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quote:* Removed: Haste That is...interesting. I think it's probably a good idea overall as haste is almost certainly the powerful, general-use spell in the game but... Casters have taken a lot, a lot of hits over the last 8 or so patches. My win rate with the 'traditional' caster combos has went from 40%~ in 0.13 to about 20%~% as of 0.18 and I'm guessing removing haste probably won't be a net positive on that! Part of this is that I don't play as much and I make a lot of mistakes, but part of that is that mistakes with casters are becoming increasingly lethal. I haven't played enough of 0.17 or 0.18 to have a really strong opinion from which to pull good data and anecdotes and the more I think about it, I think it might just be a product of me playing less.
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Nov 3, 2016 19:02
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I'm guessing this has been discussed but..quote:* Removed: That is a monster, monster nerf to to character power. 
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May 26, 2017 21:59
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:It's sorta weird that those existed. If they wanted the player to find 20 uses of heal wounds on the ground, they could have made stacks of 20 heal wounds potions. That, and the relationship they have with recharge scrolls, where recharge scrolls may as well read, '+3 - 5 heal wounds, hastes, or teleports. Your choice!' I think if you took stats from my games were I got the 'three good wands' before mid game, you'd probably see my winrate skyrocket when I had all three, versus when I had none.
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May 26, 2017 22:22
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Thalamas posted:wulfric and I are setting up a team. I'd get on this!
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May 27, 2017 02:40
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Thalamas posted:Join our merry band of mutants. I would take that last spot if that'd be cool -- player name: Kautzman
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May 28, 2017 00:59
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I probably bitch about this at least once every thread, but man... Casters have become so miserable to play that I'm probably not attempting a 'pure' caster again until something changes.
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May 30, 2017 01:18
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IronicDongz posted:magic buff, maybe, but kinda hard to make a change that globally buffs all magic playstyles without making any of them busted and also being fun This is a very real problem and for that reason, I'm not really willing to offer up a suggested solution because messing with magic is pretty dangerous. Here's the experience I've had over the last decade, having played this game since 0.4.5, when myself and all my friends collected our first wins ever with MDFi. Casting used to be 'harder', because there was a barrier of knowledge (in a genre already 7-layers deep in barrier to knowledge issues). Not only did you need to what spells did, but when to use them, and what support stuff was 'good', and when to use it, and the esoteric mechanics around spells like 'Conjure Flame' (Which enemies would pass through it? When? Did you know you can trap a lot of enemy types with staggered placement and abuse polearms?). It asked the player to study the game, but in return, it gave you this almost godhood status when you achieved mastery. Spells like cTele and Teleport Self were around. You could stack Swiftness and Haste, and Swiftness had no penalty. Necro and Statue Form were around to round out the list. At some point, you were functionally immortal because utility spells were *so* strong. That, of course, was not a good thing. So things got changed (for the better): The personal teleport spells were removed, Swiftness got a nerfed, Haste got nerfed, there was more XP in the dungeon so putting a lot of levels into Enchantments was a non-issue, which later got split into Charms and Hexes. Regeneration got nerfed, cross-training got nerfed (and then reverted), support Necromancy got nerfed, smite-Abjure got removed, and the list goes on. Beyond that, a bunch of monsters got added that were especially threatening to casters (and often not threatening to high AC). Ghost Moths, Caustic Shrieks, Harpies, Everything in Shoal, Everything in Spider, Anything that moves fast, attacks fast and hits for moderate amounts of damage. The mid and end game started to get scary for casters, and they were now without their ridiculous toolset to deal with them. I don't really know when it was, but casting drifted from a game about managing long-term resources + planning to a game about rolling dice and hoping they turn up favorably. That might sound like a harsh accusation, but follow with me here. Crawl's mana system is such that you have a finite amount of resources*, and spending