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Started a DsMo, got nightstalker, found a ring of invis and a Dith alter all by D:2. I guess I see where this one's going. Edit: It went in a sewer, where I died. BigFactory fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 17:57
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| # ? May 27, 2024 09:24 |
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quote:Goodbye, LogicNinja.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:03
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Angry Diplomat posted:Don't axes and polearms crosstrain, though? Shouldn't be too hard to get that thing to a useable delay between 17 levels of crosstraining and a speed brand Train axes, get M+F  I mean I've got a decent executioner's axe, I just thought a bardiche of speed was pretty much up there as the best weapon in the game outside of giant spiked clubs. Possibly eclipsed now by a claymore of speed or level 27 unarmed, I dunno.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:09
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27 UC beats gsc of speed soooo yeah.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:14
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PleasingFungus posted:not fighting the entire jackal pack at once, I suspect. Please tell me how you magically keep the entire pack from noticing you and force the level layout to change so that there is a one tile hallway right next you.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:18
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kaschei posted:27 UC beats gsc of speed soooo yeah. Yeah 27 UC is pretty goddamn strong just as a baseline, and if you start piling on poo poo like claws/blade hands/statue form/dragon form it gets real silly, real fast. My OgMo of Oka was ripping out golden dragon hearts and snapping titan spines like nothing with 27 UC and a shield, no damage buffs or transformations. On the orb run I had a Pan lord show up and popped Statue Form to fight it, and I completely clobbered it in like two hits. On an all-comers basis, high-level Unarmed Combat is the rawest out-and-out melee killdudesing skill in the game. You give up brands, randart egos, and weapon enchantments to get it, but once you get your skill nice and high, there's just about nothing that can withstand your appendages of fury, and if you chuck Statue Form or Dragon Form on, there is exactly nothing that can face you toe-to-toe and not die almost immediately unless you do something dumb and get yourself killed outright.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:27
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Can Ashenzari please let you curse your own bare hands so as to boost unarmed, though.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:38
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"Everything I touch turns to gold!"  Speaking of, devs can you implement replacing blood spatter with single gold coins as a brand/mutation so we can beat lunch money out of monsters please thanks in advance If not then get Gozag to do this please. Jory exploding into money as part of this effect would be incredible too.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:45
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Sage Grimm posted:"Everything I touch turns to gold!" Make coin explosions generate noise.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:50
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"You slice the yaktaur open like a piggybank!"
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Sep 19, 2014 19:11
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Sage Grimm posted:"Everything I touch turns to gold!" Can we just turn Gozag into the Piņata god?
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Sep 19, 2014 19:12
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Random thoughts on gods: 1) Why do any gods still require you to sacrifice corpses? It is seriously the most tedious poo poo. Just make those gods give slightly more piety for killing living enemies, it'd fit the flavor and you wouldn't have to rebalance the other numbers. 2) Ashenzari should really auto-curse all your equipment when you convert to her. I'm seriously tired of reaching her altar with zero or one remove curse scrolls.
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Sep 19, 2014 19:29
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Ash shouldn't do that imo, but there's no point to having multiple different kinds of curse scrolls anymore.
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Sep 19, 2014 19:45
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Have you never combined a scroll of immolation with Gozag? It is... beautiful.
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Sep 19, 2014 20:22
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Internet Kraken posted:Please tell me how you magically keep the entire pack from noticing you and force the level layout to change so that there is a one tile hallway right next you. if there is a one tile wide corridor, you will fight the jackals as a single-file pack, and you will die. instead, as soon as you see a jackal or any other enemy, simply walk away. if you are followed, all to the good; let them pursue you into known territory, and kill them there, singly & safely. if you do not run away, you will encounter more than one jackal, and if you are a weak character, you will die. this advice is not specific to jackal packs, just especially relevant to them. Sage Grimm posted:"Everything I touch turns to gold!" brutal demonspawn-with-ignite-blood nerfs
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Sep 19, 2014 20:37
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I'm pretty sure what kraken was talking about is, when one turn you haven't noticed any, then you move one tile and either multiple come into view and notice you or one does and barks, making the others notice you regardless of what you do after that which certainly does happen
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Sep 19, 2014 20:43
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Then clearly a Ds with Ignite Blood would spew out liquid gold, upgrading it to sticky flame if it spatters on someone. Or just let the fire burn longer on the ground. 
