The first cut let a caster cast in auto-resolved rooms and capped nothing but
upcasting. The sweep said that was half a fix. Room deaths fell for every caster
— mage 131 -> 105, sorcerer 118 -> 105 — and fleeing collapsed, which is what §6
predicted. But elite and boss deaths exploded behind it: mage 7 -> 38 and 19 ->
61, sorcerer 14 -> 51 and 15 -> 65. They were winning the trash rooms and
arriving at the thing that matters with an empty pool. Net, mage and sorcerer
came out of §6 worse than they went in (-34 and -37 runs cleared).
"Never upcast" is not a reserve. A mage's native-level spells ARE its boss kit,
so casting them at native level in a goblin room still spends the dragon's
slots. Only a level cap reserves anything.
So an ordinary room may reach for a 2nd-level slot and no higher. Every caster
still owns a real spell down there — a cleric's inflict_wounds, everyone else's
scorching_ray — but fireball, spirit_guardians, flame_strike and every slot the
turn engine would upcast into stay in the caster's pocket until there is
something worth spending them on.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01B2MwktU4RgfWkar8HM3zZn
§6 was filed as "clerics are weak in solo — lift the trailer". It is not a balance
problem and a tuning dial would have buried it.
Re-baselined on HEAD: cleric still last, 46.4% vs fighter 81.4%. But cleric *dies*
less than mage, sorcerer or warlock. Its entire deficit is FLEEING — 167 of 500 runs
end with the player alive and the expedition over, where fighter and ranger flee
zero. Instrumenting the stopEnded sites: every one of those runs ends in an ORDINARY
room fight. Not a patrol, not an elite, not the boss.
An ordinary room is runZoneCombatRoster → SimulateCombat on an 8-round clock: one
breath, no turn engine, no action picker. The only spell that could ever land there
was a PendingCast the player queued BY HAND before walking in. On autopilot nobody
queues one — so for every room of every expedition, a caster fought with a weapon and
nothing else. A cleric has no Extra Attack, a mace, and its whole kit unusable: it
grinds the 8 rounds out, and a wounded one starts losing fights a fighter never
loses. One room loss ends the whole expedition.
The tell is that dnd_class_balance.go — the harness the class corpus was tuned on —
ALWAYS hands a caster their best damage spell before it simulates. The numbers that
say "cleric is a weak class" modelled a cleric who casts. The live room modelled one
who does not. The corpus and the game disagreed about what a cleric is.
Same defect as the rest of this plan: the action model is narrower than the kit. §1
(the picker never healed), §3 (the companion never acted), Pete (LoadDnDCharacter →
nil → "attack"), and now every caster in every room.
The spell is additive pre-damage, exactly as a hand-queued PendingCast has always
been, so this stays comparable to the corpus instead of being a new mechanic.
It is slot-aware and NOT free. pickBestDamageSpell reads slotsForClassLevel — the
theoretical class table — so reusing it would have cast an unlimited leveled spell
every room: the same "no row to persist onto, so it arrives fresh" free lunch that
gave the companion an infinite body. The new picker reads the seat's real remaining
slots and spends one.
It never upcasts. The big slots are what the elite and the boss are for and the turn
engine spends them there; a picker that nukes a goblin with a 5th-level slot leaves
the caster swinging a stick at the thing that matters.
Both goldens byte-identical — they pin the engine, and this changes its inputs at the
zone layer. Martials provably untouched.
UNMEASURED: the verification sweep is still in flight. Read cleric's fled count, and
watch bard/druid for overshoot — they get the same buff and were not the problem.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01J5SQZWoLmL3M3mw2XmHHdy