them wisely is a big part of playing well as a caster. Herding monsters for a more efficient fireball, or into the path of a Bolt is an important skill, because eeking out the maximum damage/MP is important when you can cast 5 - 10 spells before having to exit combat entirely to replenish the pool. This is problematic though when for most damage-dealing spells, you have to roll to see if it succeeded, to see if it hit, and then to see how much damage it does. In the earliest parts of the game, you can very easily drop games by simply low-rolling a couple times. This is alleviated as you progress with consumables. TPs, Blink, Fear, Haste Pots, Healing etc. all can buffer you from short-term low-rolling. But if you low roll on your TP and you TP into another dangerous situation, you have to burn *another* consumable to not die. Over time, you low-roll enough, and you start to run out of your consumable buffer. This leads to some really tedious gameplay in the name of preserving those consumables. If you compare this RIPed 'pure' caster to this 15-rune derp-tier melee character, there are a couple things I want to point out. The most important thing I want to compare is Turn Count and Time Played. "How is it you can finish a 15-rune game with a melee character, in the same time and turn count that it takes to just barely get 2 runes with a caster"? Because 2 hours and 25k turns were spent stair-dancing and Sticky Flame kiting. I spent literally an hour clearing Spider on that caster. I spent so much time stair-dancing and kiting Demonic Crawlers that by the time I had finally cleaned up everything I pulled upstairs, more poo poo spawned on that floor that I had to clean up before I carefully and meticulously pull another moderate threat to the staircase on Spider:4, because if I ran into a single Ghost Moth + one other thing, and the OOD I would send didn't connect the first time, I was going to die. I'm honestly very curious to see how many extra mobs I spawned on Spider:3 in the time I spent kiting there, waiting for another 4 mana to show up so I can cast another Sticky Flame on an HP sponge that might last between 1 and 10 turns, doing between 1 and 4 damage per turn, before regeneration is taken into account. All this while hoping that I wasn't going to get hit on cast, because I could only take 4 or 5 hits before I had consider casting blink, which might just put me in melee range again, where he gets another swing, where I have to then decide whether or not to use a very limited consumable because somewhere along the way, the RNG shat on me. God forbid something moderately threatening spawn mid-kite... This experience sucked. It's so incredibly tedious and so mentally fatiguing that I honestly don't want to deal with it ever again. The end result is a death due to said mental fatigue where I literally forgot I had castable blink. In fact, the !tv of that death is a string of foolish errors. Compare this to my GrFi game where I think I spent most of the game sleeping on the tab key (The opposite problem!) Beyond the short-term RNG that casters have to deal with due to their MP pool, they also get to deal with long-term RNG! If you notice, I don't have Bolt of Fire in that caster game. I really, really wanted it, but I didn't get it, and so the most powerful spell I played with up until the very end of that game was Fireball, which means I get to spend a lot of time pulling as few mobs as possible up stairs and down hallways so I don't have to burn up consumables. I think there was a book of earth in that game, but I didn't find it until I had a lot invested in Fire/Conj and since LRD doesn't pool into Conj, that severely limits its usability. Would it have been wise, at that moment, to start pooling XP into Earth? Maybe, but it would have depended on if and when I found a Dragon or Fire, really. You would never know at the moment, so you get to roll to dice on that too! But let's say you make it to the late game. You probably need to start thinking about a better way to generate resources rather than spamming the '5' key and hoping to not get rudely disturbed. Well, you can channel, which at 15 Evo puts you at a slightly better than 50/50 success, which then generates 7~ MP/ turn. Or it can just fail. And if it fails you have 20% of suffering a divinations miscast which is just super duper! Another option is Crystal Ball, which you have to use proactively since it's success rate is dependant on your current mana. Well, even at max evocations, you still have a 1/20 chance of draining your mana pool and another 1/30 chance to confuse you for several turns. Since you'd be using both of these in combat, or in Hell, failure will usually force the use of a consumable. Wands were kind of the last great buffer for casters. Recharges meant +4~ TP/Haste/Heal. They were a huge deal and were the glue that kind of held the caster archetype together since it meant that you had to low roll *a lot* before you started having to do extreme things to conserve your inventory (assuming you got