would have resulted in anything
Of course waiting and doing nothing doesn’t result in anything. That’s obvious, and I don’t disagree. Maybe one of us missed the point of what the other one is saying.
It does help understand why you made your decisions, though.
I just won a DrBe (grey) by finding a dragon talisman on D1 and staying in dragon form until I found a storm talisman in depths. It was the easiest win I’ve ever had. I think it should probably be tougher to use the higher-end forms when you find them earlier. Perhaps introduce a chance to lose your form when you take significant damage? Something like 50% chance with 0 shapeshifting skill and 0% when you have the minimum skill for the talisman. That would make it riskier to just use dragon form for the whole game.
Thanks for the report! I’m surprised a -70% hp penalty wasn’t enough. I could make it -80% or -90%, i suppose - don’t think there’s a need to add more mechanics in.
I have some other nerfs in the pipeline, regardless.
Won a OpSh today. Many people in this thread have already provided excellent feedback, so I will try to refrain from repeating anything that has been said here, and keep it brief.
Some minor suggestions/remarks:
It would be nice if autopickup defaults to picking up any given talisman until you’ve picked it up for the first time.
It’s a bit unclear if sacrifice artifice includes talismans or not. A priori, I assumed that it did, because at the time I didn’t see that a new sacrifice type had been added (Ru offered it to me later). Now I am even less certain.
While I think it’s generally pretty good that you can’t switch out of forms quickly (ringswapping is evil), it definitely made granite form (formerly statue form) worse than before, even if it wouldnt be noticeable most of the time. I absolutely don’t think that this is a reason to enable exiting forms quickly, but it makes granite form a bit more awkward, considering that storm form exists and overlaps even more with the skill training compared to before.
I got some warnings for resting in poison clouds in granite form (and entering them), but I wasn’t always able to reproduce this. Maybe worth looking at if something is happening there, considering that you don’t get dispelled out of granite form anymore via e.g. quicksilver bolts (at least I believe this is the case).
Now that each individual form is tied to its own item, I think this opens up some design space for alternating(?) items here. I know that originally this has been used to lighten inventory pressure of evocables/consumables while introducing more of them to the game, but I personally think this could be fun, and break up some of the potential monotony throughout several shapeshifter games.
Overall, forms feel less clunky to use, so it is nice to see that the game is heading in this direction! I never personally had any major issues with how they functioned before, but I can see how this would make transmuters (now shapeshifters) more enjoyable to play for a lot of other players.
I’ve played two BaSh chars. First one went forms and stupidly splatted by me making a bad mistake, second went ranged and won very easily. Also watched some other people play. Some thoughts:
Start feels like a medium strength melee background, it’s nice that Slay from beast form is generic. Similar to Tm, it feels weird to start as a robe character with no points in Stealth. I think giving it Stealth:1 would make the start slightly more consistent on D:1, which is useful when you don’t get a weapon choice and your only way to deal damage is UC.
It felt like going with forms noticeably limits gameplay options (maybe not a bad thing by itself). All three tier 2 forms are very offence oriented and sorta squishy. Two of the three forbid throwing, which is very annoying for an early game melee char. Slot melding and inability to exit form on the fly makes lots of otherwise exciting loot useless.
Skilling for tier 2 forms feels very unusual. The gap between skill 9 and 20 is like a gap between casting lvl 4 and lvl 8 spell. It’s kinda huge and the gains don’t feel like they’re worth the investment.
With previous system skilling for Transmutations gave you access to other (very strong) spells along the way, but now since you use only one form at a time it feels too all-in, like you are training two skills to use a melee weapon.
The tier system obviously has a lot of benefits, but perhaps forms can be made more interesting by having unique skill targets. Like for example Blade is still 9 to 20, but Maw is 6 to 10 or something, so you get full power Maw earlier and with less training, but Blade gets much better in the endgame with investment.
Delay on transforming/untransforming is probably needed to prevent tedious behaviour, but I’m not sure it needs to be exactly 5 turns or symmetrical. Something like 3 turn delay will make changing or dropping form an actual tactical decision in some situations, while something like 5 turn transform/2 turn untransform will make granite and death forms more competitive and allow for using harsher form downsides in general.
It would be cool if more forms had special active abilities like blinkbolt or dragon breath. Mobility/repositioning tools like barachi hop, harpoon shot, web throw or some knockback effect can be especially appealing for chars who want to use forms for more than just punching people in the noggin, though maybe that’s better reserved for unique talismans.
TrSh felt extremely powerful. I worshipped Wu Jian and found anaconda, dragon, and death talismans when I needed them. Even though the rest of my gear was very mediocre and vanilla, I completely steamrolled the game. Never had to use any meaningful consumables or have any close calls really. This included getting teleport trapped deep into lungs of zot 5 and marked. By that time I had GDS with death form and was able to just wipe everything out, even though I couldn’t drink potions.
