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Cardiovorax posted:Level 1 halflings are well-documented to be able to sneak past high-level incorporeal undead. You must be doing it wrong. I just got to stealth level 5 and attempted to sneak up to a totally alone solo kobold. He woke up when I was a tile away. I have gotten off one stab in this level.
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Jul 31, 2019 02:22
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Sorry, it was just a Lord of the Rings joke. But yeah, the early game start-up issues are another reason why I always thought that stabber as a gameplay approach just doesn't quite work as intended. You have to spend a lot of time playing not-a-stabber until you develop enough stealth to be able to play as a stabber. Neither combat nor magic builds suffer from that to the same degree, which suggests to me that something is off. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Jul 31, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 02:23
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Cardiovorax posted:Sorry, it was just a Lord of the Rings joke. Oh right lol sorry
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Jul 31, 2019 02:24
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the secret is that Stealth in crawl only exists to up your stabbing damage and keep you from being caught off-guard; just walking up to enemies to stab them is a really bad and dumb idea that you should basically never do, and the sooner you accept this the better of a time you're gonna have as a stabber. is that unfortunate? eh, i dunno, maybe? i don't think i'd want the stealth system to change in crawl at this point, but i can understand why people would find it disappointing because it doesn't do what it says on the tin very well. if you're playing assassin/some non-En start, lean hard on throwing or something like that to soften enemies up so you can kill them quickly. poison needles will carry you to lair, use them and either kite or murder things once they've been reduced to low enough health that you feel confident attacking them. accept that you won't win every fight, learn when and how to run away or not even engage to begin with. it's okay to not clear a floor entirely and to come back later if a vault, unique or even just a single obnoxiously OOD spawn is giving you a tough time. it's a playstyle that's stupidly more punishing than playing a heavy cj dude, a tabby melee guy, or any kind of bow-user for basically zero benefit, and i don't know why anyone would do it (or why i play so many stabbers  )
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Jul 31, 2019 02:35
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I"ve had a bad time with ranged weapon in every game I've had. Ammo seems to scarce.
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Jul 31, 2019 02:37
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quote:i don't think i'd want the stealth system to change in crawl at this point, but i can understand why people would find it disappointing because it doesn't do what it says on the tin very well. I'd invite any discussion or suggestions people might have about that, because the same issues that make me think stabbers are rather player-unfriendly also mean I'm not really familiar enough with the playstyle to have a lot of ideas on how to improve it.
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Jul 31, 2019 02:42
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Just lost my halfling assassin to an ogre who I couldn't resist sneaking up on. gently caress this i'm going back to the stupid old minotaur bezerker
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Jul 31, 2019 02:43
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Cardiovorax posted:I'm not sure how much or even what I'd want done with it, but it's a long-standing and persistent issue and I think something really does have to be done about it at this point. If nothing else, the trifecta of mage-rogue-warrior is so well-established in gaming that turning stabby or stealthy playstyles into a valid approach would do much for accessibility, because you're right that they just don't work as you would expect them to from the name. When you pay the skill taxes warper stabbers ARE fun. I think they should have access to controlled blink earlier and have a buffed stealth skill to begin with.
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Jul 31, 2019 02:45
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Yeah, you're right, but I'd consider that a hybrid build, and the fact that any really successful stabber pretty much has to hybridize heavily into something is a big part of the design issues I think they have.
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Jul 31, 2019 02:47
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I think thieves should be themed more strongly as super resourceful survivors. Giving felids massively reduced food requirements is a step in the right direction. I think they should be given an appraise skill or something that lets them auto-identify items maybe and gold bonuses.
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Jul 31, 2019 03:08
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having a pretty ok run as a springgan warper but Lol. gently caress you rng
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Jul 31, 2019 03:23
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Amethyst posted:having a pretty ok run as a springgan warper but Wu Jian is amazing as a stabber because the passive lunge works on backstabs and you can pin people in place.