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Sep 19, 2014 20:44
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IronicDongz posted:I'm pretty sure what kraken was talking about is, when one turn you haven't noticed any, then you move one tile and either multiple come into view and notice you or one does and barks, making the others notice you regardless of what you do after that barking doesn't actually make the others notice you; it only wakes them up & makes them move toward the noise. if you move away & ideally break LOS with the source of the noise, you will almost certainly be fine. coming into view of multiple jackals at once is strongly inadvisable and to be avoided.
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Sep 19, 2014 20:52
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But in some areas you're not always able to do that fast enough, since they move more quickly than you and you're not always able to break LOS quickly depending on what your surroundings are like.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:09
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This is why I wish it were easy to set up repeatable "crawl puzzles" where you craft a scenario to try things out in. Like sprint but an even smaller scale, with preset characters. Then you could just link it and the thread could all play "get away from the jackals" to see.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:10
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Crawl version of http://chesstempo.com/chess-tactics.html sounds pretty good, and it'd be cool to see some stat analysis on, like, least risky solutions, quickest solutions, etc.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:33
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scalded schlong posted:Crawl version of http://chesstempo.com/chess-tactics.html sounds pretty good, and it'd be cool to see some stat analysis on, like, least risky solutions, quickest solutions, etc. It'd look pretty samey throughout. Crawl is simple, like 6th grade algebra -- except instead of playing with variables to solve for X, you are playing with consumables to solve for BREAK LOS.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:39
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PleasingFungus posted:if there is a one tile wide corridor, you will fight the jackals as a single-file pack, and you will die. As opposed to fighting the entire pack out in the open?  quote:instead, as soon as you see a jackal or any other enemy, simply walk away. if you are followed, all to the good; let them pursue you into known territory, and kill them there, singly & safely. if you do not run away, you will encounter more than one jackal, and if you are a weak character, you will die. This is brutally obvious and clearly not the situation I'm talking about. I'm talking about when you spawn in, walk outside of the starting vault, and the first thing you see is an entire group of jackals which all notice you and start running towards you. What exactly are you supposed to do in that specific situation? You can't say lure them away one by one when you literally rounded a corner into the entire pack right off the bat.
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Sep 19, 2014 23:01
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If you explode an enemy with OoD while worshiping Gozag, do they turn into small scattered piles of coins?
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Sep 19, 2014 23:06
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Internet Kraken posted:This is brutally obvious and clearly not the situation I'm talking about. I'm talking about when you spawn in, walk outside of the starting vault, and the first thing you see is an entire group of jackals which all notice you and start running towards you. What exactly are you supposed to do in that specific situation? You can't say lure them away one by one when you literally rounded a corner into the entire pack right off the bat. I'm on board with this. I've lost 2 caster streaks to this exact scenario, one which I dropped during the tournament. You just kinda lose barring an incredible feat of luck. I understand that D1 is the only place where jackels are threatening, but since there is a very real chance you have literally no where to retreat, they can very easily be a death sentence. IMO, force them to spawn far away from the entrance.
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Sep 19, 2014 23:11
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Maybe if you leave D:1 without going down another level it doesn't coun't as a loss for the purposes of win streak? 
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Sep 19, 2014 23:15
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This Orc:4 had Saint Roka... and two of the four shops were mimics. I feel ripped off.
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Sep 19, 2014 23:45
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paranoid randroid posted:If you explode an enemy with OoD while worshiping Gozag, do they turn into small scattered piles of coins? Yes. It is amazing. 