FeSh was definitely an improvement over FeTm, but was still very hard. I appreciated that I could worship Trog and use forms, which was something I had always wanted to do. I ended up running out of lives in snake pit, mostly due to sloppy play. Only form I found for 95% of the game was maw form which was pretty underwhelming.
Overall I think the changes are a net positive. Transmuter starts were just awful before, and now they feel comparable to something like gladiator. It is much more straightforward to build your stats and skills, and it opens up some very new player friendly combos such as TrSh.
That being said, as has been mentioned, it does feel very one-dimensional. You are extremely reliant on finding the right talisman(s) on time, and if you do, it doesn’t really matter what else the dungeon gives you. I think some of the suggestions around having increased talisman variety or having different strengths of talismans could help a lot here. Otherwise the archetype will get very repetitive.
Statue Form “piercing” AC is a fun(?) and intuitive effect. It makes sense that a slow-but-hard hitting attack (e.g. heavy brand) would be stronger against high AC. I think it would be a small buff worth having.
This idea might be bad, but what if you added cross training between shapeshifting and transmutations?
Also, an unrand idea I had:
King Lycan’s Crown (rC+, AC+3, Regen+, slay+3, str+5, rSilver-, *Meld, int-5)
*Meld being that it would meld body slot as well, and it’d make you even weaker to silver than normal, but it’d give bonus regen equal to a troll and some nice extra damage
I like that most of the forms genuinely feel distinct from each other, with the possible exception of Anaconda form which just feels like a weak version of Dragon. Even Maw and Beast have use cases where you might consider keeping them the whole game, but Anaconda->Dragon is a straight upgrade.
For me they feel very strong and there is an easy progression as they all just use Shapeshifting. If anything I can totally see a case for having Death, Statue and Storm all require cross training to make them less linear.
Given that you’ve removed the main draw of Transmutation is this the time to just merge it with Poison? There is a lot of overlap between the 2 anyway and a lot of mediocre spell with neither having anything higher than ENB at level 6. Shmoosh them together as ‘Alchemy’, remove Alastair’s intoxication, add a few higher level spells so investing in it past about 15 isn’t just a noob trap.
I only had one (almost) full game, where I died in Zot 5 (generaly just commited suicide), but I played some quickly lost games as well.
I like that you do not need to recast, it makes the game smoother. However, I found most of the forms are significantly stronger than the old transmuation version, as they seem to be easier to get online. Note that I think old transmuter was a decent start and relatively easy to win, but you needed to balance skills and attributes appropriately, so it was not the easiest to play. Old transmuter had the multiple attribute dependency: str for damage (my usual choice), IQ for getting forms online faster, dex for evasion. However new forms do not need IQ anymore, and some even can wear armour for defence without problems. Being permanent is visibly stronger where you may have a hard time casting: purple dracs/quicksilver dragons/silent spectre/antimagic, but more importanty, you do not miscast spider form 6 times in a row anymore.
Old transmuter gave access to a bunch of other spells. This made them a very unique playstyle as melee fighters with specific spells. I miss this playstyle. The new version feels very similar to a simple melee fighter, on the tactic level it feels exactly the same. I feel this is a lost opportunity – forms simply feel as a new weapon schools, with slight differences. One thing I can think of is to give most (all?) forms some active spell-like abilities. For no active ability fighting we have the melee fighters already.
Also, while most forms scale with Transmutation skill, the scaling is usually pretty boring, and encourages some min/maxing with UC/Fighting skill. I do not like scaling damage, for example, as UC already does this. I would prefer some breakpoints where you gain some ability, or something.
Some of the forms, has significant drawbacks that are made much worse by the slow exit. Statue form is the worst offender here. For me this means that the balance between various forms are shifted. Storm form is relatively stronger than it was, since it does not have a harsh drawback and it was double school. In my opinion the skill requirements are too low for storm form. I did not like old statue form much on most species (there were exceptions), but I feel it become even more useless. I do not like to be slow, I think players underestimate how bad it can be.
I have not tried the new mummy form yet, but being vulnerable to dispell undead while not being able to drink cancellation or haste also sounds brutal to me. I can see it has high MR, but there are chaos effects late game you would like to cancel immediately, and haste is very important. At least you could exit old mummy form quickly, altough in general that was useless as well, so maybe nothing changed here.
Early game beast form is weaker than spider form. A shapshifter start become stronger than old transmuter on level 1-2 but weaker afterwards until you find something. Altough it also got much simpler to play – you do not need to balance skills so carefully anymore, as you simply start with enough transmuations and can focus on UC or whatever. You also do not miscast spider form 3 times in a row anymore.
