Banish _?Banish?

[Thraalbee]

I think the game would benefit from strongly reduced availability of banishment for all but mages, maybe even from entirely removing all ? and _ of Banish/Mass Banish. My few winners so far (3) all had way more banishment than I'd want to use and I fail to see how that is a good thing.

/Mathias

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Thraalbeast

I think the game would benefit from strongly reduced availability of banishment for all but mages, maybe even from entirely removing all ? and _ of Banish/Mass Banish. My few winners so far (3) all had way more banishment than I'd want to use and I fail to see how that is a good thing.

ISTR from previous threads that there is a reasonable consensus to tone down Banishment in some way - either via reduced availability, or reduced effectiveness, or increased side effects. In the 3.4-dev versions fizzix has reduced the danger from summons (specifically, summons no longer appear in such huge groups), so maybe now is the time to adjust Banishment. I'll leave it to fizzix to say what he thinks is the best thing to try first.

[dos350]

look, 1 out of my 1 winners didnt need banish, atleast 1 of my lozer chars died as a direct result of banish~ due 2 the strain of casting mass banish, which i was unaware of til that moment, and i am yet 2 cast it again since that day,

personally i dnt think its op~ nn 2 increase bad effects or reduce availability imo, please no rage

pro edit:

if u got 2 much banish, i dont think the game is forcing u 2 do anything with it, how is that u think u bla bla can fail 2 see something , just dont use if u dont like it , that goes 4 alot of things in angband that people cry 4 , not just banish!!!!!!

[Starhawk]

The last few deep games I've played, I have barely found any Banishment consumables at all. So the idea of toning them down is terrifying...

[fizzix]

1. I don't find banishment all that plentiful, usually only one _banish and 7-8 ?banish. But then again, I tend to have turn counts around 500k at completion, so I could imagine OP finding four times more.

Now, the main need of banish was to get rid of nasty Demon and Hound summons. These still exist in 3.3.0, but they're less likely. (you are less likely to have either a weak hound summon or a deadly hound summon.) So the need for banishment has gone down considerably. (It's still very hard to deal with Morgoth or Ancalagon without banish though.) Some options are.

1. Change _?banish to only work for monsters in LoS
2. Change _?banish to be similar to the priest spell banish evil (change name to teleport evil)
3. Change _?banish to be similar to the priest spell banish evil, but work for non-evil monsters. (change name to mass teleport other)
4. Keep everything the same, but make banishment rarer.
5. remove _?banish entirely.

Ok, here are my thoughts. The biggest difference between a staff and a scroll is that the staff has a ~5% fail possibility and a scroll has ~0%. In this case, if you find yourself surrounded by nasty monsters of one race, a staff is not a reliable escape. If you make _banish need LoS it loses a huge amount of usability. In fact, I would say it has only the niche use of scattering a strong, sleeping escort so you can kill the monsters individually. Even though LOS banishment, at face value, is the same as the priest spell, it differs because the priest spell is zero-fail and can be used in a tight situation. So I don't really like options 1-3 for _banish but they seem good for ?banish.

So I suggest making _banish rarer, so that my 500k turn game only has something like a 25% chance of finding one of them. Then I would change ?mass banish to be a mass LoS teleport. As to what to do with ?banishment? switching it in rarity with ?mass banish seems appropriate. I really don't think we need more than that. ?banishment is not overpowered if it's sufficiently rare.

Regardless, the priest spell banish evil really needs to be called teleport evil. That's confusing.

[dos350]

hey u forgot option 6. Stop crying and play angband

[Derakon]

I like the idea of a mass teleport-other as a rare item. It's actually more useful for dealing with Morgoth than Mass Banish, though, since it hits uniques as well as their underlings. So if Morgy pulls in Vecna, Ancalagon, etc. and you're suddenly faced by the tag-team Legion of Tolkien Evil, one casting sends everyone away, with only Morgoth having the necessary stubbornness / disrespect for granite needed to chase you across the entire level.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Derakon

I like the idea of a mass teleport-other as a rare item. It's actually more useful for dealing with Morgoth than Mass Banish, though, since it hits uniques as well as their underlings. So if Morgy pulls in Vecna, Ancalagon, etc. and you're suddenly faced by the tag-team Legion of Tolkien Evil, one casting sends everyone away, with only Morgoth having the necessary stubbornness / disrespect for granite needed to chase you across the entire level.

ooh, that's a good point. In my mind mass-teleport was strictly worse than mass-banishment, but I completely forgot about uniques. I'd prefer to have Morgoth summoning Ancalagon and Vecna to be the hardest situation to deal with, rather than one that's trivial for most classes. Especially since it can only happen once in a battle, and since it's avoidable by killing Vecna and Ancalagon before facing Morgoth.

I think the long term solution is to allow some monsters (probably only uniques) to resist all forms of teleportation. I'm not sure that's reasonable yet.

[ewan]

One option: (some forms of) banish affect *only* summoned monsters. On first glance I like this.

Agree on renaming of banish evil.

But not sure that the overall prevalence of banish/genocide is too high. Seems pretty OK to me in general.

[Therem Harth]

I've always felt Banish/Mass Banish was kind of cheesy and unthematic - why should the character be able to just delete monsters, and why should unique monsters be exempt? IMO it's giving the player too much power over the game.

That being said, high level gameplay can get pretty brutal. If Banishment is removed IMO it needs to be replaced with something (almost) as useful.