Does creating diluted potions when dipping into fixed water sources serve a useful purpose?
rbsec opened this issue · comments
If you #dip a potion into water (such as a fountain or moat), you create a diluted version of the potion (which functions mostly the same as the original), and then have to #dip it again to create a potion of water.
The only reason I can think why you'd want to create a diluted potion like this is so that it stacks with other diluted potions in your inventory (for blessed or alchemy reasons), but that seems like something of an edge case.
If the player is intentionally dipping a potion into a fixed source of water (rather than another potion), they're almost certainly trying to create water, so is there any benefit to having to go through this intermediate step of a diluted potion first? It doubles the number of steps that you have to take, which can be tedious if you've got a load of different potions you want to turn to water.
The main gameplay impact I could see for changing this would be that you could effectively turn twice as many potions to water with a fountain (as you'd only need half as many #dips to convert them, so less likelihood of it drying up). But that could be avoided by only applying it when #dipping into a pool or moat.
You could consider believing in homeopathy, which would make diluted potions stronger....
Should you get wet (by being on top of melting ice for example), your potion would get diluted, hence protecting them once.
@PFGimenez I can understand why it's nice to have the diluted state when you unintentionally get things wet, to stop falling into water being too devastating. But if I'm intentionally #dipping it just feels like an unnecessary extra step to have to do it twice.
I think it makes sense to have it be a consistent rule, instead of adding a special case for moats and pools. And I have definitely deliberately diluted potions before so that they stack (e.g. for alchemy), I don't think it's that uncommon.
An underlying issue this thread is touching on is that most potions are useless enough to the hero that the typical thing you do with an average potion is go dilute it into water.
@copperwater while there are certainly quite a few potions that are of very limited value (and some that are outright harmful or useless), for me it's usually less a case of the potions being bad and more that holy water is really good. If you want to bless all of your key stuff, there isn't really any reliable alternative to mass producing a load of holy water - so even decent potions can be worth giving up for that.