one, of course). I'm not sure I'm sold on their removal. Melee doesn't have to deal with this. Because their resource is HP, and because they naturally have effective HP in spades, if they miss a swing, it doesn't really matter. Since AC works the way it does, you can tank an Executioner with 40 AC and 12 EV and 16 Armor Skill almost indefinitely. A caster-equivalent to a Formicid couldn't work in crawl, because as a caster, you are guaranteed to need to get out of a sticky situation that you simply do not have the resources to deal with. But as a melee character, you have so much room for error and so much room for moderately bad things to happen that I'm honestly surprised it's even considered a 'hard' race. In my active Formicid, I don't think I've even had to shaft myself once yet. Low rolls don't wreck games as melee. They just make them last one turn longer. --- This ended up being a lot longer than I intended it to be when I started writing this, so apologies to the forum for my wall of text. I don't want to leave the impression that I want casters to be in the state they were in 0.6, nor do I want to imply that I think GrFi should be the gold standard for character power level. I also don't want to leave the impression that I think DC:SS is 'bad' or even in a 'bad state'. I'm splitting hairs over some specific things and nothing in DC:SS is fundamentally broken, which is not something I can say for any other roguelike. This kind of stuff is really, really hard to get right, and because of the number of systems at play, it's probably only a matter of time before someone figures out how to break it again. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 08:45 on May 30, 2017 |
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May 30, 2017 08:25
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dpeg posted:That was very interesting to read. Would you mind me linking or just sending this to the c-r-d mailing list? I am not sure how many developers are aware of this channel, and I think it makes for good food for thought. Yeah, that'd be fantastic! A lot of the time I post in this here thread, I'm critical of the game, but I do want to emphasize how much I appreciate the work you guys do. I've played, and will continue to play Crawl longer than any other game I've ever played and I hope that my appreciation for this game isn't lost in the noise.
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May 30, 2017 19:24
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Araganzar posted:- What would you change to alleviate these perceived issues? I want to preface this all with a few things. First, I think any 'obvious' solution isn't. I stand by my claim that these problems are hard to fix and it's significantly easier to break the game than it is to address some of it's outstanding issues. Everything I'm suggesting is through the lens of someone who plays a lot of casters and not a lot of stabbers, so some of this might not apply universally to EV. So, suggestions and such: I think there is one piece of low hanging fruit that I'm honestly surprised hasn't been addressed in the past, so lets get that out of the way: - Spell Failure chance of 1% and 2% is really stupid. There is nothing interesting there and the player treats it functionally as 'guaranteed to succeed'. When in doesn't, you don't feel like you took a calculated risk, so much as you got bitch-slapped by the dice. There a few solutions to this. A really easy one would be that if spell failure is below a certain threshold of something around 2.5%, it just gets set to 0. Beyond that, I think a fundamental rethinking of the question, 'what is the nature of the MP pool?' might be due. That's kind of the major problem: You can't be Good Enough™ at both casting and melee combat to make them effective because XP is limited for most of the game. A potential solution might be another class of weapon that casters can use that uses Spellcasting instead of weapon skill to check for hit and swing speed. Maybe you can evoke it to change it's element and bonus damage is applied based on the skill you have in that element. This would impart a lot of flexibility in how you approach combat as a caster, and it might force you to think about how you allocate experience. It just as easily could trample on the skald archetype a bit too much, but The Dream would to build some supporting systems to have this gradient, where on one side is a pure caster, and on the other side is pure melee and in the middle is this spellblade style that distributes XP across physical combat stats and elemental/spellcasting skills. That's much easier said then done, of course! Something else to toy with might be reduced casting penalties from heavier armor, but with your armor type acting as a modifier to your mana regen. You can traverse the dungeon in with little AC and a robe, but you get a lot of MP regen for your sacrifice and can pave the way for a 'true, pure caster'. This kind of works with the Spellblade idea above. We already have a