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Sep 19, 2014 23:50
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Ha, 8 ancient liches and 5 titans on zig 24, and now the code has changed to make the 2nd zig you go into even harder.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:01
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pathetic little tramp posted:Ha, 8 ancient liches and 5 titans on zig 24, and now the code has changed to make the 2nd zig you go into even harder. That is only like *half of the enemies that were actually present on the level, that was taken almost immediately after the fight started.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:04
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Something I mentioned a week or two ago was that I'd write up a big ol' post about how the way some damage mechanics in the post end game feel cheap and lazy, and offer some suggestions. Well, here is that post. Just to recap on what I was on about, my complaint lies in that mechanics like torment and hellfire are fundamentally flawed for a few reasons 1. It's lazy design A lot of the game is spent finding ways to mitigate the threats that you are going to encounter. Fighting Orbs of Fire without rF is silly. Going into snake without rPois is silly. Walking into Elf without no ticks of MR is asking to get banished. You need to consider what they threats are and whether or not you have the tools to deal with them. You don't necessarily need any resistances to finish the game, but you at least have to have some kind of plan. If you want to fight an OoF without rF, then maybe antimagic will do the trick. That's at least a decision that the player makes and it's interesting. It's making the best of a poo poo scenario and at it's core, it's problem solving. Hellfire and torment are the way they are because there is a very real chance that a PC will find themselves in a situation where elemental damage is a joke and physical damage can be almost totally ignored. Hellfire and torment don't give poo poo about your gear and even at rN+++, torment still does very threatening amounts of damage. The problem is that poo poo is lazy. That's a bandaid solution to the PC scaling problem in the game and it's implemented by simply adding 'pure', unmitigateable damage to the game. Right now, it's there because it needs to be there. Now, pure damage isn't necessarily a problem and hellfire really isn't a bad mechanic except... 2. The only reason you are alive is because caster mobs are stupid Casting mobs never act in an ideal manner and god knows that if they did in the game's current state, it'd be a disaster. The problem is here that when you are dealing with threats that are dishing out pure damage, depending on a few variables, the amount of damage that can be unleashed on you can range from 0 to 200+ depending on how they act. For reference, if you there are 2 things that can torment you, 1 thing that can hellfire, you can get knocked down from 200 HP to 0 HP in one turn. That poo poo don't work on paper and it's only the idiotic nature of caster AI that you can even touch extended. It's only caster AI as well that doesn't actively try to slaughter you post haste. Centaurs and Yaktaurs will shoot at you every turn they can. Melee dudes will walk up to you and beat your rear end in every turn they can. Ancient liches will go full retarded and cast at you maybe one out of 3 or 4 turns...except when they don't and decide that summoning a 1 and lobbing crystal spears is the best thing (which it is!). This really comes full circle back to my point at the beginning of this section: Caster AI acts really poorly compared to the rest of the game. If you are level 4 and an orc warrior comes around the corner, you know exactly what to expect and can actaccordingly. If you are level 12 and a group of death yaks is staring you down, you know exactly what to expect and can act accordingly. If you see a group of yaktaurs on D12 (do they spawn that soon? I dunno) and are low on life, you know exactly what to expect and can act accordingly. If you see an Ancient Lich, you have a list of literally 24 spells subdivided into 4 sets that he can cast at you, but there is also a good chance that the lich will just walk at you for a few turns as well... What? Why would it do that? It makes sense on some caster/hybrid mobs like Saint Roka, who can slaughter you from afar with a scary smite, or hit you for a billion damage with the sharp edge of his stick, but for a lich? All you are doing is introducing some ridiculous variance by forcing this particular class of NPC to act stupid. Now, this doesn't mean that I think every caster should be employing the Orb Weaver strat of 'run away like a bitch oh my god I want to slit my wrist every time I see this enemy' AI, but I think we can do better than the current implementation. Casters in Crawl have Trisomy 21, and it's part of what enables some really sloppy design with ultra-high variance which is part of why there needs to be this crutch of 'pure' damage anyway. 