Menu

#3087 Rebalance distraction stab

open
nobody
5
2009-11-22
2009-11-22
No

I just played a character built to squeeze the most out of distraction stabbing. Short blades from the start, Hill Orc (they now have 70 Stabbing), summoner. I trained melee combat all the time. The character died around clevel9. Results were deffinitely in 'disappointing' range:

Stabbing skill a bit below 4
Short Blades around 10 (turned off since 8)
Spellcasting 5 (turned off at 5)
Summoning 12-15

That was with taking every opportunity to engage in melee combat, and distracting monsters with summons. Oh, and pre-lair boots of running !

My point is: it's ridiculously hard to train Stabbing without stealth. So much that it's practically useless even if you focus heavily on it, have very good aptitude, and even boots of running. It should be possible to train Stabbing reasonably without Stealth.

I think the problem is that distraction stab training triggers very rarely. By design, it should be less effective than attacking helpless/sleeping monsters, but this is much too far. I propose to balance distraction stab with lower damage instead of trigger chance. I know it's already lower damage, by the way. Good side effect of my proposal would be improvement (and distinguishing) of Short Blades.

I think distraction stab suffers from "winner wins more" syndrome. As your skill increases, it triggers more often and training accelerates.

Discussion

  • Borsuk Euroazjatycki

    If it matters, I played trunk 53a9087 on CDO.

     
  • Nobody/Anonymous

    http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=Stabbing

    Currently, all non-100%-stabbing (confused, fleeing, etc) has a chance of (stabbing + dex + 1)/155 (140 if invisible). The difference you're noticing is that they deal almost no damage (with short blades, you get double damage at 14 skill, while 4 skill is only +25%. This is not including the dagger bonus).

    This is probably too small, considering distraction stabs are sort of dangerous. I would compress tier 2 and tier 3 into tier 2, making distraction stabs as effective as confusion stabs.

     
  • Borsuk Euroazjatycki

    Anonymous:

    I don't care that the damage starts out low. I care that it takes forever to train the skill that way even if you're trying hard.

     
  • Nobody/Anonymous

    Borsuk: I've tried to implement this in r98126e581296, would appreciate if you could test this (once it goes live on cdo?).

    This increases chance of all random stabs by a factor of 3/2 while cutting damage bonus to half of the old bonus.

     
  • johnny shelley

    johnny shelley - 2009-11-22

    Anonymous:

    I have not looked at the actual formula, so take this w/ a grain of salt of I'm horribly wrong:

    Using fictional numbers:

    4/10 stab percentage at 10 damage = 40 damage.
    4/10 * 3/2 = 6/10
    10 * .5 = 5
    6/10 stab percentage at 5 damage = 30 damage.

    This SOUNDS like a 25% NERF rather than a buff. Am I misunderstanding something here?

     
  • Nobody/Anonymous

    Jwsehelley-

    You're misunderstanding the complaint. The point is, that few stabs mean few opportunities to train stabbing, so the distraction stabber never gets off the ground. The proposed change would reduce damage for a given level of skill, but it would accelerate skill training, making distraction stabbing more viable as a playstyle.

    Or at least that's the idea.

    Lemuel

     
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous - 2009-11-22

    jwshelley: I think you were replying to me, let me explain.

    The point is that if you have a 10% chance of stabbing a given enemy, and do 1000000 damage when you do stab, then doubling chance of stabbing while dividing damage by 1000 sounds like a huge nerf, but isn't at all, since you still kill all enemies in one hit.

    I hope I've hit the numbers in a way that doesn't change distraction-stab usefulness significantly, possibly buffing it slightly.

     

Log in to post a comment.