Sustained Skills & Energy Levels

[nehal]

This comes up for me right now with Sun Paladins:

More or less, Sun Paladins are entirely anti-fun to play. They rely heavily upon sustained skills(Weapon/Shield of Light) but keeping those skills active is a tedious task of micromanagement. You end up spending as much time spamming skills for the sake of raising your positive energy as you do actually _playing the game_.

Ideally, the general rule should be set across all skills for all classes, current and future:
The only thing that deactivates sustains are the actions of opponents - the engine will never deactivate a sustain. If you have 0 energy, and you have Weapon/Shield of Light sustained, when those skills attempt to proc, they should simply fail but remain active.

My thinking is this:
1) All gameplay should support the emergent development of tactical situations with a minimal amount of repetitive player downtime
2) ToME already attempts in many cases to support Point #1 - roguelike standards such as hunger are removed.
3) Currently, to play optimally, a player experiences an imbalance of downtime compared to action - compared to other classes where a quick rest is all the punctuation necessary, a Sun Paladin must rest to heal, but then spend additional turns both after that healing and, ideally, keep spamming spells as much as possible before the next combat so that his skills always have energy to use in ambush scenarios. There's nothing particularly challenging about this situation, it's purely tedium.

[donkatsu]

Seconded, and positive/negative energy needs to not degenerate over time. As is, that mechanic adds nothing but tedium.

[edge2054]

I agree for positive/negative energy.

But sustains deactivating when Stamina or Mana hits 0 is an integral part of the game and has been for a long time. There's also a couple of talents (not more then a couple granted) that take advantage of this. There's also many talents that are written with this in mind and don't have a 'firing' mechanism such as Momentum, True Grit, Invisibility, etc. etc.

So while I agree that Weapon of Light and Shield of Light should be made like the current incarnation of Corona I don't agree with this statement.

Ideally, the general rule should be set across all skills for all classes, current and future:
The only thing that deactivates sustains are the actions of opponents - the engine will never deactivate a sustain.

[nehal]

I'd disagree and indicate that they have a logical firing mechanism - even if the code sees it differently - in the same way that Weapon of Light does. So you want to sustain Invisibility? Cool. Each turn it goes:
If the player has enough mana, make sure the player is invisible for this turn. If they do not have enough mana, make sure they are visible this turn. So if you sustain it and dry your mana pool out, then leave it active and pop a manasurge, Invisibility kicks right back in but starts chewing up mana again.

In my estimation, the tactical impact is roughly equivalent.
There are two plausible tactical situations with these skills:
1) You activate on-demand, then deactivate before you run dry. In this circumstance, the tactical equivalent is entirely zero-sum even with the changes.
2) You activate on-demand, but let your energy run dry. Currently, you lose the effect and are forced onto a cooldown timer. With the proposed changes, you have the ability potentially to pop a regen and have the effect come back up, but at the immediate cost of your regen almost entirely supporting this sustain that you've left on.

It creates a consistency of skill behavior, even when skills might logically function differently. I simply believe that a consistency of "skills will only deactivate upon the actions of the player or an enemy, never upon the inaction of a player or enemy" creates a more intuitive gameplay.

[edge2054]

Gameplay wise I understand where you're coming from Nehal but implementation wise sustains like Weapon of Light and Shield of Light work waaaaay differently than Invisibility, Momentum, True Grit, etc. etc. And this doesn't even take into account talents like Mana Clash and Body Shot that drain resources partially with the intention of turning off mana and stamina based sustains.

We'd need to either recode almost every stamina and mana based sustain in the game so that it's both called on-demand and checks current resource levels or implement an engine function that would basically deactivate a sustain without turning it all the way off (so the current deactivate functions in the sustains would be called) if resource requirements aren't met as well as turning it right back on as soon as they are. We'd also need some means of communicating this to the player (a big red X over the sustain icon for instance).

Realize that currently all Mana and Stamina based sustains are turned off if your resource reaches zero so even the ones that don't drain a resource pool would need to be rewritten if that was the route we went. Also realize that there's not code support for checking many current sustains on the fly and that such support would need to be added.

Simply put, what you're asking for isn't a trivial request and while it may be a good idea it's really not a very practical one.

Weapon of Light and Shield of Light are both called on-demand and having them check for current resource levels and having them simply not fire would be a trivial change. Changing the behavior of every stamina and mana based sustain wouldn't be.

I'll make a patch for weapon of light/shield of light. Which is no guarantee it will get implemented. As to the rest, frankly it's a lot of work for not much gain. If someone wants to figure out the logistics of it and make an add-on or submit a patch I say go for it. Personally it's not a project I have the time or inclination to do right now.

[lukep]

The recode could be fairly simple, if I understand the code correctly, all that would be required is to add something like:

on_pre_use
if self.mana >= t.mana_per_turn + 1 return true else return false end

(but altered to actually work). This would deactivate the sustain that drains mana before it dropped to 0, avoiding deactivating all of your other sustains. This would work for draining-per-turn sustains, and draining-per-action ones (Weapon of Light) could start with a clause that either deactivated the sustain or didn't do the action. This, combined with my sustain protection addon (still only b37) would remove most of the ways the player would accidentally deactivate all of their sustains.