Two artifacts that get little respect among power nethack players are
the Vorpal Blade and the Tsurugi of Muramasa.
Both these weapons have a small chance of instakill against most
enemies. In an apparent effort by the game designers to balance that
advantage, these weapons do low ordinary damage compared to the other
artifacts.
Power players sneer at them (except when they are in enemy hands)
because most of the time the instakill will kick in on popcorn monsters.
In theory it could be handy against really tough monsters, but since it
takes an average of 20 attacks to wait for a critical, it's normally
safer to use other means.
Considering that monsters where the instakill would be helpful will be
relatively rare, it might improve weapon balance if the player was given
some control over when instakill shows up.
My suggestion: if you #invoke ToM or Vorpy, "You feel an odd sense of
focus", and your next attack will always be critical. While the
invocation timeout counts down, there will be no random criticals (this
actually does the player a favor by letting him know when #invoke
becomes available again.).
A variation on the idea is to have #invoke enter a "combat fugue" where
for 20 moves (or so) the critical chance is very high.
I'd also suggest making #invoke recharge faster as normal damage is done
using the weapons. This gives the player an incentive to use ToM or
Vorpy all the time rather than swapping them in just for
#invoke-attacks. In turn, this gives the two weapons a fair chance to
compete for the player's ?oEW supply.
---- Michael Deutschmann <michael.RemoveThis@talamasca.ocis.net>
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