Spellblade archetype in that supporting Charms are pretty common in many melee builds, but I think the elemental approach could be a different direction - one that traditional casters would probably be recommended to take as part of the kit. The goal with these kinds of ideas would be to introduce a Caster/Melee gradient, and to bring a different kind of significance to MP. Getting the systems just right would probably be pretty difficult, but I think it's a lot of unexplored space in the Crawl universe. Not caster specific, but I think I'd consider swapping the rarity of Blink and Teleport scrolls. I think Blink is way more interesting to think about as a player since you are deliberately and tactically repositioning, where Teleport is the kind of thing you might want to pop in full panic mode. Maybe that's too strong to be afford dozens of Blinks per game, but it might be worth testing. AC is good, and maybe more importantly is that Not AC is kinda bad. Nerfing AC is probably the way to go. In the GrFi game, I literally tabbed through all 4 branches of Hell - Nothing could really hurt me and it's not like I had amazing gear. Explicit diminishing returns might be a starting point, even though those kinds of mechanics tend to feel clunky. Maybe instead you punish EV more in heavy armor - EV isn't as 'good', but moderate EV with high AC is really powerful, and you generally have enough XP to max fighting, get your weapon to min delay, and have high Dodging and Armor skills, granting you a ton of mitigation against both physical and spells that have to roll to hit. Maybe AC should be a % damage reduction instead of a flat number. It'd be a relatively easy way to implement diminishing returns and is both an implicit nerf to AC as a player, and an implicit nerf to melee damage and 'slaying' in general. Tuning that just right is probably going to be a massive nightmare though. If the nature of MP as a resource doesn't change, I think the evocable channels need to be more reliable at some level of Evocations. If, for some reason, you put 27 levels into Evocations, you should *not* have a chance to become confused by a Crystal Ball. Spellcasting could grant passive damage reduction against spell damage, say, 1 - 1.5% per level, or maybe instead of Spellcasting, it's the specific element that is linked to a damage reduction stat. Maybe Spellcasting grants a point of MR per level I'm just spitballing here and all this is more an exercise in brainstorming than it is serious, implementable suggestions. Stuff like this adds difficult-to-communicate complexity and isn't really ideal by itself. I'm probably going to explore the idea of the Spellblade more on paper and maybe try to pitch something with actual number, systems and details if you're interested in that. Focusing just on casters for a second, I think the thing I'd try to do is make the entire archetype more reliable...somehow. The genius of the current system is that because you are operating on limited resources, you often do have to make some really hard decisions and it's in those moments, when you feel like you make a really good set of decisions, that you feel great as a player. Hard decision-making is awesome and forcing the player into fair, but difficult scenarios is cool. That is so, so much easier said then done, but I think it's honestly close-ish right now and with a couple changes, we can get closer. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 00:30 on May 31, 2017 |
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May 31, 2017 00:27
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kickascii posted:My wife calls this game Stick Man. Tell her that's offensive to our kind and you'd thank her for calling your character, 'Potential Champion of the Orb of Zot'.
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Jun 1, 2017 01:28
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redneck nazgul posted:Tavern has no idea what game balance is, film at fuckin 11. The community of literally any game ever tends to be very wrong about game balance. Satisfying the requirements of even passable 'balance' for most players along the skill curve is very hard and most people do not think about the game outside of either their own skill level, or that of the very best players
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Jun 6, 2017 01:34
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Tales of Woe posted:I will never figure out how people streak with squishy classes in this game, I die so much on the first few floors before I have a real MP pool or identified consumables Careful play. That may sound obvious, but playing like every monster is a serious threat is different than how most people play, especially the early levels. Honestly, unless I'm playing on a streak, or I'm caring about my winrate, I'll play the first 10 levels super recklessly or until I get something good enough for me to justify caring. I don't think that's a particularly bad strategy against time, especially as the more difficult races.
