Concerns about Floors 11-15 and high-end gameplay

So, I just got done taking 2 characters through the Realm of the Diggle Gods and trashing Dredmor on Dwarvish Moderation/Permadeath.

Character One was my latest incarnation of the Dual-wielding, WoW-style Rogue. I took Fleshsmithing (for Knit Flesh), Dual Wielding, Burglary, Berserker Rage, Swords, Assassination, and Piracy.

The concept of the character was to wear enough armor to have reasonable Armor Absorb without sacrificing Magic Power and Regen. My true focus was on stacking Dodge, Counter Attack, and Resistances. Using Knit Flesh before any fight (the mana cost is negligible with ANY Magic Power ) and stacking resists, along with a massive Counter Chance (eventually), I was able to DPS my way to victory with a variety of Evil Chest weapons.

Character Two was your Stereotypical Glass Cannon Magey-type. She had Promethian Magic, Wand Lore, Psionics, Burglary, Blood Magic, Viking Wizardry, and Ley Walker.

The concept of the character was to only wear armor that had Sagacity, Magic Power, Magic Regen, or Resistances on it - ideally all of the above. Any equipment with a negative to any magic-related stat was summarily dismissed. By the end of the game I think she had about 95 Health - but she also had 210 Mana and almost 100 Sagacity and Magic Power and like... 18 Magic Regen.

So anyway. My experiences and concerns fall mostly on the Mage side of the equation. The Rogue was actually a blast to play - as long as I was careful, used AoE consumables for Zoos, and abused Move in a Mysterious Way to my advantage, the challenge was pretty steady. Most floors started off a bit stressful, but by the time I was ready to descend to the next floor, I was confident that I had things well in hand.

The Mage, however, suffered from a Severe Lack of Scaling™. Let me list the problems I encountered in bullet point form:

