Darkness Demon

[Dracos]

I'm bad at remembering the name precisely, but they're common enough that I assume folks will know.

There's a couple of demon type enemies (Dark shadow monsters) that will blast an area with darkness, blocking your light source from doing more than 1 radius distance. While this generally doesn't make them that much harder to kill, the real nuisiance is what happens afterwards. They die, time passes on...and the entire area they blackened stays dark.

So far, there doesn't seem to be many answers to that. The Burning Star will reveal the map back again, but I don't think it fixes the lighting problem. I think some sun paladin abilities negate it and umbraphage does, but outside of those 3, basically if the darkness gets on the map, it is staying there. Maybe sun infusions can do it (I rarely end up using past early game since their 'power' level to afflict blind is low), but that'd be a painful 'answer' since that's basically spending a category point for a low impact annoyance.

Could this ability get a timeout? Even if it is something long like 50 or 100 turns, just so these demons aren't leaving permanently blacked out parts of the map behind? It is an ability that largely your character can't block from happening as it is, and save a rare item coming up, most classes have zero way to clear that back up. It'd still allow it to have the deceptive "Darkness->Teleport->Blast from a new location" that they sometimes do, as well as still being a hinderance once they're dead, without being a 'well, this part of the map is unseeable forever now'.

[0player]

I'm bad at remembering the name precisely, but they're common enough that I assume folks will know.

There's a couple of demon type enemies (Dark shadow monsters) that will blast an area with darkness, blocking your light source from doing more than 1 radius distance. While this generally doesn't make them that much harder to kill, the real nuisiance is what happens afterwards. They die, time passes on...and the entire area they blackened stays dark.

So far, there doesn't seem to be many answers to that. The Burning Star will reveal the map back again, but I don't think it fixes the lighting problem. I think some sun paladin abilities negate it and umbraphage does, but outside of those 3, basically if the darkness gets on the map, it is staying there. Maybe sun infusions can do it (I rarely end up using past early game since their 'power' level to afflict blind is low), but that'd be a painful 'answer' since that's basically spending a category point for a low impact annoyance.

Could this ability get a timeout? Even if it is something long like 50 or 100 turns, just so these demons aren't leaving permanently blacked out parts of the map behind? It is an ability that largely your character can't block from happening as it is, and save a rare item coming up, most classes have zero way to clear that back up. It'd still allow it to have the deceptive "Darkness->Teleport->Blast from a new location" that they sometimes do, as well as still being a hinderance once they're dead, without being a 'well, this part of the map is unseeable forever now'.

Summertide Phial is a standard answer, actually, but maybe it can be assigned a timeout.

[Mankeli]

Yeah, remove the effect after the monster is dead please, it's a horrible effect. I'd be actually inclined to remove ALL spell and similar effects after the monster is dead probably excluding status effects. It's great fun when you start autoexploring after killing, say, an orc cryomancer and the game doesn't remember that the ice storm is still active and rans straight into it exploding your disruption shield into bits or just generally being really annoying.

[EatThisShoe]

The enemy is called a Duathedlen I believe. I know of three ways to remove their darkness, Summertide Phial, Umbraphage, and alchemist bombs using the gem that creates light.

I actually kinda like this effect. The enemy itself is not that dangerous, but it provides a strong incentive to kill them ASAP so they don't make the rest of the map difficult. My only complaint is that I believe these guys can spawn from the demon portal in the final fight and that just seems ridiculous.

[edge2054]

You can see through it with infravision/heightened senses to I believe, unless that was changed.

[Mankeli]

I actually kinda like this effect. The enemy itself is not that dangerous, but it provides a strong incentive to kill them ASAP so they don't make the rest of the map difficult.s.

I think they mainly make rest of the map more tedious and as I've said before in other threads, I don't think that tedium is a very interesting way of increasing "difficulty". You just don't enter the part of the map that is unlit or use arcane eye from skill or hat to carefully examine every single tile (arcane eye reveals monsters in a 3x3 radius while this effect is active).

The most ridiculous thing is that when you use a wand of clairvoyance, that explicitly states it is supposed to dispel darknes in the very description of the said item, nothing happens. If wands of clairvoyance would actually do what they say they do then every character would have an easier way of dealing with this problem. However, instead of making it a complete non-issue, the effect could be removed altogether after the monster is dead. And please remove all other spell effects on monster death too while you are at it (excluding direct status effects).

