Suicidal npcs

[ghostbuster]

In several occasions, I have had an npc autotargetting with a rune of frost. He becomes frozen without any reason and, in the log, I realize that he has just shot himself in the foot with his rune.

Probably happens more frequently without freezing and with other runes, but I do not study all log informations.

[SageAcrin]

NPCs don't really comprehend very slow projectiles combined with instant action and walk in front of them.

Maybe Frozen Spear ought to be an instant blast radius instead, or something. It would make it more unique anyways.

[Frumple]

Yeah... iirc, frozen spear's the only rune that does that. Either making it instant travel (akin to channel staff or a beam) or having it use up a turn as per insidious poison infusions would fix it. Small AoE (maybe just a cross pattern?) instant shot (akin to a alchie bomb) would be neat, too. Though making it an AoE freeze would be pretty powerful, hum.

[tiger_eye]

Yeah, Frozen Spear runes have come up before. I think the best change may be to make them more interesting. For example, maybe they could convert some damage to Ice for a number of turns, or maybe ice retribution when hit.

[Frumple]

I could see a sort of omni-ice effect, with interesting bonuses. General ice conversion of all damage at maybe a 50-75% rate. Convert your melee into a 2-3 range beam (give attack a range, basically, and let you do stuff like stunning blow from 2-3 tiles away), make ammo shots limited pierce (go through one target) and explode in a 25 or so percent ice blast either on hitting a second target or reaching the end of its range. Something different for magic and mental effects (frozen feet on all magic damage, brainlock on mental? This on top of the ice damage conversion.). An elemental conversion matrix, basically. Fairly low duration, maybe 3 (t1) - 6(t5) or so.

Something that interesting and relatively powerful would probably fit better on an artifact rune, though. Still, it would be neat.