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Jul 31, 2019 05:10
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Amethyst posted:A level 1 halfling assassin is incapable of sneaking up to a sleeping rat. This is bullshit. stabbers are hard mode. Assassin and warper aren’t stealth backgrounds. I know, that’s conceptually weird, but the way you do an assassin play style in crawl is with disabling powers, either through needles, wands or spells, to open up enemies to stabs. Stealth is unreliable as a means to stab enemies. Its real value is as a powerful defensive stat that lets you escape from fights more easily, generally means you fight fewer enemies at a time and lets you pick your fights more carefully. If you want to play a stabber, the most straightforward choice is enchanter, though earth elementalist’s starting book allows them to transition into a good stabber in the mid game while providing the tools work around immunity to common stabber tricks. Warper is a really hard class, by the way. Its offense and defense are both sub par, and while it has great escape options, it’s very difficult to actually kill stuff. Assassin is a strong start, though. You just play as a normal melee character, but you have some very powerful ranged tools to take out early starting threats. TL;DR, light armor and stealth are hard to make work in Crawl without magic to support them. If you want to play a stealthy assassin type, start as an enchanter. Edit: Somehow I missed the whole page of posts above this. Anyway, I think it would be nice if short blades or even light weapons in general could do more damage and stabs would just be a bonus like cleaving or riposte. Heithinn Grasida fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Jul 31, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 05:12
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Thanks I'll give it a try. My spriggan warper of ru was just hacked to death by orcs.
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Jul 31, 2019 05:19
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i honestly don't even like dithmenos that much but i'm pretty weird, i never really understood how to use him that effectively and tend to just feel worthless and eventually die wishing i'd chosen someone else. i haven't tried dith in ages though, maybe it deserves another shot
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Jul 31, 2019 05:35
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Man the crawl wiki is really obtuse about exactly how to-hit rolls and EV and AC interact. Is there a good breakdown somewhere?
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Jul 31, 2019 05:38
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Amethyst posted:Man the crawl wiki is really obtuse about exactly how to-hit rolls and EV and AC interact. Is there a good breakdown somewhere? The way they work is just really, really weird. Somebody can post the to-hit formulae here if they want for a laugh. Basically, there’s no clear way to tell how much work your EV is doing, just that more of it is better, but it also has diminishing returns, so it’s not worth trying to push it too high. AC is fairly clear, I think. You deduct a number from 0 to AC from every attack (except AC ignoring ones, like smiting or many, but not all, elemental brands on monster attacks). Some electrical attacks only allow you to apply half your AC. Armor has a hidden GDR (guaranteed damage reduction) stat that changes the minimum damage reduction from 0 to a percent of your AC based on the type of armor, but this only applies to melee attacks, not ranged. So basically, if you have 10 AC, you’ll deduct an average of 5 damage from the majority of attacks. If you’re wearing plate armor and have 10 AC, you’ll deduct an average of 5 from ranged attacks and 7.5 from melee attacks. It’s totally possible for your armor to crap out and not protect you at all multiple times in a row, especially against ranged attacks because extremely random, swingy combat is a feature of Crawl. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong on AC.
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Jul 31, 2019 06:03
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Nearly there, GDR will guarantee some damage reduction in melee range (either the full percentage of the damage or half your AC, whichever is lower). You mention that early on but your comments afterward were a little confusing so just in case I'll reiterate that information. You may want to rely heavily on AC to start because most enemies in the early game are reliant on melee damage and you're going to be in that range a lot of the time. Eventually you'll want a combination of EV + AC (and SH in 3-rune games) to have the most flexibility in encounters.
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Jul 31, 2019 06:22
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FR: Add the stabbing bonus to missile weapons. Crawl has a severe lack of "stealth archer" gameplay.
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Jul 31, 2019 13:45
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quote:FR: Add the stabbing bonus to missile weapons. Ideally, I'd want stealth to feel like being the protagonist from Thief when he sneaks through one of those undead-filled early game tombs.
