Losing is fun. Corrupted equipment is not.

I would like to have an option in tweakDB to have all corruption effects instead instantly kill the character. Quite frankly it would be more fun to have to reload from my last save than have all my equipment ruined (quite frankly this is what I do half the time anyway, but this suggestion would save me the trouble of having to end the game through the task manager).

 

I don't like corruption effects, either, since there's a 100% reliable and 1000% tedious way to avoid them. (I'm sure most people reading this know already, but for anyone who doesn't--corruption only targets artifacts, so you swap all your artifact gear for non-artifact replacements whenever you could be hit by a corruption effect.)

I think I've read that, due to a bug, corruption used to only target weapons. I sure would like to have that behavior back. Swapping out up to three items is not so bad, but when it's seven, as it is for my current character, it gets old very quickly.

I think my answer next time will be to maintain a good-as-possible non-artifact replacement for every piece of artifact gear I use, and then just run the whole floor with my "second string" gear whenever there are corrupting mobs present. Certainly not ideal, as I sure don't want to spend any more time on inventory management than I do already. But maybe the least-bad solution.

PS: I only play GRPD, and so I'm not too hot on your suggested solution. ;-) It's definitely a problem in need of *some* solution, though.

 

I've never found corruption to be a huge problem. If it's a monster that inflicts corruption through melee, it only affects you if their attack isn't dodged, countered or blocked, and then only a percentage of the time. Most characters are going to have at least one of those stats fairly high by the time you encounter corruption monsters, and even if you don't, you'll almost certainly have some way of dealing with them without having to risk corruption (powerful cooldown attacks, spells, ranged weapons etc.) And usually, one or two stat points lost through corruption isn't a game-ending affliction. Sure, occasionally you're going to get something horrible like -3 AA resist or something, but that's a rare occurrence. I keep back up gear just in case for such situations, but I barely need it.
In my opinion, corruption monsters are just another challenge to overcome. They aren't gamebreakers in my experience, but something to be aware of and work around.

 

Melee corruption can be dodged, countered, or blocked, and there's the resist roll.

Diggle archmages can be reflected and the magic resist roll is always there.

Or simply not use artifact items. Keep a backup set of gear in your pocket dimension.

The whole point of corruption is to either make the player take precautions, or suffer the consequences; like everything you do, there's a risk/reward involved, and Professor Science is right in that it's not game-ending unless you blithered ahead without taking any precuations at all. It may not be a mechanic you agree with, but that doesn't automatically make it bad.

This argument has been around long before your time in the form of "melee is underpowered compared to ranged B/C corruption", and the devs have shown that they have no intention of removing it. If it annoys you so much, mod it out. It's very simple, really, just search your base game and RotDG spellDB for effect corrupt="1" and delete those lines. Problem solved.

 

Done.

But I'd still prefer a simpler toggle in tweakDB.xml; that way I wouldn't have to scan every new mod I install.

 

Losing slowly is part of the game as much as losing quickly.
Gear checks need to be relevant continually to make it so that you can't just sit on your one super powered artifact item.
I think everything is fine the way it is.

 

I've beaten GRPD multiple times and corruption has never been as big of an issue for me as scary counterattacking bruisers and exotic spell damage late game. *shrug*

 

Corruption is not even comparable to death, and I must tell you: death is given by every single mob of the game. We must nerf that, too, then!
Or, just, use your throwables to kill from afar corrupting monsters. Or take Demonology and burn that corruption down.

 

I hated rust monsters with a passion... They actually were FAR worse than any of the corrupting critters in Dredmor. They were usually a primary target of scrolls of genocide.

 

A general theme to Bohandas' suggestions seems to be to try and eliminate tedious game mechanics that do not work the way they were intended originally. The fact that there are 100% tedious ways to avoid these things is unfortunate. I can think of an easy fix for this though.

Have corruption impact equipment of all kinds, not just artifacts. If the player wants to fight that blob of corruption completely naked, give them permanent stat debuffs.

 

I think fighting them without equipment of any sort would be punishment enough.

 

Also, corruption has been nerfed due to the new block-counter-dodge mechanic that makes them act like magic resistance for the purpose of melee procs. Not sure how I feel about that itself, but this would somewhat balance that and make corruption more threatening again.

 

It is fine guys. There will always be people who min/max this stuff, but for the most part we choose to play at range OR stack and hope nothing procs OR continuously hope to find upgrades as stuff gets corrupted.

 

I have a profound hatred towards the corruption blobbies and diggle archmages, especially now that I've arrived at DL14 with my full melee GR PD character, but I would definitely vote against nerfing / taking out corruption. It'd be like removing creepers from Minecraft

 

How much block and magic reflect does your character have? You might not really be in too much trouble.

 

My block is 124 without any buffs at the moment (what a waste, right)
My magic resist is just above 50 I think, though the MR equipment I intend to use is still lying around my pocket dimension.

I just swapped it out, and I'm getting 109 Block Chance and 101 Magic Resist, which just about does it. I'm honestly quite bummed out the Mirror Shield and Mirror Darkly Shield don't give Magic Resist, so I'm stuck on the Fine Filigreed Silver Shield, with half the reflect chance :/

I considered going double Mirror Darkly, as then MR doesn't matter, but my damage output is reduced to flip-all.

 

With 100// and 100 you are actually completely immune to corruption, except from traps (or if you don't have enough excess dodge to deal with enemy ), because all corruption in the base game except from the traps is either a missile, a melee proc, or in the case of the magic golem, both. But with 100 you are immune from the traps too. Your call.

 

Ah, that makes sense!

I'm still dreading going toe to toe with Dredmor, but it's good to know I won't have to worry about losing the attrition battle with corruption

 

Oh, I completely forgot about lord dredmor. He can actually cast it on you, I think, so there magic resist is your only hope. You can, however, just silence him.