Arivia posted:

Reintroducing Pakellas.

Teal posted:

Okay I'm mad; I've been having one of my best runs so far, and as many such runs I had before it ended with me getting sent to Abyss by an orc bitch with a sword of distortion and eating poo poo and dying there (I've not yet cleared Mines or Lair; have been slowly pushing both. In Abyss I actually managed to get pretty far by burning my stockpile of 6 blinking scrolls, making it just barely alive through two panic-portals before dying to a loving beyblade which moves twice per turn (Executioner). I feel like I asked about this years back when I played the game for the first time but is there any meaningful tactic to getting out of Abyss alive when you can't REALLY fight any of the enemies there or can you just Ctrl+Q the moment a fucker RNG's your rear end there and count it as getting instagibbed, the sole lesson learned being "burn wands rather than ever taking Distortion hits".

Tollymain posted:

a vaguely original idea for rod re-implementation: merge inaccuracy, ignition, and scattershot into a single item that randomly selects from one of their effects; merge shadows and swarm and add a another summoning effect for another unpredictable rod (how much does swarm overlap with sack of spiders? could replace that with something new if it's roughly the same thing). this makes rods (clouds, destruction, summoning) differentiated by wands and related to each other via their unpredictability.

Sage Grimm posted:

Teal posted:

I really, really, really loved the idea of Gnoll Skald because I am a lazy tabbing bitch but at the same time loathe missing out on magics entirely and I also hate when I find an artifact I just quite can't use due to the skill deficiency. Problem is, since I'm a lazy tabbing bitch and GnSk isn't all that great at that, I over and over and over again die before I actually make it to Lair/Mines, usually just by walking into something marginally above my current capability or by failing to recognize it's the right time to pop my buffs, mismanaging the spectral weapon, etc etc.

Well, I finally felt confident enough disregard the highlighted suggestions of character/background combos and am trying out Gnoll Fighter and jesus christ if I don't feel like I was wasting a loving ton of time with GnSk. I get to start with a War Axe and early on, the shield and armor skills help you a LOT more reliably than the ever-mana-draining, confusion vulnerable utilities which GnSk relies on, yet I get to bzoom straight into the first Vehumet infostall and by the time I am in the areas I rarely ever made it to as GnSk, I'm assblasting everything with destruction spells while wearing chainmail like I'm some kinda bomb defusal squad Gandalf.

Discouraging GnFi is outright loving misleading and so I learned that the suggested builds in the character selection screen are bullshit.

weirdly chilly pussy posted:

upgrade to heavier armor when your spell failure rate allows it

Teal posted:

That's the thing tho; with GnSk your armour has to play catch up with your magic and it feels like your delicate AC vs. Miscast balance is extremely fragile and vulnerable to bad drops. Meanwhile with GnFi you don't rely on getting anything good in particular at any specific point; you can start casting whenever it happens to become feasible, as opposed to having to rely on hoping it stays feasible as enemies scale in damage in ways your AC capped by your Miscast can't keep up with. In a game mostly about taking chances and mismanagement, GnFi just seems a lot more robust and less reliant on which magic/items you find.

weirdly chilly pussy posted:

Spectral weapon will more than compensate for the slightly lower AC a skald will have. Just make a habit of always considering your positioning: always fight at chokepoints, one at a time and make sure your spectral weapon gets to hit as well. If this is not possible, run until your position allows it. Don't get caught out in the open.

In my opinion it's the fighter who has to rely on good drops, because they start with no spells and their starting weapon/armor isn't that good.

Tollymain posted:

should redundant elemental evocables continue to have a shared cooldown and hence be useless

Floodkiller posted:

Alright, next couple of topics (both of these were on the "Yes" list, so they need a finalized design this time around):

Reimplement rods

• Does this mean bring rods and removed rod effects back in their previous state (separate item, wield to evoke, regenerates charges over turns)?
  
• If yes, should there be any changes/improvements to how they work? Maybe bring back removed effects as wands and make all wands have the potential to drop as a rod? All rods can be evoked from inventory?
  
• If no, how should the removed rod effects be brought back? As wands? As evocables (either full charge like lamps of fire, or partial charge like lightning rod)?
  
• What should be done about items that were previously rod effects (wand of clouds, wand of scattershot, lightning rod evocable)?
  

icantfindaname posted:

Is it worth training stealth as a melee tank? I’ve played two or three games as experiments and it seems neat but if I’m just going to kill things with an axe anyway what’s the point?

Patashu posted:

I'm working on Megabyss.

Done so far:
1) Abyss is extended down to 27 floors. Item generation, monster generation and some frequencies of things ramp up as you go down.
2) From Abyss:5 on, one-way portals to the Realm of Zot are generated, putting you on the Zot:1 upstairs. If you enter without 3 runes, the door is one way (shuts behind you once you enter Depths). This lets you do 0-2 rune runs, if you're crazy. Also, most important of all: It doesn't crash! It took a while to sort out the bugs and implement this properly.
Todo list:
1) Playtest/make sure that it's 'fun'. It should be dangerous, but not a suicide mission, to go down to Abyss:27. And there should be sufficient incentive, in forms of being able to acquire loot faster in real time, for going down to low (not necessarily 27) Abyss levels if you're strong enough to handle it.
2) Megabyss corruption! If you explore Abyss:27 and live to tell the tale, the dungeon is permanently corrupted (like Lugonu's effect, but in a few random places on each old AND new level, and stacking with Lucy corruption if you happen to worship her too).
3) Stretch goal - have weird things happen on the lower Abyss floors. Pockets of corruption suddenly appearing, translocation storms, chaos/mutagenic fog generators, etc.