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Jul 31, 2019 13:52
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what happened to needle stabbing, anyway
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Jul 31, 2019 13:55
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someone awful. posted:what happened to needle stabbing, anyway it offered a way for Stealth, Throwing, and needles to be useful as late-game skills and as we all know, those are things that are only supposed to be used in the early game like Poison Magic edit: For a non-snarky answer, needle stabbing was seen as "too overpowered" to be able to gently caress up any non-undead if you maxed out Throwing with a +9 blowgun and had a healthy supply of needles. From a quick Google, your probability of getting the needle effect on a stab was 2+ 1d(3 + Throwing Skill + Blowgun To-Hit) compared to the monster's hit dice, so it still wasn't a guarantee. The fact that "doesn't work on undead at all ever", "requires you to have enough Stealth to consistently get a stabbing bonus against the toughest and most numerous enemies in the game", "entirely single-target with no possibility whatsoever of AoE", and "requires constant use of consumables, even with divine gifts" were not considered in judging something as "too overpowered" is indicative of mainline Crawl's design priorities. Also, if you've maxed out an appropriate skill and have the means to take advantage of it (+9 weapon, level 9 spell), there shouldn't be anything you can't gently caress up in short order. The difficulty in the endgame is in being able to deal with the group of things you didn't kill. redneck nazgul fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Jul 31, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 15:09
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redneck nazgul posted:FR: Add the stabbing bonus to missile weapons. Actually, curare needles used to do some damage on impact against enemies without rPois. Since you could stab with a blowgun and stabbing multiplied the impact damage, at very high skill levels, you could kill pretty much anything without rPois silently in a single hit from range. It was really fun, though without the rPois restriction it would have been ridiculously overpowered. As it was, groups of draconians in Zot just all died without any possibility to react. And you could turn invisible and still murder them even if some poison resistant enemy woke up everyone up.
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Jul 31, 2019 17:19
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I'm starting to think needle stabs should be returned to GoonCrawl, the drawbacks are on the level of the other options available to stealthy stabbers (Invisibility does nothing against seeInvis/detectInvis, Passwall can't go through granite and takes several turns to succeed, other Hexes need to make an MR check, etc.).
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Jul 31, 2019 17:46
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I think you could expand this to a general stabbing for ranged weapons (or even just thrown) weapons and lose nothing in regards to general balance. Fact is, throwing currently kind of sucks. Stealth currently kind of sucks. Anything that makes stealth in specific better without making anything else worse is a net benefit to the game that costs no one anything.
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Jul 31, 2019 17:57
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the combat formulas include so much insane randomness that it ends up being fairly deterministic on some level due to the sheer amount of rng checks being done all the time until an ogre mage gets max rolls on their spell damage and you get worst rolls on your whatever checks and your brains get blown out via a crystal spear
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Jul 31, 2019 18:26
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Why do I play stabbers? Because it feels so good one-shotting uniques and other things. In my experience, stabbers need more exp than other types - more skills to train and/or those skills are "weaker" at shoring you up against the really difficult encounters. When I have to abandon multiple parts of multiple levels it really feels like a slow death spiral - less loot & exp making you less able to get more loot & exp... Which gave me the thought : what do people think about having a god that grants experience through exploration (or some other non-killing means)?
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Aug 1, 2019 19:50
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FnF posted:Why do I play stabbers? Because it feels so good one-shotting uniques and other things. Ashenzari?
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Aug 1, 2019 20:38
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Ashenzari grants piety for exploration and I believe Elyvilon gives partial XP for some kind of non-lethal pacification ability he grants, but that isn't functionally different from fighting and killing the hostiles, it just leaves them making their own way out of the level instead of dropping dead on the spot. The obvious problem with a god like that would be, of course, that unless they punish killing, a follower would essentially gain free XP for walking around in addition to whatever they get for killing everything as per usual. That's conceptually tricky, because sooner or later, you'll have to kill something out of necessity. Trying to solve that by making them just give very little XP would leave you with a god who's so weak that the benefits may not be worth it and giving equivalent XP at the cost of hamstringing you leaves you with something that's closer to challenge mode.