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Jun 7, 2017 02:49
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Speleothing posted:And yet the devs think the game is too easy I seem to only post in this thread with effort posts, so lets do that again! Lets talk about Difficulty In Games! Very strong players can produce win rates that are well above 50%. Inexperienced players often time have trouble getting a win in 100 games. The big questions to answer are: - Why is this the case? - Is this a problem? - If it is a problem, how do you fix it? To answer this, it's important to understand game difficulty. Difficulty is generally derived from a combination of three categories. Those categories are Execution, Decision-Making, and System Knowledge. Execution is performing an intended action. The classic example is shooting a guy in an FPS. You see him, you know you want him to not be there and your gun can remove him. Can you actually point and click on the man before he clicks on you? Decision-Making is pretty self-explanitory. Using the FPS example again, if you see a man you want dead, but you are also overextended on the map, do you think he's alone and engage him? Do you suspect immediate backup and retreat? Do you try to get a safer pick and take cover before shooting? Do you have a planned retreat vector? Do you charge him and worry about preserving your life later? These are the decisions you have to make as a player in such a scenario and great players tend to make a better decision than new players. System Knowledge is simply knowing the rules of the game on a detailed level. Lets say the FPS you are playing happens to be Overwatch and you are playing D.Va and the guy you want to kill is across the map. Someone with strong System Knowledge would know that firing at him is a worthless endevour because it's going to do virtually no damage. But queue into bronze league and you'll see inexperienced D.Va players try to pick fights from a range of 30 yards against 76s and Pharahs - an ill-advised tactic. Knowing all the rules of the games and how individual systems interact with each other can lead to better Decision-Making - Great players tend to have great System Knowledge. What kind of difficulty your game exhibits depends on it's genre and how it uses these three difficulty categories to create an experience. Turn-based games will never have an Execution requirement, so they must derive their difficulty from Decision-Making and System Knowledge. You don't need to embrace all three to have a great game that is difficult either. Go is a turn-based game with an extremely simple ruleset that has the depth of the Mariana Trench. There is a debate about whether or not System Knowledge constitutes 'Real Difficulty'. If you aren't expected to execute on your ideas, and if you don't have to make hard decisions -- If the only thing stopping you from defeating a boss is simply knowing it's move list, does that constitute difficulty? It's a hard question to answer, but context matters a lot, so lets put it in some context: Dark Souls is a very popular game that a lot of people have completed, but still gets the label of a 'difficult' game. Why is that? The reason is because Dark Souls is a game about trial and error - It's a game that wants to surprise the player in fantastic ways with big bosses and literal giant enemy crabs. It kind of feels like you have to make decisions, but it's not terribly difficult to arrive at a plan to not get hit and hit the dragon when you can. Your moveset isn't particularily deep and it wisely gives you a roll with IFrames to really smooth out the experience. The truth of the matter is that Dark Souls isn't actually a hard game at all. The game derives almost all of it's difficulty in forcing the player to learn it's rules, which in this case manifest as enemy attacks. It's a game that's designed to be beat by even the most average of gamer and feel like an achievement and it executes on this idea almost perfectly. This is all actually OK in the context of Dark Souls because Souls games are supposed to be an Adventure. Adventures should be about exploring the unknown, and learning about your world organically through exploration and getting better as a player by understanding the environment and your opposition. You can clearly see this is the intent of the design and the wish of the community by how people discourage players from looking up spoilers to bosses and areas. Baking a lot of the difficulty into System Knowledge is not only OK in this situation, it's arguably ideal. It means you can deliver this real feeling of an adventure and you don't need LEET GAMER SKILL to actually complete it - You just need patience and willingness to learn. But it doesn't make the game difficult more than once. Once you know about the stuff, the stuff is no longer hard - the purest would argue that Dark Souls is not actually a difficult game at all and just provides the illusion of difficulty, and does so more successfully than almost any other game in the market. It's also a reason why Souls games don't have an 'easy' mode. Such a mode compromises the experience the game wants to deliver on a fundamental level and the people clamoring for such an option or argue that it doesn't do any harm to include it have a total misunderstanding of the underlying elements that make Souls games appealing. So how does this relate to Dungeon Crawl. Dungeon Crawl has elements of Decision-Making, but a great