More Variety for Mimics

Ideas for cool stuff in the future.
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Solanidae
Posts: 27
Joined: Sun Mar 08, 2015 7:43 am

More Variety for Mimics

Post by Solanidae »

With as much as I love the class, I feel like they have the potential to be so much more. Before I had any idea what kinds of monsters existed and what kinds of forms are good, I was extremely excited by the concept behind mimics. Essentially it's a class that uses the special abilities of monsters to give it an advantage over its foes. A lot of early forms have small things that set them apart from @ that are really exciting. Tengus can teleport, novice rangers get extra shots per round, Ogres get to walk past mountains, Gargoyles can fly and have a ranged nuke, Master Yeek is a low level form with an immunity, if you're a martial artist then you have forms like Fruit Bat and Cave Spider that are really useful too.

Then you start to reach a higher level and new mechanics start to become available in usable mimic forms, namely Kill_wall and Pass_wall, I like this. The problem is that many of the older types of forms that were previously useful become useless. Many mimic spells cost too much to use realistically with Mimic's limited mana pool. Levitation is marginally useful and mountainwalking is completely useless since wraith exceeds both and there aren't any mountains in Mt. Doom or Angband anyway. There are also no forms that have useful spells beyond "AoE nuke" or maybe "Save money on speed potions". The wide pool of viable forms shrinks down to 2-3 monsters that fit one of three categories. The first is a ball of stats like Nightwalker that you fight things in, and the second are your pass_wall and kill_wall utility forms. Mimics go from having options and variety to becoming a warrior with a different model and free wraith. You could technically get away with only ever using Oriental Vampire and Greater Balrog form and you wouldn't really be losing anything since Gbal can double as both the kill_wall and the ball of stats. Personally I'd be okay with losing some of the power of the ball of stats forms if it meant that I could later switch into nuking things or shooting things on a whim and be able to somewhat perform decently. My most satisfying moment on my mimic thus far is when I kited Jubei using chaos breath and mana potions, and I only wish that was a realistic option for more enemies. Others simply have too much health for my 300 damage nukes and many mimic spells can cost as much as 20-30 mana (which for a max mana pool of 200ish is very high).

What I propose is to make generally mimics weaker in melee combat but make their forms have much more influence on what their character is good at. Some forms should be able to somewhat work like the status quo with increased damage, ac, and health. Some forms should allow them to much more easily sneak around or use ranged weapons. Lastly Mimics could really use some more utility from their forms. A form that could easily destroy cursed loot would be really handy, as well as a form that could pass over traps safely much like mistform does for vampires, or forms that have special slays or ESPs intrinsicly. I would really love a form that was extra good at using magic devices, maybe I'd start carrying some of those mapping rods. I'd also like to see forms with much more specialized and rare immunities, like a form that is immune to teleportation attacks, or forms with anti-magic fields (I think these exist already but I heard they are traps and you can't change out of them bar herbal healing, maybe somebody else can correct me). A higher level vampiric form to replace Vampire lord and compete with the other warrior type forms would be great. Having blind/slow spells not always return the message "The X was not affected" or "The X highly resisted" might justify actually using those spells for something other than waking up a sleeping monster and luring him away from a pack. Being able to change into different monsters to utilize their special abilities is what mimics should be about.

Overall what I find most disappointing though is just the number of high level monsters and useable forms compared to lower levels. For the first 30 levels there are so many different monsters and forms, but none of that matters since you can clear those first 30 levels in a day, even as a maiar. The next 20 levels afterwards just as the game starts to slow down so does the number of monsters you see. Outside of uniques which you obviously cannot turn into, there's about 50 monsters from level 65 to 98 compared to a whopping 853 from 0. Of that last third of the game's level range, there are about 5 viable weapon forms (Hru, Gbal, Nightwalker, Bronzeg, HR), a handful of Ds for martial artists, and Death Orb exclusively for Shamans. Qs, Leviathans, Shamblers, Jabberwocks, Solars, Mandragoras, Hounds, Unmakers, Black Dogs, and Ns are all unuseable outside of some MA Morgoth Crown silliness due to equipment problems. I feel like this is a small problem even on non-mimics as well, as I find myself only looking for Ds and Ls on my Istar, and on anybody other than an Istar I'd probably only bother looking for Ds due to cursed loot. Nether Guards and Solars could easily be made balanced forms by applying a soft cap on the amount of damage they contribute to a mimic similar to what is already done with form health. That aside I think a wider variety of higher level V, mold, aquatic, R, X, or mimic forms would be really neat.

Also minor quality of life change, swapping to a form that does not have available equipment slots, rather than unequipping items it'd be really great if it just greyed them out and pretended you weren't wearing them. Not sure whether this is possible or not, but I could actually see people using forms that are lacking equipment slots if it didn't mean they didn't have to spend 10 rounds re-equipping all their items afterwards.

TL;DR I'd like to see a mimic that functions more like a jack of all trades rather than a warrior with a W model and built in wraithform. More high level monsters to turn into or even just to kill for non-mimics would also be nice.
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