• The way the game creates artifacts breaks down at the highest levels of gameplay. For instance, I could cast, say, Gog's Tactical Pyre on something, and with 90+ Magic Power, expect it to do about 30 to 40 damage. On the other hand, I could instead whack the monster in Melee with my Evil Chest Artifact Weapon with about +50 damage stacked it (plus the Giggle God of Fertility Blessing), and deal 50 to 75 damage. Basically the problem is that Damage Types are stacked to ludicrous extremes - I've seen up to five times the base damage of the weapon - and yet no weapon is ever given something like, say, +10 Sagacity or +22 Magic Power. But +22 Asphyxiative Damage? Happens all the time. So by the end of the game, you get a staff that's so stacked with damage - but not Base or Secondary Stats - that it out-scales your supposed primary means of the damage - the one you spent literally 25 Skill Points on. A mage with that much Magic Power and Sagacity should never be able to melee for 1.5 times the damage of his or her best spell - and yet, that's what was happening by the time I was clearing Floors 12-15. The constant barrage of "pull Lever, get 3 Evil Chests" room contributes to this problem greatly, giving a player so many of these massively stacked weapons that they can have 3 of them Corrupted to hell and back and still have 5 solid backup ones to replace them with. I would go so far as to say that this gives Melee characters an disproportionate boon, that only gets worse (better?) as you advance down into the depths of the dungeon and the +Damage stats get stacked higher and higher.
• There wasn't enough 10-star Gear added to fill five entire Dungeon Floors. The game devolves into a huge slog once you reach Floor 12 or so, because the game is throwing the exact same items at you over and over and over and over and over again, the only difference being the random stats they are given. I've had backpacks with no less than 5 Serpentine Armor, 7 Serpentine Greaves, 4 Serpentine Gloves, 3 Boilerplate Armors, and 6 Boilerplate Helms... all from the same Floor. You'll also find plenty of Time Lord Scarves and the Windows Icon Pendants, along with a smattering of Jangly Crystal Staves and a new Lirpa every other room. If you're going to increase the game's length by 50%, I should only rarely be finding the same pieces of gear on Floor 10 as I do on Floor 15. Instead, you find the exact same gear constantly from Floors 10 straight through to 15. Do you find Traffic Cones on Floor 6? Daos on Floor 11? Not normally. But you will find the same "high end" armor pieces appearing literally 20 times per Floor on Floor 10, Floor 11, Floor 12, Floor 13, Floor 14, and Floor 15.
• Related, all Throw! Vending Machines devolve into Holy Hand Grenade dispensers, also around the Floor 12 mark. I think I had literally 75 Holy Hand Grenades after clearing out the Floor 15 Monster Zoo - on both characters - because every time I built a Throw! machine in the Room with 3 Vending Maching Runes and a Lever, I got another twenty Holy Hand Grenades. There was almost zero variation - the Throw! machines on Floors 9-11 would have the occasional (normal) Hand Grenade or Powder of Ibn Gazi, but on the lowest floors, every single machine contained Holy Hand Grenades in every single slot.\
• Related, Traps. Once again, the game devolves into only have 2 traps that are "high enough level" to throw at you. Floors 11 through 15 are filled with NOTHING but Brimstone Cloudbursters, Dwarven Landmines, and whatever the strongest Gargoyle Face Trap is called. You face the same 2 traps (Brimstone & Landmines) for 6 solid floors with almost zero variation.
• Zorkmids flow like water. Both characters were able to top a million Zorkmids, and that was after the occasional 60,000 or 100,000 Zorkmid purchase of an Artifact out of one of Brax' shops, and the constant buying of 8,000 Zorkmid stacks of Hand Grenades. This is related to all of the above; mainly, that there are no new "end game" pieces of gear to buy with values that escalate to levels that might drain the massive piles of cash you're constantly vacuuming up.
• Magic scaling could use some tweaking. Without any new Spells to acquire once you're Level 20 or so, you have to rely on your spells scaling to the Health of the monsters you fight on the five new floors - and really, they don't. You use the same exact Spells from Floor 8 (or so) straight through to Floor 15, and while your damage might increase by, say, 33%, monster health pools increase by roughly 250%. Basically, you go from "Spam Spell X twice per monster/situation on Floor 10 to win" to "Spam the same Spell you spammed on Floor 10 to win, but now you have to spam it six times per monster/situation". This is neither exciting nor engaging, and the last five Floors basically ask the question, "Did you remember to take a Skill Tree that includes a Teleport?" If the answer is yes, you'll probably win. If it's no, you'll probably die. Keep in mind this was on a character that boosted her Sagacity and Magic Power to the exclusion of all else.
• Floors 11 through 15 use the exact same room-creating methods/algorithms/whatevers as Floor 10. So while the tileset changes, you basically repeat Dredmor's Lair SIX TIMES IN A ROW (10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15). Again, this gets stale right around the middle of Floor 12.

Okay, I had to get that off my chest. I know this seems like some "you guys suck, fix yer game" rant, but I'm trying to offer constructive critism here. I love this game. I have over 400 hours logged. I still have yet to beat the game on Going Rogue since roundabouts the 1.0.4 patch. Money WELL spent.

However, I found my interest in the game waning very, very heavily once I got to Floor 12, and slogging through those last 3.5 samey floors with the same layouts and the same gear being generated and the same consumables appearing, using the same spells and armor sets and rings and amulets, while dodging the same two traps hundreds and hundreds of times... it was tough. Very tough.

The game ceased to be fun and became a test of will - can you keep enough focus to not auto-walk over the Dwarven Landmines and Brimstone Cloudbursters? Do you have the patience to carefully move through several hundred rooms so you don't get surprised and Crit-counter-crit-here-have-some-Corruption-on-your-gear-too by whatever monster respawn is most dangerous to your character? Are you willing to repeat what is essentially the same Floor six times over in order to find and kill old Dreddy?

I'm hoping you guys can find the time to add some more high-end content and general randomness to the game in future patches to address the desire-sapping sameness that permeates the Realm of the Diggle Gods. Until then, I'll maybe give Going Rogue a try with a tank character... but I'll be Dreding those last six floors for the wrong reasons if I do.

 

Wow, wasn't actually expecting a reply. Kudos to you guys for that.

