ToME WikiKhymChanur: I remember someone saying that the "drains charges" monster attack would need to be rejiggered if/when the alchemist class in 3.0.0 becomes more about using magical devices than creating ego items or artifacts. Even if this doesn't happen, I've found the drain charges attack to be annoying, and even though there should be annoying/dangerous attacks, a monster can only totally drain all charges from a single wand/staff, or not do it at all, with no inbetweens. I think that there should be a variety of charge draining attacks, which would probably be easier to code in 3.0.0 than in 2.x
Some ideas:
- Drain a single charge from a wand/staff. For use by low level monsters, like disenchanter eyes and molds. And if an alchemist gets a princess quest of 12 disenchanter eyes that can drain a charge each turn they get, this can still end up being nasty.
- A number of different attacks that drain differing levels of a random number of charges (1d2, 1d4, 2d3, etc), like there are different levels of drain exp attacks. The nastier monsters will drain more charges.
- Drain a percentage of the charges in a wand or staff, with a number of different levels, like the previous idea: 10%, 20%, 50%, even 75%. If 3.0.0 alchemists end up being able to give wands and staves huge numbers of charges (like they can in 2.x), this will faze them even where the above attacks wouldn't.
- Drain mana from a rod. This could be a different attack than draining from staves and wands, so that different tactics/strategies would be adopted against different monsters, or it could just be added to the usual drain attack.
"Drain" from activatable items (even artifacts) by adding to the number of turns it will take before the item can be activated again. If this attack happens multiple times to the same item, it will take a loooong time before it can be activated again. *cackles evilly*
- Peform the same attack on every applicable item the player has. Drain a single charge from every staff and wand to be annoying; drain 50% of charges from every staff and wand to really hurt an alchemist; drain 100% of mana from all rods (they'll recharge eventually, but it can put you in a really tight spot).
RedNaga: I agree about the needed tweaks about the charges draining attacks, alchemist rewrite or not. I almost never use the most powerful staves since, by the time they start showing up, charges draining monster show up too, and the characters who most need them (that is, warrior-like) have them drained in no time, so making them essentially useless.
I like the proposal about rod-draining and artifact-draining (now this is *nasty*) as well as the 'reduced drain' one, but what about combining them all? A single attack could select a random item in your backpack chosen between staves, wands, rods and junkarts (maybe including worn artifacts) and then drain it based on its type: arts/junkarts will need to recharge just as if they were just used, rods would be drained of all their charges, and wands/staves would be drained by a random percentage between 25-75%. Comments?