Mucking around with confusion and monster status effects

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Estie

Another use for status effect not mentioned is to reduce the amount of monsters acting against you. For example, sleep a room full of orcs and fight one at a time.

In Angband, this isnt a very powerfull ability since monsters start out sleeping and if many are awake, you leave the level rather than put them to sleep again. Also, fighting in bottlenecks makes maintaining a 1v1 situation easy.

I dont really see great potential for confusion, unless maybe for a mage or other ranged attacker. The random movement is going to make any melee combat awkward and long, certainly not something that should become the default mode of fighting ? Slow seems like a much preferred debuff for the melee fighter.

Maybe confuse should be the way to go for ranged fighters then.

Originally Posted by Estie

The problem with all this is that the premise is wrong: there is very little incentive to kill tough monsters. Inventing elaborate ways for fighting previously unkillable monsters is fine, but there also has to be a good reason to bother.

For example, take Ithangast. Typically my encounters with him proceed as follows:

The first times I see/detect him his breath would 1-hit me and I stay away as much as possible. When my hit points catch up, he still is fast and while I could suvive a round or two, it would be foolish to fight him yet. Later, assuming I am fast and have fire resistance, I could kill him, but would use many potions and lose half of my consumables to his fire, so I dont.
If I happen to have a source of double fire resist, this might change.

The problem is not that there's no incentive to kill powerful monsters. The incentive is there, especially for uniques since they have a significantly increased chance of dropping artifacts. The problem is that uniques are incredibly overstatted. And furthermore, in a game like Angband, you can always "wait until later". It's a tough problem and it makes balancing stuff like this very difficult. My thoughts usually are to try to balance around a "visit each level once" and if players want to take it slower they can.

We do give an extra "wait until later" incentive by improving drops at later depths. This makes sense for normal monsters, but maybe we don't want to do that for uniques.

Originally Posted by Estie

Lastly, there is one debuff which isnt in the game but would be very usefull: an effect that reduces damage, either all damage or at least breath damage, to get out of 1-hit land more easily. Maybe call it "debilitation" and have the afflicted creatures damage reduced by 1/3, with a short but fixed duration if it works - no randomness here as that would make the effect basically useless. Of course, the monsters are also entitled to use it on @.

It exists from the player side, and is stun. I agree that this is how stun should work.