I know the original post reads as a bit harsh, so I just want to reiterate that I love this game to death

I think I was pretty specific in the OP, but I really was looting almost nothing but the three Serpentine Plate items; the Shiny Uber Steel Items; the Boilerplate Items; Time Lord Scarves and Windows Pendants; and Lirpas. I wore the same (Corrupted) pair of pants from Floor 5 all the way to the end of the game because the not-made-of-plates versions simply stopped spawning after certain point... Floor 6 or so if I recall correctly. Also, there are no Caster-stat Pants if the Wiki is to believed, only Heavily Armored and Rogue-stat ones.

Yeah, as I said, unless there's something preventing New and Shiny Higher Level Stuff from spawning, eventually the game just says, "hell, Brimstone Cloudbursters and Landmines are the only traps good enough for these floors, so here's hundreds of them, cheers." The same happens with Alcohol and Thrown weapons: on the final floors, you see literally nothing but Holy Hand Grendades, Absinthe, and Pan-galactic Gargle Blasters (my mage had a stack of over 130 of those).

Yeah, I can attest to Damage Types stacking. I wish I had a save so I could post some screenshots, but believe me when I say that Weapons - especially Evil Chest ones - can have some serious Damage Type Modifiers. I saw Lirpas with +22 of this damage and +18 of that damage on top of the base damage, for a weapon that could deal 60+ damage (plus Burliness mod).

Now, imagine my Rogue character dual-wielding weapons of that strength... pretty much everything (but Dredmor, you don't melee him!) died in 2 or 3 hits unless it was a Named Monster. Compare that to my Mage, who had to spam 95 Magic Power Gog's Tactical Pyres or Thor's Fulminaric Bolts a minimum of 6 times to kill the same monster type(s).

I'm hoping this is just a bug of some sort, but currently Levels 10 thru 15 all share the same configuration. You can tell the floors apart after a while... the Ice Floor has that big room with the narrow frozen "rivers" in it that usually has a very narrow corridor on the north end; the Fungal Floor has lots of circular rooms; the Lava Floor (9?) Has those large rectangular rooms with lava pools scattered about, and so forth.

Well, all the Diggle Gods Floors use the "Floor 10 exclusive" rooms, like the room with the Shrine to "no God you know of" and the computer altar and that room that uses 2 pools of fluid to redirect you left then right then left again as you go North and South.

I really wasn't expecting this post to amount to anything; if anything comes from this I'll feel very gratified (and humbled). Thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedules to read this sort of thing; I know you guys have tons on your plate at any given time between Odin and Dredmor, and we really do appreciate all the hard work you've poured into this game. Or at least, I know I do, I can't speak for all these other guys.

 

I believe items with a level higher than 10 are not spawning randomly at all.

This is cutting out a lot of RoTDG content which should have been in there in the first place.

You can NOT see an eldritch crossbow, bolt eruptor, savvarius, hexxaxe or golden mask anywhere except a shop.

This goes the same for monster hordes--randomly spawned monster hordes will NOT contain any monsters from level 11 or below; I've had to specify muscle diggles in the horde for them to show up at all when modding rooms.

 

Seriously? I thought this whole time that a hexxaxe was from a mod. I had no idea it was a core item.

Lulzy.

 

I can attest to this, looking at the Wiki there are items that I have yet to see, despite having gone through the Diggle Gods floors on the 2 characters I mentioned and through about Floor 13 on an earlier character that ended up dying to some named mob. I have never seen any of those items ICCorp listed, not even in a shop.

Related: The Monster Zoo on Floor 13 that my Mage cleared out had literally only 2 monster types in it: Tuber Spirits and Witch Heads, which happen to be the two "Floor 13 exclusive" monsters. Seeing a field of 60 Tuber corpses was a little bizarre, and made the whole zoo a bit of a joke, to be frank.

Also, are Zoo rewards possibly working incorrectly as well? I once got a Ring from a Zoo, it must have been Floor 11 or 12, that had a total of 5 Stats on it, it was something like +2 Health Regen and +5 Health. It would have been a terrible ring on Floor 6, much less Floor 12. Almost all of the Zoo rewards I got seemed to be getting about a third of the stats that a Quest Reward Artifact from the same Floor was getting.