A few thoughts after two wins, none of them extended.
Neat and creative forms, my favourites are Flux and Maw. I used Statue for both wins since it offers the most protection, didn’t find Storm/Death form in either game I think.
However, something feels like a pebble in my boot. And I think it has to do with Crawl’s design philosophy. I picture the playable archetypes (melee, ranged, spellcaster, hybrid etc) as like… A big highway, lots of lanes. And you can switch between lanes to a certain extent. A *Be probably will not, that guy’s fairly linear, but otherwise you can be flexible. Man I’m not really explaining this well… But simply put the Shapeshifter style feels like a narrow road disconnected from the highway - you HAVE to dump almost all your excess XP into Shapeshifting, then put enough points into core skills like Fighting/dodging/UC. So your path is laid out for you - it reminds me of ToME4 in a way, as soon as you start your dude you probably know how you’ll build him. And I don’t dig that.
It also adds the minor issue of “worthless loot”, which crawl has very little of. Sure, non-spellcasters consider books/staves worthless but books are absorbed while you can turn off staff autopickup in .rc. The stupid talismans feel out of place, since only ONE playstyle will use them, but every single character have to stare at them. Apart from the mentioned books/staves most loot can be used by all characters regardless of archetype. Talismans break this rule.
It’s easy to point out flaws, but I’d like to add that I enjoy playing Shapeshifters. Great job devs! Not sure how I’d solve the problems I outlined above. INT too low. Oh and speaking of INT! Sh has like no INT, so you can’t really hybridize easily. Not that you have XP for it anyway, enjoy your -whatever apt
What species are you playing as shapeshifters? Troll shapeshifter with statue form is one of the most powerful things you can do in the game now. It’s practically a free win. Statue form is not so good on low HP, fragile species though.
I found trolls very strong in general, even without shapeshifting and statue form, so this was not a case I particularly considered. On a troll I would likely use statue form.
Note that purely from the perspective of “how likely is the game kill you if you play reasonably well” I do not think statue form is particularly good on trolls. Sure, it helps in the majority of situations to go much more smoothly. However, sometimes you need to run, no matter how strong you are. These are the very rare but very dangerous situations, and statue form hurts in these. But I agree that with the current state of the game a Troll with statue form more likely will have enough blink scrolls to deal with these.
It is true that since a troll has a hard time find good defense, statue form games feels much more smooth to play.
I’m not sure if this is a bug or not, but thought I’d mention it: Merfolk maintain their water mutations in Statue Form (speed etc.) but sometimes fail to attack because of unstable footing. I’ve tried it out with the other talismans I have on hand (flux, blade, storm, and serpent) and none seem to have this issue. Is this part of a the slowness/awkwardness of being a statue? If so the failure message should probably be changed to reflect that.
I’m having a lot of fun shapeshifting though, aptitude-wise it’s a no-brainer for Merfolk
Transmuters were one of my favorites, and the new Shapeshifting changes look amazing, I recall when playing with different forms it felt like a drag sometimes that I often just wanted to stay in a form and not have to recast them all the time.
The shift of moving it from a ‘spellcasting’ thing to its own skill does open different build and considerations though. Before, all ‘shapeshifters’ were spellcasters too, and that made higher-tier forms harder to achieve for some races, particularly if you were Low-INT or not really making a caster-focused build. Trog Shapeshifters sound terrifying tbh(and thats awesome).
One thing I started to feel a lot compared to the old Transmutation forms, is I felt less versatile, since changing forms takes a nice 5auts, and you also don’t have the usual spellcasting attached to it that was previously a requirement.
I looked a lot at Beast-form, which is the obvious replacement for Beastly Appendage, and while from a meta-perspective I think its good, I somehow still missed gaining the extra auxiliary attacks, while sacrificing even more body slots.
I am not sure if it was because beastly appendage was considered too strong(as it gave aux attacks with very minor investment), but Beast-form feels like I need more investment for the benefit(spellcasting could be an expensive investment, but you were not getting only forms), which is understandable if that was the intention. I still feel adding an aux attack could be feasible, maybe acquired at the max-training level for it (7).
Alternatively, perhaps a bit of horizontal-progression, as in, more options around the same-training level to suit other types of builds, as sometimes I felt I was ‘stuck’ with certain form until I could use another form that was usually way up until the endgame, and it felt the investment in Shapeshifting was not giving any returns as my current form was already capped.
On some other notes, I had been doing a few runs as a follower of Jiyva, and I just thought… some forms completely override mutations, but wouldn’t it be cool if Jiyva’s unique mutations wouldn’t be? imagine being a giant ooze dragon that can engulf its enemies, that sounds amazing and terrifying at the same time.
