In a similar manner that abusing drugs leads to drug addiction, I recommend a change to poison consumption in that constantly using it has a chance to cause toxicity in which the poison damage amplifies significantly and can not be cured for X hours.
Abusing Poison should lead to toxic
We were just talking about something like this in another threat. The March changes.
Well, another route could be resistance. Using it so much leads to a built up tolerance and it doesn't work until your tolerance goes back down.
Or you could go the route of toxicity, like you mentioned, but rather than hurting you more, you just refuse to drink it as your body needs time to recover.
Either way, you have a cool down. The problem with doing something like this is that there are certain classes that once they put to sleep, you are dead, for the most part. This is all well and good for a thief to just steal everything you own, which I hate more than anything, but it means certain death if a necro lands sleep or psi land hypnotize.
Im on the fence about this..
Edited
Why should there be a downside to using poison to keep yourself awake?
As Trick said in the other thread, most of the classes that can put you to sleep, gain absolutely astronomical advantage over you, if they do put you to sleep. Such a thing MUST have some sort of a counter mechanic that is easily accessible to every single combo played.
That being said, keeping yourself poisoned has huge downsides, in the face of destroying your HP/mana/move regen.
Lastly, there is a combo currently that can put you in a state of sleep no matter what you do, and that is the most broken and unfair ability in the whole game, second only to assassinate.
On the same token some classes rely on the ability to make their opponents unconscious. I do like the idea of becoming immune to the poison after X uses in X duration for X duration. Like you I am on the fence only because I see a lot of potential thief griefing which could discourage players with annoyance.
I can tell you exactly how a change like this would affect the game and the player base..
You'd fight your enemy for as long as you could poison, then the moment the resistance kicked in and you couldn't fight you'd either run away and hide for the length of the wait timer OR you'd log off. That is 100% what would happen. I, for one, might not log off, but I promise I am hiding and waiting down the timer. So, really, this sort of change would result in similar frustration on both sides.
I'm going to eventually revisit magic_resist races a poison, anyway. The hype was all created by (mostly) players who had a current magic_resist race, or only play magic_resist races. There should be a downside, I agree, but it may take some time to come up with a way to make it work.
Isn't the downside already a vulnerability to thieves?
I just always considered it the price for reduced damage from magic.
The magic resistant races have to get a special water container and have it poisoned for them to even be able to poison themselves. It takes far more work to get, and can be impossible if a thief/ninja won't do it for you. THAT is the trade off for it, in my opinion. If you lose those and can't get 'em back, congratulations, you can no longer prevent yourself from being slept, ecstacied, hypnotized, blackjacked, strangled, lullabied, or arrowed to sleep.
It is fine how it is. It is remarkably easy to catch someone without poison or even REMOVE the poison. Psi, Necromancer, and Thieves can ALL remove poison from their enemy in one way or another. These skills should never be easy to land. EVER. They are spells/skills that are very powerful when coupled with everything else these classes are capable of doing. Thieves are a class that can remove an enemy's equipment and leave them naked. If you try to fight them and they don't WANT to fight, then you are going to end up naked.
Not everything in the game needs to be changed just because we have a coder capable of doing it.
Edited
I feel like I'm a bit slow on the uptake. The only container that can poison you I'm aware of is the brews. Brews scratch non-magic resistant races (waking them up) and they used to miss resistant ones. The poison debuff is still added to the character though and the misses were basically hidden and you could sleep without being woken. Or at least that's been my experience every time I've sucked down a brew as a dwarf. And while brews don't work on resistant races, you could still get a rogue or the like to envenom your container which definitely would work.
Is there a different container out there that I've missed, perhaps from one of the newer areas?
If we are indeed talking about brews, I'm fine with forcing magic resistant races to seek out alternate means of getting poisoned.
If I am in a pinch for poison, I usually vomit and eat it. Anyone else do that? Lol. And besides brew, there are rations that are sold that will poison you as well. Also, there is a weapon that will poison you until its sheathed.
1 hour ago, Trick said:
The magic resistant races have to get a special water container and have it poisoned for them to even be able to poison themselves. It takes far more work to get, and can be impossible if a thief/ninja won't do it for you. THAT is the trade off for it, in my opinion.
Uh.. this is REMARKABLY easy to do. Don't kid yourself. Please.
1 hour ago, Trick said:
It is fine how it is. It is remarkably easy to catch someone without poison or even REMOVE the poison.
Not everything in the game needs to be changed just because we have a coder capable of doing it.
I'll be sure to overlook any other bug I see that may or may not be the detriment to a class against other classes. Like...
- Minotaur charge (who here likes lag-locking minotaur warriors? :P)
- Exp loss due to dysentary cast by shamans against pre-50s.
- Dispel evil and dispel good bypassing spell turning.
- Vampire thrust lucks.
- Warrior bash locks (+ any other lag lock)
I could go on, and on. I don't selectively fix bugs. I fix them as I get to them. And this isn't a bug that should be overlooked because most of the player base have found legitimate uses for it. All of the above we lived with for years, and accepted as not buggy.
Magic resist races have so many upsides already. We all talk about the sleep SPELLS. I've played my fair share of necros in the past. I can't recall one single time I actually put a dwarf or halfling to sleep. Why? Well, because they are magic resist. Most all of them never even bothered with poison because they knew I wasn't going to put them to sleep too. Lets put it all out there. I don't think any magic resist race is worried about a necromancer putting them to sleep. There are currently 3(?) thieves running around, and that's the issue right now. As well as a thought in their head about ninjas, but what's a ninja going to do if they strangle a magic resist race aside an assassinate attempt that they could potentially pull off without strangle? Blind them? Doubt it. Poison them? Nope. Why not? Because they are magic resist. We're all worried about thieves prying our shineys. Lets just admit it.
And @Magick, they are talking about the water pack from the flying fortress. Magic resist races can buy that, and find a thief or ninja to envenom it, thus being able to poison themselves with a higher level poison than brew.
I like my idea (or Trick's) because poison in itself should NOT be a safety net as it currently is. If there's an overall theme of upside-has-downside in FL, then poison needs a downside. I'm not talking about the one-off encounter where someone saw a thief/ninja and drank a brew. I'm talking about the hours-on-end cabal warfare scenarios where people just poison themselves over and over - then sleep a tick to restore any lost moves. Loss of HP is not a threat with weak poisions...you restore 80-100% of anything lost each tick just standing.
Edited
@Morlhach My comment wasn't directed at you, chill out. I was saying in general.
@Zoichan You're right. It IS about shinies being taken with absolutely zero way to defend against it beside sitting far away and hiding or quitting out. You're 100% right.
The people defending the change are the people that are playing those races, true. The people advocating the change are the people playing thieves. Complaints like these depend entirely on what character you happen to be playing at that particular time. If I am a thief, OF COURSE I am gonna whine about it being too hard to blackjack and steal all the shinies and quit out. If I am constantly getting black jacked and losing my shit with NO chance of defending or fighting the attacker, OF COURSE I am gonna whine. It's all perspective.
I find it extremely ironic and nearly comical that so many people have flipped sides on this when I can remember a time when people bitched, moaned, and cried about thieves. People have literally quit their characters because of the rage they cause. Gooomf anyone?
Uhm, why are you telling me to chill out when I'm contributing to a discussion? Is it because everything I've postulated makes sense? Heheh.
No. I said chill out because it looked like you were getting defensive about my coder comment.
No biggy. Everyone's getting defensive about poison right now. Including you.
So.
Chill out everyone. :P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mej5wS7viw (music video)
Netflix and chill.
Nerf steal anyone bwahahah.