[0player]

Well, ain't removing status effects on moster death.
a) it doesn't make any damn sense (ontological intertia);
b) it does make certain critter monsters significantly less deadly;
c) it's extremely hard to implement.

However, wands of clairvoyance really should be dispelling darkness as advertised. Fixed now.

[Atarlost]

Well, ain't removing status effects on moster death.
a) it doesn't make any damn sense (ontological intertia);
b) it does make certain critter monsters significantly less deadly;
c) it's extremely hard to implement.

However, wands of clairvoyance really should be dispelling darkness as advertised. Fixed now.

Ice storm, not poison, was the example.

a) The storm effects that move with the caster shouldn't have ontological inertia independent of the caster. If they did they'd stay in place when the caster moved.
b) No critters use them. Other than maybe orc cryomancers I'm pretty sure they're only on elites, uniques, and rares.
c) They obviously have some connection to the actor that spawned them so they can follow it. Having them, in the timer decrement step, check for the continued validity of the actor and self delete if it has become null shouldn't be extremely hard to implement.

[0player]

Well, it would mean that Rimebark is less useful, and that's not something I want to touch...
I'll try to make Run/Autoexplore wary of map effects.

[edge2054]

Sun Infusion should remove it too.

[ghostbuster]

This effect can be quite useful. It is how I made my first win. One demon spawn and created this effect. I just had to hide in the shadows and inferno to death the two sorcerers. Somehow cheatty, but fun.
But, please leave it. It is a small inconvenience to autoexplore, but it can create interesting situations in terms of tactics.

[Mankeli]

Editor's note: Seems like the discussion went on but I'm too tired to edit this now but I'll add comments to the new posts.

Well, ain't removing status effects on moster death.

Nobody in this thread asked you to, I explicitly said everything BUT status effects. See the difference? Also if someone would have made that request (and once again, no one did) then this:

it doesn't make any damn sense (ontological intertia)

Would be a pretty shaky argument because magical status effects don't really make sense in the real world the reason being that things like magical darkness or necromancer's with blinding attacks don't really exist. So "making sense" in this fantasy context is obviously something diffrerent than "making sense" in some other context. I don't understand what ontological inertia has to do with anything because spells in fantasy context really don't always follow this principle anyways. Unless unbreakable ontological inertia is a TOME design goal or something.

What "making sense" should mean in a fantasy context like this is that the way things interact is coherent and logical given the ground rules that are in place in that specific fantasy world. So that the mechanics that govern the actions in a world are logical and coherent when judged by the standards of that world. I fail to see how this coherence and logicality would be threatened in TOME if the status effects too would be removed on monster death. It should be pretty obvious to players as well: If you kill like 10 monsters while you have detrimental status effects and every time you did kill one the status effects go away people would pick up on this pretty quickly. IMHO removing magical effects via killing the magic user makes no less sense than getting hit by a magical status effect in the first place! This would have obvious balance implications, however, as you noted already.

But again, no one actually did ask for removing status effects, so this is a meta discussion and thus pretty useless. And I certainly can see it would hard to implement (although Atarlost apparently knows how, at least the part that I was actually talking about).

I'll try to make Run/Autoexplore wary of map effects.

However, wands of clairvoyance really should be dispelling darkness as advertised. Fixed now.

Thanks x 2!

[Mankeli]

This effect can be quite useful. It is how I made my first win. One demon spawn and created this effect. I just had to hide in the shadows and inferno to death the two sorcerers. Somehow cheatty, but fun.
But, please leave it. It is a small inconvenience to autoexplore, but it can create interesting situations in terms of tactics.

I'm currently running an endgame wildfire archmage on madness difficulty and the majority of the damage done to monsters in this game, which is countless millions by now, has been done via inferno/fireflash to monsters who can't see you. And this is done without magical darkness and with the hunted effect where monsters actually home in to your position!

I don't think neither corner sniping (what my archmage has been doing) nor sniping from magical darkness (if that indeed works) are what I would necessarily call "interesting situations in terms of tactics". It feels more like abuse to me. (Although handling monsters that act faster than speed 100 does often times need at least some tactics even when corner sniping).

[Mankeli]

One more note:

I'm far from 100 % on this observation so take this with a grain of salt but I think that if on orc does the whole ice storm thing and you leave the level and then come back 1) the old ice storm remains and 2) the new ice storm is stacked with the old one for double damage.

The part that I'm not sure of is in italics.

[0player]

Well, there's a class for which hiding in magical darkness is straight up a core mechanic