Single-species Slays

[Mark]

Moving this to a new thread as it's broadening out...

Originally Posted by intently

Yeah, I rarely use any of the Slay X weapons, even when they're *slay*.

Me too.

I wonder if a bigger change here could be good. Perhaps overkill, but what if

Slay Orc / Troll / Giant / Dragon/ Demon / Undead became Bane of Orc / Troll / Giant / Dragon / Demon / Undead and gave:

• x3 damage against this species

and (both?):

• 2/3 damage taken from this species
• telepathy granted for detecting this species (a little bit like Sting detecting Orcs)

The damage reduction could be awesome against uniques of those species, especially dragons.

It would also offer more inventory management gameplay; carrying around a few items to assist against uniques or monster nests - presumably warriors would have the advantage here. (high strength and no spellbooks)

If a weapon is only going to give you benefits against a single species, then I feel it must be

1. vs orcs, because you encounter orcs before you encounter much better weapons (and then, only sometimes)
2. really quite powerful

[Derakon]

Race-specific ESP has been suggested previously, with the general consensus being that it'd be neat to try out and might well make it into Vanilla proper. I don't think anyone's suggested race-specific damage reduction though. Could be interesting!

As for inventory constraints, warriors actually have a pretty rough time of it. Most spellbooks contain at least two useful spells, which warriors must either do without or replace with one-slot-per-effect items.

[Timo Pietilä]

One problem with single-slays are that they do actually quite low increase of damage when they could be useful. If you find a dagger of slay orc where slay orc could matter and you have Main Gauche with +4 more damage and same blows Main Gauche beats that dagger to everything else and only slightly lower damage to orcs.

Maybe they could be straight x5 damage weapons. It's very narrow, so higher damage.

[Mark]

Originally Posted by Derakon

As for inventory constraints, warriors actually have a pretty rough time of it. Most spellbooks contain at least two useful spells, which warriors must either do without or replace with one-slot-per-effect items.

In that case, I wonder if there should be a concept of a "belt", which is to melee weapons what the quiver is to ammunition.

That way high-strength melee-focussed classes could carry multiple melee options despite inventory count limits; but low-strength, magic/ranged-focussed classes don't get an unneeded boost, as there is still the weight aspect to limit them. (But they could carry a couple of extra daggers - which is 'realistic').