deal of it's difficulty is baked into System Knowledge. If you know all the rules of the game, all the quirks of all the items and spells and abilities and gods and races, then you will find that your decision-making tree is actually very narrow because arriving at the Best™ decision in any given scenario becomes easier and easier to do as your System Knowledge becomes more compelte. This has been true about Roguelikes in general for a very long time, but few have garnered the attention and the longevity of Dungeon Crawl, which puts the game in a very awkward spot. Traditionally, Roguelikes have channeled the same kind of spirit in gameplay as a Souls game, but on a grander scale with larger consequences for failure, making the time investment to complete it very high. The result is mastery feels even more rewarding and is even more impressive, but mastery of a Roguelike is pretty hollow since it's not the result of understanding complicated decision-making, but is instead the result of acquiring increasingly complete knowledge of the game systems. The truth is that Dungeon Crawl is not a hard game if you know the rules. The reason why less experienced players have sub 1% winrates is because they don't know the rules. The reason why theglow can streak 18 games in a tournament without dropping a single game is because he knows all the rules in detail. The unfortunate end game of a game like Crawl that persists for years and years with players that have played for the better part of a decade is that the knowledge gap between the most experienced players and new players becomes increasingly large. The veterans of the game still want to cling to the memories of when they felt the game was more of an adventure and the newer players just want a game that they feel they can approach at all. The truth of the matter is that veteran players will never be able to go back to that feeling - It's like playing Dark Souls the 30th time and expecting it to feel like your first playthrough. It just can't happen. So now dpeg and fungas and friends are in this spot where they are trying to make the game less esoteric and easier to learn for newer players with fewer 'gotchas', but are also trying to cater to the jeans and elliptics of the community without trying to make either group too upset. This is actually a needle that is possible to thread, but it is extremely difficult and requires substantial effort and intuition. More importantly, it probably requires a fundamental shift in design ideals. Specifically, it will mean that the game cannot rely on baking the majority of the difficulty into System Knowledge. It probably means that they will have to start looking for ways to embrace what I lovingly call 'Character' into the game in ways that might seem unintuitive but serve the goal of offloading more difficulty to the Decision-Making side of the game. Maybe I'll make an effort post on character later. Anyway, what I want to express out of this book of a post is a couple things: 1. The community as a whole, especially the SA side of things needs to chill out. Crawl is a very unique beast and appeasing everyone is a nearly impossible task. 2. The folks doing System Design for Crawl need to be willing to embrace their harshest critics, not because they should listen to their ideas, but because they need to understand what their pain points are. 3. Those same folks need to probably ignore the veteran players more often than not in the short term, but start getting their qualitative, actionable feedback if they start redesigning major systems. 4. The long term goal should be to pivot the systems to allow players who have incomplete knowledge of the game to intuit more adequate solutions to the problems they have to solve. Good example of this in action is Hell as a whole and out of depth monsters (sometimes). A bad example of this is Rupurt, Orbs of Fire, and Tomb. Crawl is not 'dying'. I think my core philosophies and those of dpeg might clash at times, but most of the decisions the team makes are pretty smart. I think the major divergence we would have at a high level is the role of 'Character' in the genre and specifically in Crawl. Anyway, SA needs to relax a bit and I hope dpeg and team shows up here again because I would like to chat with him about Crawl's direction, but on the whole, I think they are doing a pretty good job even though I still think casting as a whole needs to probably see fundamental changes. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Nov 10, 2017 |
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Nov 10, 2017 21:38
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Zaodai posted:I think that's most of where the "the devs think this game is too easy!" comes from, because they seem to prefer to nerf strong things down for some hypothetical balance level rather than simply accepting that strong things can be useful in your single player game. These are two different things. Things that are too strong a game where a lot of the difficulty is baked into System Knowledge manifest in the same way that an easy mode in Dark Souls would - It compromises the intended experience. Also, this relates very, very heavily to 'Character In Games' which I guess I might effort post this weekend or something. The other thing being, 'The devs think the game is too easy', is likely a result of them thinking the decision tree is too narrow in most circumstances that are actually supposed to be difficult and complicated.
