Proposal For Improving Shapeshifting Experience, building off of 0.34 Trunk changes

Back Room Game Design Discussion
1

Hi there, I’m new to the forum (but not new to crawl by any means) and I came here because I wrote up this proposal in light of some recent shapeshifting changes, as well as my experience playing a lot of 0.33. I think it addresses a lot of the key sticking points with shapeshifting and would improve the experience greatly. I’m not sure who exactly my audience is, so I’m going to write this assuming it could be a dev reading it.

…

First of all, I want to say thank you for what you do, this game is something beloved to me, and your effort in maintaining and updating it means a great deal to me.

Anyways, today I wanted to suggest reworking the current tier 1 and 2 talismans so that they meld much less gear (ideally not melding gear at all), and in turn offer less combat boosts, making these talismans serve as a plain, but modest upgrade over not using any form, no matter if the player has trained weapon skills or not.

As a second part of the balance for this, I suggest that the shapeshifter background should now start with a Wildshape amulet, should begin with a tier 2 talisman equipped, and that their Protean talisman should instead give them a random tier 3 talisman instead of a tier 2 when they reach the appropriate skill level.

I believe that these changes would make lower tier talismans and the shapeshifting skill as a whole more desirable for more players in a few ways.

Firstly, they make the cheaper, lower tier talismans easier to understand, as extreme talisman transformations can significantly change the optimal playstyle, and speculating on this change can bring too much uncertainty for non-shapeshifter background players to want to consider using these talismans.

Secondly, these talisman changes to remove melding are more accommodating to players who have diverse skill training, as for example, players tend not to want to use a form that melds offhand if they have trained a lot of xp into their shield skills. Sometimes players will even refuse to train shapeshifting even if it is in their best interest to do so, because the mental aspect of “wasting” skill points on melded gear is difficult to overcome, leading to many shapeshifting forms being chronically underused.

Thirdly, since these proposed changes to lower tier talismans (if properly balanced) would make it more likely for non-shapeshifters to train a bit of shapeshifting when they find a lower tier talisman, there would be a foot-in-the-door effect with the skill XP training that players have put into shapeshifting already, which would make players more likely to explore and interact with other, more complicated talisman forms, making shapeshifting an even bigger part of gameplay.

Meanwhile, the pure shapeshifters don’t have to suffer the downsides of losing their inherent synergy with the lower tier talismans forms that currently meld gear or boost unarmed combat, because their loss is offset by how they can use their Wildshape amulet and protean talisman to advance earlier in their progression to the 3rd tier of talismans that are more optimized for “pure” shapeshifting/unarmed combat. This would help many of the underused tier 3 talismans have more presence, by virtue of not having to rely on luck to find them so early in your adventure as a dedicated shapeshifter.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions. I also have other ideas for changes to shapeshifting and higher tier talismans in a similar vein as these suggestions to make the shapeshifting mechanic feel more rewarding and interesting, and I also have some ideas in mind for ways to rebalance current lower tier talismans in accordance with my suggestions here.

Thanks for all you do,

-A passionate Crawler

2

Getting the rimehorn talisman at D:1 is so OP though. This form can carry you through all the Dungeon, Lair and Orc easily, and is even manageable in S branches if you don’t have better talismans (I had two runs where I didn’t get a single tier 3 talisman until Vaults so I transitioned from Rime Yak to Statue and Sphinx directly. It wasn’t that bad!)

There are already several forms that don’t meld much: Medusa, Werewolf, Statue, Vampire.

3

Hi, thanks for reading. Yes I agree Yak form is powerful for unarmed combat-focused shapeshifters, and it scales pretty strong with shapeshifting levels too, so wildshape would also make it really really good, almost certainly too much so. This is partly why I suggest that tier 2 talismans should not meld: this inherent synergy with pure shapeshifters makes it too difficult to balance talismans to be both desirable for non-shapeshifter backgrounds without being OP for shapeshifter background. This is furthermore why we have the awkward situation we have today where most talisman forms are generally useless to most characters, but extremely useful to certain characters, but at the same time are often too rare to actually find the exact talismans you are looking for at the exact game stage that you’d like to actually use it for.

Anyways, this is all to say, Yak, as a form that melds a lot of gear and synergizes with unarmed combat shapeshifters, would best be reworked in this scenario to become a higher tier talisman. I think it could easily become a tier 3 or even a tier 4 with minor adjustments.

Thanks again for reading!

4

Rime Yak is fundamentally bound to the early game though - their ability necessitates having walls (and, especially, hallways), the feature that gets lost in wide-open areas like Swamp and Shoals.

In the late game, walls return somewhat in Vaults and Depths but by then so many enemies have at least rC+, and in Vaults in particular so many enemies are immune.

IMHO, the main problem of shapeshifting is how unreliable the talisman drop rate is. I’m sure many o-tabbers would gladly train shapeshifting for medusa, werewolf, wellspring talisman (without even mentioning statue!) if any of these dropped when they were still useful. The forms themselves are fine bar a few underwhelming ones.

5

Interesting point about Yak and walls, my first idea is to simply switch talisman forms for Swamp/Shoals as other branches dont seem to have this issue and there should be enough opportunities to find talismans by then, but aside from that, this might be a good topic to target in buffing yak form to the standard of other higher tier talismans. Maybe the yak itself can count as a wall tile for the sake of Rime, to make the experience more consistently strong. just spitballing here.

I agree 100% that much of the issues of shapeshifting revolve around finding talismans while you still are in a place that finds usefulness out of them. However, I don’t think that this issue can be fully separated from the notion that theres simply a ton of forms that are useless for the vast majority of characters. I’m not sure there is another solution that doesnt create its own problems. I think you’d have to boost the spawn rate of talismans to pretty insane levels to make it consistent that a player can find 10+ talismans before midgame, toss them aside because they all either arent possible or attractive for their build, and then finally find one talisman that really fits for them. At which point, talismans are no longer rare whatsoever, theyre all basically guaranteed to spawn by lategame, and I’m not sure that fits with balance or design philosophy.

Maybe I’m wrong and there is a direct solution, but I havent seen it from any suggestions thus far. Increasing the general utility of the current tier1/2 talismans at the cost of direct synergy with unarmed combat shapeshifters is the best that I could come up with.

6

There’s a solution that’s already used for higher tier talismans: making it a special drop from a unique. Maw talisman drops from Rupert (50% chance), granite talisman from Roxanne, snake from Aizul. In my experience maw and granite show up much more frequently in my runs because of this.

Just give one tier-2 talisman to a unique (since maw isn’t tier-2 anymore) and you will make sure there’s high chance to get a fitting talisman earlier than good weapon/armor/shield drops (the main struggle of talismans in non-shapeshifter runs).