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Aug 1, 2019 20:41
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FnF posted:Why do I play stabbers? Because it feels so good one-shotting uniques and other things. The God of Dancing lets you build piety and perform a one-shot murder too!
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Aug 1, 2019 21:08
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when I want to one shot things I just go uskayaw. More reliable than stabbing and definitely easier honestly uskayaw is kind of hilariously overpowered and in my experience it's really hard to lose while worshipping him. Free irresistible mass paralysis, pain sharing, a mobility option, and the ability to make 1 problematic enemy vaporize, what else do you need tbh efb kinda
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Aug 1, 2019 21:15
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Lol I just played an abyssal knight of xom it was great. Fun mode after strabber tedium
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Aug 2, 2019 00:14
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Floodkiller posted:Ashenzari? Hepliaklqana grants xp for exploration too, and gives you a spare stabber to coordinate stabbing with. Or a tank to stand behind; or a battlemage to go loud with.
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Aug 2, 2019 11:57
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To be clear, I was talking about exploration into experience, not exploration into piety (of which there are already a few gods people have already named). Characters absolutely need experience to survive and progress. Piety helps, sure, but you need experience more. Ash gives a tasty skill-boost, but most of your skill value/strength still comes from experience earned from killing. I was thinking more like having 75% of your exp granted directly through exploration with the remaining 25% coming from killing (i.e. enemies grant 25% of their normal exp). For comparison, all other chars intrinsically have the split being 0%/100% instead of this 75%/25%. The game knows how much exp is generated (via hostiles) on a level. The game also knows how many explorable tiles a level has on generation. (Or it could just take average values for each). Therefore it can, per level, work out the proportion of the level you've explored, and grant you that same proportion of experience from what the level would normally contain in its hostiles. (a contrived example) Let's say a level has 1,000 points of experience (in its hostiles) and 100 explorable tiles. Therefore, for this god, one explored tile is worth ((1/100) * 1,000 * 0.75) = 7.5 experience. An enemy on this level that would normally be worth 10 experience would instead be worth 2.5 exp. There's already a strong incentive to kill enemies - loot, either what they're carrying or what they're guarding. So even with this god, characters would still want to fight. It just wouldn't be quite as essential. I have no idea what this god would do for piety, or what their other powers would be, or anything. Obviously there'd need to be balancing and various guards against exploits, but I can't yet see a reason why this idea couldn't work. Edit : vvv yeah, I have no problem with that. Doesn't have to be a new god, or a god at all. Open to all ideas! FnF fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Aug 2, 2019 |
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Aug 2, 2019 15:10
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Not that I wanna shoot down your idea but now wondering if there isn't a pretty strong case to make experience be 75/25 exploration/kills regardless of worship.
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Aug 2, 2019 15:18
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Aren't we just copying Sil then?
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Aug 2, 2019 15:23
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There is nothing wrong with copying better games. See also: Song of Slaying.
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Aug 2, 2019 15:58
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I'm trying to play gooncrawl on the servers and it's crashing instantly.
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Aug 3, 2019 15:36
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Jon Joe posted:I'm trying to play gooncrawl on the servers and it's crashing instantly. I hosed up in the last patch by forgetting to make a tag for older games before adding a player variable, so it's trying to unmarshal a variable from your save that doesn't exist. At this point I believe I've already hosed the save up so I don't think I can fix it by reverting, you may need to get it wiped.
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Aug 3, 2019 18:08
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Floodkiller posted:I hosed up in the last patch by forgetting to make a tag for older games before adding a player variable, so it's trying to unmarshal a variable from your save that doesn't exist. At this point I believe I've already hosed the save up so I don't think I can fix it by reverting, you may need to get it wiped. How do I do that?
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Aug 3, 2019 18:28
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