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Nov 10, 2017 22:46
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Internet Kraken posted:People like theglow that have played this game for literally hundreds upon hundreds of hours should be able to beat it reliably. That doesn't mean the game is easy. That means the game is a properly designed single-player experience. Single-player games can't constantly scale in difficulty to match your skill like multiplayer games do through matchmaking. If Crawl is actually a fairly designed game, then a skilled player should be able to beat it 100% of the time if they play properly and make all the correct decisions. People like that are very much the exception though. Even the best players don't win every single game. Its especially baffling that a thoroughly average player like Dpeg thinks the game needs to be more difficult. Winning 100% of the games you play is fine, but the important question to answer off of that is, 'Why'. If it's because given perfect knowledge of the ruleset of the game, the decision tree is narrow, then it's a problem. If it's because despite a wide and ambiguous decision tree, the player tends to make good decisions regardless, then that's very healthy as it would be a strong indicator of depth in the systems. It is my opinion however that the decision tree is narrow most of the time. quote:Adding more options we can pursue from the start of the game gives us new ways to play it that we aren't familiar with No matter what you'd do to the systems, this will have to be part of it to some degree, but to make this work for a game that's around for literally more than a decade, the systems themselves have to offer a lot of depth. For an extreme example, we can look at Destiny 2: You can add a dozen more classes to the game, but that doesn't fix the issue that veteran players will be able to explore the entire pool of possibilities with those classes in a short amount of time - the support systems just don't offer anything to build on. Conversely, adding a character to a game like Dota 2 has wild implications and mastery of that one hero could represent months of effort. It's not a totally fair comparison because Dota 2 is multiplayer and gets a lot out of that by itself as you mentioned, but a single player equivalent might be something like Path of Exile. Adding a handful of skill and support gems to a game can completely change the way people think about the game, experimenting and discovering new stuff for months if the gems are especially well designed. The new gems aren't what make that work though, it's the supporting systems that enable all of that. It's that kind of system design that games like Crawl would do well to embrace.
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Nov 10, 2017 23:15
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Internet Kraken posted:Well you're flat out wrong about Crawl having a limited decision tree because the entire appeal of it, to me, is that it has a very broad one. There are tons of different options you can pursue for your character in Crawl. I think we are talking about different things :P. When I say 'decision tree', I'm talking about a single decision you make that optimizes your chance of success given a specific circumstance. I'm not talking about choosing a style of play. I'm talking about whether or not you want to take another whack at Sigmund or whether you think your chance of survival would be better reading a TP vs quaffing Heal Wounds vs something else.
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Nov 10, 2017 23:44
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Right - at it's most verbose level, every action you take is a result of reaching some conclusion at the end of a discrete decision tree. Obviously in actual play, players will take 'bulk actions' and not evaluate literally every move, but the concept is one that's important to frame correctly and all that. The absolute easiest way to do this is to tie actions to resources. Casting actually does this exceptionally well right now. Melee does not and doing so without introducing some pretty radical changes would be a neat trick. It's an idea where talking about the abstract is a lot easier than actually proposing strong solutions to the problem, but I think there is room to make it happen.
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Nov 11, 2017 00:03
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This is the best thing.
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Nov 14, 2017 10:15
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Oh my god, I've got like, 3 races left to win with for greatplayer status and one of them is Mummy. I've tried so much to win the game with a Mummy for so long, but have never been able to do it, but I've got an absolutely ridiculous character running at it right now. I feel like I cheated...
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Nov 21, 2017 21:39
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Pacra posted:Needs more slaying Crap 3. 7.... A lot. Man, I feel like I had a lot fewer left... E: man, I feel like I had centuar and demigod and ghoul done - I wonder if that was all on local. Bad news for me regardless.
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Nov 22, 2017 04:04
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lol j/k died to Mennes because I completely forgot about silence and since casting and reading requires you to speak, whelp...
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Nov 22, 2017 05:01
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Xom is one of the pieces of the game I've almost totally ignored for the nearly 10 years I've played this game. What's the strategy to keep him entertained? Embrace the Chaos Brand and go nuts? Or do you have to make special considerations in how you play otherwise to make sure Xom doesn't get pissed?