3. Because of how high variance is, it's impossible to play around a worst case scenario, because the worst case scenario is often times death Like I said before, 2 tormentors and a hellfire-capable mob can kill you from 200 HP in one turn*. The tactical nature of the game kind of breaks down after awhile. Between the number of tools you have and how versatile the PC becomes, it's really hard to throw something at the player that forces them to utilize clever positioning or think about their kite/retreat path, when even the dumbest of melee PCs can have RMsl and Flight castable. So you just employ difficulty the way Ninja Theory does and just jack up numbers until something becomes scary. As I see it, pure damage -- as it is currently implemented -- is being used if not as a tactics-replacement, at least as a supplement to the idea. -------------- How to fix it Fixing this without introducing some other kinds of problems is pretty hard. Any adjustments to systems at hand can have terrifying side effects and to say it'd be 'simple' is comical at best. That said, here's what I came up with as starting points Torment no longer does damage Torment doesn't do damage anymore. Instead, torment applies a debuff that stacks up to 3 for some number of turns. The torment debuff incurs rN- and adds an additional 10-20 of negative damage from every source of damage taken, increasing by 10 for every stack of torment. Torment checks MR and has a spell power dependent on who is casting it. For most end-game monsters, I think a spell power of 225 is appropriate, giving it a 63% chance to be applied against MR of 200. The chance to add additional stacks is reduced by a 1/3rd for every stack, so assuming those numbers stay constant, the chance to add a second and third stack would be 42% and 28% respectively. The idea here is that torment by itself isn't that threatening, but with other enemies, it becomes a really serious threat. It'd also give MR a little more value and make pots of cancellation more precious. Choosing when to engage with the debuff and when to retreat and figuring out what you can get away with would be a big part of managing it. Hellfire does elemental damage and makes itself scarier Hellfire does more normalized damage (I'm thinking like 25-40 instead of 3-60) and checks fire resistance and applies a -rF debuff for some number of turns. Alternatively, hellfire could just check against your lowest resistance among rC rF and rN and shred that instead, making it exceptionally scary if you are walking around with no resistances in a specific slot. The goal here is to remove pure damage as a crutch to still inflict threatening damage to the player. Casters act like they know how to cast Give casters the ability to make better decisions. If you are at max range, a lich that can cast OoD will probably cast OoD, but give that spell a cooldown. They way I'd implement caster AI is to give them sets of tiered spells and force a cooldown on each tier. So something like OoD might be a Tier 1 spell, but Mystic Blast might be Tier 3. Casters will probably always reach for that tier one spell, but if you can dodge or mitigate it, you don't have to deal with it again for some number of turns. This could also have an interaction with antimagic, where instead of incurring a fail chance, the internal CD has a chance to be delayed. This is somewhat dangerous though as if you round a corner to 3 casters, the results could be pretty devastating. Some minor changes to resistances On the back of the Hellfire and Torment changes, I'd like to see resistances go from 50/35/20 to 50/37.5/25. I'd like the see rN put on the same scale. These kinds of ideas are pretty rough and without some thought, brainstorming, and testing, they aren't something I'd ever condone to just ship, but I hope they are at least a starting point for a conversation. ------------- Finally... So after I've spent a week thinking about how I'm going to rag on Dungeon Crawl, and a half-dozen hours typing and retyping this up, I guess it's important for me to state that I really like this game and I find it really exceptional. I think the devs do a fantastic job and compared to most other games I have *strong opinions* about, the sins that DC:SS commits are quite minor. If we are being honest, this is nitpicking about a relatively minor aspect of the game I don't think the game itself is somehow fundamentally flawed or 'bad' because of torment, hellfire, or caster AI. Please don't interpret this as a 'Blizzard doesn't care about Shamans' post, because it isn't intended as that. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 00:12
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You should submit that to the Tavern for discussion. If you decide to do that, though, then I'd make your analysis of the design (Points 1-3) the OP and your proposal for reworking your second post.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:27
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Just lost another DDNe; the actual cause of death was somewhat uninteresting (underestimated a pack of orc priests led by a high priest at O:4), but even before the death the game felt strangely difficult. I had a Lair ending with dire elephants, and could hardly damage them, and in Orc the knights and warlords were mostly undamageable except by using Makhleb's stuff or wands. Vampiric Draining was definitely my most powerful spammable attack, which felt a bit wrong since my artifact spear seemed to do nearly no damage. I'm pretty sure I didn't train stuff properly, but I never felt really secure changing my training from casting/necromancy to fighting/polearms. The biggest problem I've been having with my casters is that after the initial handy book, I have no idea what kinds of spells to go for next. There're so many of them and I'm pretty uncertain of how much experience I should dedicate to a different school of magic before memorizing any spells from them. In this game I had the Necronomicon (but dumbly never even attempted memorizing anything from there) and 4-5 other books with overwhelming amounts of spells I didn't know what to do with. tl;dr: Whine whine game is hard whine whine I'd really appreciate it if someone could take a quick glance at the morgue and shout at me for something dumb I did (preferably related to spell memorizing): http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/Hempuli/morgue-Hempuli-20140920-000417.txt