Oh yeah, one other thing: Red Lichess and Preserved Witch appear to have a flaw in how the game calculates their Health. I have yet to hit one of these monsters with any weapon or spell and not had them die in one hit from it. Even low-end Crossbow Bolts can usually one-shot them. Do they perhaps have nothing but Wizard levels? Some bug that treats them as being lower level than they really are? Because I'm reasonably certain that a Floor 15 monster (Red Lichess) should not be dying from a single 40 damage Gog's Tactical Pyre... yet they were, every time.

In any case, they are never a threat in any capacity because you can kill them from a distance with literally any ranged attack in one hit, which means they never have the chance to become aware of you and start casting spells. This can potentially be a substantial chunk of completely free XP for your character, for instance if they appear in a Zoo and die the instant you fire a Bolt of Mass Destruction or Squid Bolt or *insert AoE ability here* into it.

 

There are quite a few level 11 to 15 items in RotDGs, but none spawn on their own as random floor drops. They only appear in shops, and that rarely. On floors 11 to 15, the game spawns items as if it were level 10. I reported this a month an a half ago:

http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/items-of-level-11-are-not-spawning.2012/#post-16430

It's pretty widely known amongst the play base now, and I've never heard anyone say it wasn't happening to them.

 

Amen. I felt exactly the same way, that's why I started modding this game.

At the risk of being seen as a self-promoter, might I suggest you install my Interior Dredmorating mod, at least until the devs release a fixed version of the main game? Many of things you point out are specifically addressed and corrected for in Interior Dredmorating. It should breathe some life and variety into your game until the devs can get to it.

Interior Dredmorating adds lots of new rooms to the dungeon. All the floors have new rooms that only occur on that floor specifically. My most recent release, Interior Dredmorating 1.2.1, specifically focused on the last half of the dungeon, with several new rooms for each floor from 10 on down.

The new rooms on floors 11 to 15 include several that are stocked with the level 11 to 15 items you never see in the main game. I've also added a few additional level 10 items to break up the monotony of what items do normally spawn, including a level 10 throwable that should be a welcome relief from the holy hand grenades.

I also included a few rooms that cause monster spawns slightly different than what the game populates those levels with, so you no longer are likely to get an entire floor of just potatoes and witch heads that all fight the same way. (Or the floor of nothing but fish and muscle diggles that's only an issue if you're vegan.)

Link: http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/interior-dredmorating-1-2-1.2158/

 

The way the game handles monsters is that it has one archetype full-content version of each monster type that includes every stat and all the animation references. Then all the variants of that monster only include stats that are changed from or added to that base.

In the case of the higher mummies, they're missing the line that gives them additional class levels. So while they cast better spells than the base mummy, they have the same number of class levels and resulting primary and secondary stats. So their hitpoints are exactly what you were facing off against when you fought the mummies of the second floor.

 

That is great news, and I'm looking forward to it.

Just the same, I have to ask "have you double-checked that they are actually spawning in all the ways they should?" Do floor drops use the same lists that evil chests do? Do inconsequentia rewards use the same list? As the game currently stands, we can occassionally see the level 11 to 15 items in shops or spawned via "you find something in the fountain", they just don't show up as loot, chest, or reward items (so, like 98% of the ways items spawn). If all you did was add more level 11 to 20 items, it won't solve the problem. I'm hoping you did more than that.


P.S.: I love this game. Don't want to come off as too critical over what's obviously a bug, when the rest of the game is so darned compelling. The general combo of roguelike gameplay, eye-catching graphics, and humor is wonderfully addictive.

 

Is there still a way to join beta test ? I'd be happy to do some play test.

 

Re: Bergstrom - nice to hear that these problems aren't all "in my head" and that people (mostly Modders) have seen the code and know that "something is up".

Re: Dave and Nicholas - looking forward to the next patch, those patch notes are intriguing even if you don't get some of these "last minute" fixes worked into it. And as you said, there's always "the Patch is in Beta" time for us to break ALL the things.

 

Does that mean it's going to be a different group than those of us that were beta-testers back in the day?

 

Thanks Daynab, I'll come by

 

Got it set back up.