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Nov 24, 2017 20:42
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This forum is a great barometer for changes and adjustments (most of the time). If this here forum says, 'I don't like this change', it's a good representation of a lot of different kinds of players, from some of the best players to some folks who don't have a win yet. To dismiss the subjective feedback of this forum is probably a major mistake. That said, SA has some terrible ideas of how to fix specific issues.
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Dec 19, 2017 19:30
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quote:-Put rMut amulets back in Stuff like this is probably worth scrutiny. What is rMut's role? Previously, it was to mitigate mutation obviously. Fun stuff with this though is that if you rolled 1/10 and got a mutation, you were mad. If you didn't have rMut, you were mad. If you were a micro manager and were willing to shuffle rMut on and off when it's relevant, it's tedious even at it's best. Mutations themselves are somewhat easy to mitigate and once you know what the Bad Ones™ are, you deal with the minor ones and quaff cure mut for the worst offenders. It's yet another system that benefits a great deal from system knowledge and doesn't really bring new decision making paths into the game most of the time. Malmutate, and maybe the mutation system as a whole, probably could use a complete redesign. Adding rMut isn't really adding anything to the game other than a way to mitigate a half-baked system that occasionally can dump all over a character. To be clear, I'm not defending the current mutation system - I'm saying that adding rMut is a bandaid solution to kinda sorta fix a flawed system. Don't bandaid the flawed system. Fix it at it's source. quote:-Put Norris back in Is paralysis interesting? Are you going to be making interesting decisions around paralysis, or is this just another check for players that know what Norris's spell list is, and a giant 'gently caress you' to new players who haven't yet bathed in the glory of 5 turns of stun? I've previously said that I think the direction the game should probably embrace more is one of uncertainty and 'character', and Norris certainly is 'character', but there are much more fertile, much better places to get that than a unique with on-demand paralysis.
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Dec 19, 2017 22:03
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I'm at home for Christmas, but I want to make a statement I want to substantiate when I get home and can make an effort part: Features should not be voted on explicitly. The great majority of the community has no idea how to craft a cohesive experience. Polls like the one flood made are really useful for getting an idea of what the community values, but should not serve as an explicit guideline. A direction, goals and values should be discussed as a community, but individual features should be chosen by a, or a group of system designers.
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Dec 25, 2017 03:55
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cheetah7071 posted:Recharging evokables sounds great for tele and haste imo. A bit weird for heal wounds though. If by 'recharging' you mean 'recharging with XP', this encourages you to pick up every tele/heal evokable you run across, and also runs into problems of being usable once every now and then - something that's often not actually that great except for the hasting effect. This is a Bad Idea. Tollymain posted:make wand of hasting a brief time-stop evocable that makes time stop for like 2-3 turns and then gradually resume back towards normal speed. While neat, that's completed busted. Tollymain posted:take out regen the spell and make heal wounds an evocable that gives you a heal + heal-over-time effect instead The spell Regen and a wand of Heal Wounds solve different problems for different characters at different times. Taking out the spell makes no sense.
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Jan 3, 2018 06:06
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cheetah7071 posted:I meant recharging with the same mechanic as phial of floods and such. Getting an extra teleport or haste every four or five fights seems fine to me? A yellow-class effect every 4 or 5 fights is completely busted. A yellow-class effect every 4 or 5 floors is almost worthless. Wands of Tele and HW are specifically strong because they can hold a lot of charges. Burst use of specifically HW is generally how that goes down and keeping a single HW potion that recharges every so often as an inventory slot is probably good enough to sit in your inventory, but it sure doesn't feel great. The extra problem is that as you get more of them, they get collectively better. If you have 10 HW evocables, your on-demand healing goes into the stratosphere in a very unhealthy way, and the fact that they recharge with time and/or XP means you'd never get rid of them, which puts the long-term resource management meta (which is about half the game) in jeopardy. It gets the bonus of taking up inventory slots, so on top of it being a pretty strong option to collect these evocables, it's also introducing tedious inventory micromanaging.
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Jan 4, 2018 01:11
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