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Sep 20, 2014 01:30
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I agree with most of this, just wanted to point out that while the hellfire suggestion is ok, you could easily "exploit" this by keeping a trivial resistance low.. like keeping your rF at minimum while in Cocytus. The problem with this is that this kind of concept would go immediately under fire for being one of those things that in theory could be abused in a boring/tedious way by constantly shuffling your resistances with jewelry, for example. Maybe making it so hellfire's resistance debuff is fixed (or applies it according to branch, perhaps) would be a better alternative. Also, why not bring this write-up to the crawl forums? Stuff like Ru, Gozag, etc. were proposed over there and ultimately implemented, after all.. and maybe getting some non-goony feedback would be useful in helping polish crawl's extended game areas along with your proposal.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:33
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Hempuli posted:Just lost another DDNe; the actual cause of death was somewhat uninteresting (underestimated a pack of orc priests led by a high priest at O:4), but even before the death the game felt strangely difficult. I had a Lair ending with dire elephants, and could hardly damage them, and in Orc the knights and warlords were mostly undamageable except by using Makhleb's stuff or wands. Vampiric Draining was definitely my most powerful spammable attack, which felt a bit wrong since my artifact spear seemed to do nearly no damage. I'm pretty sure I didn't train stuff properly, but I never felt really secure changing my training from casting/necromancy to fighting/polearms. Probably woulda pumped up pole arms and gone less heavy on the spell casting. Necromancers moreso than a lot of other book backgrounds tend to be meleers with spell support vs blasty types. (obviously this can change depending on what you pick up early on etc but in general) Without knowing how to foo-tv or read ascii maps, I'll also venture to say that you may have been able to do something tactically to avoid being in view of so many smiters for long enough to kill you but I'm just guessing there. e: oh yeah, looks like you realized this already Kekekela fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 01:35
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So what I'm getting from that is that Extended should be decided by resistance checks instead of tactical decisions. Torment especially is an interesting obstacle that manages to threaten every character while not actually being bullshit. Hellfire is less interesting but I'm generally okay with it. It's just a fireball/smite that does more damage, and that's fine. It's no worse than iron shot or crystal spears in the midgame. E: Oh and extreme MR does have value in the endgame because Chaos Champions check MR with their smite-targeted debuffs, and it's a very difficult check. It's also a very important check, because they can berserk/paralyze you or otherwise ruin your poo poo. Darox fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 01:40
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Darox posted:So what I'm getting from that is that Extended should be decided by resistance checks instead of tactical decisions. Resistance checks should matter more than they currently do, but shouldn't afford you immunity and instead should afford you some level of comfort while secondary mechanics are forcing tactical play without resorting to pure damage at any time. quote:Torment especially is an interesting obstacle Said no one ever.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:46
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Darox posted:So what I'm getting from that is that Extended should be decided by resistance checks instead of tactical decisions. So you didn't read his post and the major points about enemy AI and the issues inherent in the system as it stands. Ok. Cool.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:48
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:Said no one ever. Torment is interesting in the mid-late (but not post-) game where you have one tormentor on screen and a few other not-normally-deadly enemies. This is pretty much exactly when an ancient lich summons a fiend and no other time.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:51
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Speaking of the postgame, it really chaps my rear end that demons are immune to ?silence.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:52
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