Forum:YANI: 5 new artifacts, comments wanted
I have an idea for five new artifacts (for which I've actually coded a patch against SporkHack), but I'm looking for the community's input on their abilities. Here they are:
Luck Blade: Neutral short sword. It acts as a luckstone of equal beatitude when carried, gets +d3 to hit and +d4 to damage all monsters. Additionally, on each hit, if the roll of a d20 is less than your luck, it inflicts an additional 2d8 damage. If the enemy wields it against you, the test is reversed so that the extra damage gets more likely the less lucky you are.
Quicksilver: Unaligned silver short sword, gets +d5 to hit and +d6 to damage all monsters and confers speed when wielded.
Spineseeker: Chaotic rogue stiletto, gets +d5 to hit and +d6 to damage all monsters, and deals double damage against fleeing foes. Would be the first sac gift for rogues. A rogue's backstab damage isn't doubled.
Blasphemy: Chaotic trident, double damage and +d5 to hit cross-aligned monsters, may (50% chance) stun monsters.
Ravenbrand: neutral scimitar, +d5 to hit, +d6 to damage all foes. On hit, there's a 50% chance to blind and a separate 50% chance to slow enemies. Blinded enemies might (20% chance) turn to flee, while slowed enemies might (50% chance) be "lacerated by barbed chains of shadow" and take d10 damage. The damage may still occur even if the enemy was already slowed.
Too strong, too weak, pointless, too niche?
Jade nekotenshi 15:46, July 3, 2010 (UTC)
- My thoughts:
- Quicksilver: I like it; in fact, SLASH'EM has a similar-themed artifact, Quick Blade, which I always thought should grant speed. Personally, I'd like to see an artifact short sword that provides more than speed (i.e. gives you a base speed of 24 or so, or better, always attacks twice), since speed is quite supersedable. Of course, one could argue having the speed boots slot free would let you use jumping boots, but that's a kinda iffy benefit.
- Spineseeker:Too weak for the late game, but makes a good first sacrifice gift. Perhaps it could have a bonus for being thrown?
- Blasphemy:A little weak, I'd think. Also, cross-aligned damage isn't very useful for chaotics, as the vast majority of chaotic monsters are always hostile. Thus, anyone would need a second weapon for things like liches. Also, stunning monsters doesn't do very much (much less than to the player).
- Ravenbrand:Would give scimitars a point for being in the game, which is a definite plus. The slowing effect would become much less useful in the late game, as it has to get past monster MR; I don't know if the extra d10 damage would still apply then. I'd probably increase the base damage bonus though, maybe to d8 or d10. Make it at least as good as Excalibur, which is about the weakest artifact I'll consider using into the late game. -Ion frigate 13:26, July 4, 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for your feedback.
My patch makes a lot of other changes, but a few of them are relevant here - I've removed trident skill, and put tridents under spear, and collapsed scimitar and saber skills into one skill called "curved sword". I also moved katanas to the curved sword skill. Without these changes it seems Blasphemy is mostly useless, true enough. I'm thinking of tweaking the others as so:
Quicksilver: I'm thinking of adding an Extra_fast property that this would grant, which would 24 movement points, or possibly making it so that landing a hit has a 50% chance of attacking a second time with Quicksilver only. (so that a high-damage offhander doesn't get swung again, which would be probably too strong)
Luck Blade: Might change the luck test a bit so that the extra damage is somewhat more likely. (maybe if d20 < luck+4?) Incidentally, this Luck Blade was inspired by SLASH'EM's Luckblade, but I thought that one wasn't interesting enough.
Ravenbrand: Make base bonus damage d12, reduce chance of slow causing damage to 33%.
Spineseeker: Maybe 50% chance to instakill fleeing foe when thrown, 25% chance if not a rogue. (Foes immune to death are immune to this)
Blasphemy: Maybe just dike it out... Jade nekotenshi 15:04, July 4, 2010 (UTC)
