I'm tossing this here for the moment rather than announcements because it's still a work in progress and I anticipate a certain amount of discussion. How jackassed this discussion becomes probably will determine if I repeat this experiment soon.

I've been doing some conjurer tweaking tonight, which will be showing up in a crash/reboot near you sometime soon. Here's the gist of it:

1) Familiars. The familiars that should be out and with the conjurer in dangerous situations have been improved slightly more with respect to how much of a beating they can take. Saves against faerie dragon faeriefog and imp impcurse are a little harder than they used to be. I'm toying with the idea of letting familiars in the room with their master share protective spells cast upon him for free, but I don't know that this is all that necessary.

2) Elementals. A new elem command available to all four kinds of elementals, noarea, will let you tell your elemental that you don't want it using its area attack spell-like ability anymore. This is not a toggle (once you tell it noarea, it's done for the life of the elemental), and it won't execute other special attacks in the place of the earthquakes it's not doing, etc. This is another option for conjurers; you certainly don't need to take it if you don't think this is a good option.

I want to evaluate the balance effects of elementals not 100% predictably getting themselves killed by area'ing in certain situations before I consider taking this any further, and I've learned the hard way it's easier to give a little and then a little more later than to give a lot and need to take some of it back later.

3) Morosa demons. Their chain lightning should be a little less obnoxious.

4) Challegha demons. These demons, if pleased with their masters, will be less (note: that's 'less', not 'not') inclined to attack their master or his allies if they are wounded.



That's where it sits right now. Also on my list and more likely to be a more gradual project is tweaking devil AI. The spells they cast won't likely change; their strategy for picking them likely will, making them more effective in some situations and perhaps less in others (nothing's perfect, and we've all watched an archon do something dumb rather than save a conjurer's life on occasion). As one particular example, I don't feel that devils do enough for an orderly neutral conjurer, for whom binding a devil should be one of his top choices, all things being equal (which they never are, but let's pretend.)

Other changes of grander scope, such as splitting angels to work and be chosen like demons, are beyond the time I intend to divert from a somewhat bigger project right now.