First of all, class balance is really bad. Pure rogue seems near impossible to play if not incredibly tedious. Melee classes are ok until monsters start having massive hp and elemental damage starts coming into picture. The damage abs wont do anything against elemental damage which makes sense... but it makes it nearly unplayable for melee chars past lvl 6. When monsters start doing 10+ damage past your absorption, you start burning through your comsumables to clear a couple group of mobs. Its not like you can 2 shot stuff at those higher floors either. Not to mention the new AI that spams spells which can do massive damage. And the named monsters are insane to deal with as a warrior when they take out 1/3 your life with one hit. Let me try to list some things on my mind atm... Melee's need a feasible way to get elemental resistance or magic resistance. Krong Anvils are stupid because they can totally ruin your equipment. At least before, you could reroll items with archeology. Now archeology is TOTALLY useless. There is really no way to get enough resistance to melee higher floor monsters. This is actually a gameplay design flaw i think. Mages only survive because they dont have to get hit. There was one way to stay even with hard hitting monsters.... vampirism. But vampirism is largely useless now also. I made a dual staff mage with about 10 absorption and around 3 resist of many different elements. I believe my int was about 30 at floor 6. This is when things took a nose dive. There was no way to keep up the hp without spamming hp potions every few monsters. Now this was a build based around vampirism and it couldnt keep up with most monsters toe to toe. If a true warrior build took vampirism it wouldnt even leech any life due to low int. Vamp needs to factor in total damage dealt so people can actually use it with other melee weapons and heavy armor. Also, there is absolutely no reason to upgrade vamp to lvl 2 or 3. Those skills need to be tweaked and it could use some more skills in the tree.... Smithing needs to be adjusted. There are many suggestions already, but the crux of the matter is that smithing doesnt scale at all past floor 3 or 4. Also it needs to placed in the warrior category. Its focused on melee weapons and heavy armor, why are we getting a rogue lvl for this skill? Warrior skill tree is pretty bad. In fact all the weapon skill trees pale in comparison to magic. The stat bonuses you get from maxing these trees are negligable imo. The active skills are extremly underwhelming also. While magic skills scale very well as your magic power goes up, melee based skill tree doesnt scale at all. This is all on Going rogue difficulty btw
I was thinking perhaps melee weapons should get a bit of a rework. Drop the penalty for not knowing how to use a weapon form the game completely, buff the existing weapon lines to compensate and perhaps add some more melee enhancing trees to be combined with the existing lines.
Is the problem being unable to deal damage fast enough, or is it that monster damage output overcomes the player's defensive capabilities? Let's make certain we're fixing the right problem here. It wouldn't be very interesting for high-level combat to basically be "I one-shot practically everything, but counterattacks wreak me." It is noticeable that there's very little reason to take more than one weapon mastery right now, which means that any given warrior is guaranteed to ignore at least 4 of the 10 warrior skills. Mages and rogues don't have that problem. Though rogue skills do have the problem that they're basically entirely semi-niche support skills (possibly excepting archery); piling on too many rogue skills makes you versatile but weak.
its both. Because monster damage output goes through the roof on higher floors (mainly due to elemental damage), its hard to melee them one on one. Now its not always possible to funnel them so when you have 2 mobs hitting you its you are pretty much forced to retreat. I mean, your 18 damage absorption isnt doing anything when monsters do 20 elemental damage.... And how much elemental resistance can you get really? for my runs it was averaging 2-3 for most and 5-6 for some. Now there are potions for some elements but obscure ones like asphyxiation and aetheral cannot be dealt with in this way. And i dont see how you can take out unique monsters by going melee. Its fine that you would have to resort to using bolts or deal with them in some other way, but when all regular monsters drain your supply of "special circumstance items," there is a problem. I think the big problem is that all regular monsters require intense micro management. I think a better way to go is to keep general monsters at a manageable level and include some low spawning hard monsters like dragons or something. And unique monsters can stay strong if we can prepare for them by saving certain items to take them out. Melee damage is only weak in relation to the monster's ability to rape you. Doing 40-60 damage a hit isnt too shabby but when it still takes 3-5 hits per monster.... it just doesnt work. I think the general melee abilities need some buffs and more diversification (they are all pretty much same), but the big problem lies in our defense not scaling at higher lvls. And really vampirism needs some work. If you focus on magic, you might get more leech and damage but you also take ridiculous damage and cannot keep up. If you focus on melee, you have no magic power and cannot leech fast enough. It should really factor in factor of your total damage output or at least the primary non-elemental damage (since you know, these types of damage would produce blood) Also, i didnt really experiment with unarmed but it looks pathetic from the skill chart. You get like what 10 total damage and a bunch of other stats, but that damage output is really pitiful compared to equipping a weapon.
I have an unarmed/psionics/promethean/perception/astrology/assassination/master of arms that just got to level 10 on the medium difficulty. He has an ensigiled shield and a special dark orb equipped as dual shields, and with the special buffs from items I do about 30 damage per hit. Assassination makes this hitting even stronger, and with master of arms I get Walk it Off quite a bit, which sends my hp regen to 11 for a limited number of turns. I don't really use promethean and have focused mostly on killing everyone by hand. In addition, unarmed has two knockback skills and in my opinion is very powerful, especially once you get it maxed out. I've only used psionics for radiant aura, which saves me time and time again when I have too many monsters attacking me at once. I maxed out assassination, unarmed and master of arms as quickly as I could. Second sight in perception is also a great boost to stats that helps you dodge their attacks even easier. This is one of my favorite characters that I've been working on, and I'm looking forward to seeing how I do when I start pummeling on Lord Dredmore, even if I die horribly while trying. Dying is fun! But melee is very viable, and unarmed is a fun challenge. I've already been killing arch diggles, and for this character they aren't much of a problem yet, even with two of them at once. I also have a dual wielding swordsman / vampire / smith with no magic that is carving his way through the dungeon pretty quickly. I'm looking forward to seeing how he does on the later floors. If something isn't working for you though, change it up and try other skills. It took me quite a few tries of horribly dying to find how unarmed would work well for me, but that's the point of this game. Experiment, try out new things, and don't be afraid to die a lot.
well im talking about going rogue, but then again i havnt tried medium difficulty so I wouldnt know if its significantly easier or pretty much the same but i do know that 30 damage is pretty low for GR
Unarmed damage is insufficient in later levels on DM too. You do about 30 damage a hit and it takes forever to kill anything. I did an Unarmed+Archery build since the unarmed damage applies to crossbow attacks. Ended up using my crossbow even at point blank near the end since it hit for about 50. With the heavy armor, physical attackers like arch-diggles aren't too dangerous. There is just no way to guard against the elemental attackers though.
