There are a couple of stats in this game that don't really seem to be pulling their weight. And I'm not just talking about the depreciated Wand Lore skill. I'm talking about EDR and Sneakiness, two stats which currently do pretty much nothing for the player at the moment. To break it down... EDR You don't need it pretty much at all, unless you're trying to hit something that has Mustache in it's name or fighting with the new Dredmor himself. Think about it. is / 3. A CL 30 character who has no rogue skills at all and no other modifiers to his or EDR has a of 12 (remember, at CL 1 you get 7 skills, so you have 36 at CL 30). is / 2. The deepest non-Mustache monsters in the game have a dodge of about 15-25, meaning they have from a 3 - 13% chance of dodging hits. Most players don't need to worry about because that's not a really significant percentage. Sure, you might miss once every other monster, but a CL 30 character can mostly hit what they swing at without needing boosting skills. This sends a deceiving message to players: "You will never really need to beat this game, because look you can hit most everything." Then you meet Dredmor and unless you're a mage, you barely brush him once every four hits or so. Optimistically. Plus, it devalues skills like Perception and even the various weapon trees. Why sink points there when I can hit most of the time anyway, and having all that weapon specialty just makes Evil Chest gear that much worse? Suggestions for EDR Make Monsters Dodge More Give all monsters a dodge bonus dependent on their floor. Say, = stats + 5 + DL. So creatures on DL 1 would get +6 while monsters on DL 15 would get +20 above and beyond their stats. This isn't a huge increase, but it would make a shortage of felt. Make Stuff Scale to EDR In particular, I'm thinking the Big Game Hunter procs, Thrown Weapons and Archery abilities and Eye Lasers. These are all things that would feel right with damages that scale to rather than . The Deadshot tree could be revived with an emphasis on scaling to as well, although I'm not really sure that'd make it any more interesting than it was before. Increase Amount of Good Equipment That Reduces EDR Currently Clockwork Limbs of any type, Clockwork Gauntlets, Plate/Serpentine Gauntlets and a selection of the best Helms reduce . Mayhap a few of the best weapons could offer penalties in exchange for a little more power? Or the penalty on heavier gear could be upped a tad bit all around? Sneakiness OK, as I understand it this skill represents the % chance of not tripping a trap when you step on it and not being noticed by a monster each turn you spend in its vision radius. Lame. That's just not enough to make the stat appealing at all, and as it's pretty much the only stat other than Haywire effected by , Savvy is likewise devalued, particularly in the eyes of non-Wizards. Suggestions for Sneakiness Change the Interaction Between Traps and Sneakiness Rather than giving a character a % chance of not tripping a trap, make it so that traps require a certain amount of and, if a character has it, they can pass over the trap with no danger. Say, for each to disarm a trap, 5 is required to walk over it. This would let a person who is interested in traps move over his own traps in safety, increasing his ability to actually, y'know, trap stuff and encouraging strategic planning. It also makes the Savvy on Tinkering seem less like something tacked on because all crafting skills get Primary Stat bonuses and more like something actually relevant to the skill. Make Traps Scale to Sneakiness Don't know how practical this is, because I'm sure at least some traps share spell effects with other sources where scaling to would make less sense. Maybe we could just create a trap specific version of those spells? But if the idea of traps is to hide them and then let other people trip them, scaling to makes a lot of sense to me. Make Assassination Procs Scale to Sneakiness Because assassins are supposed to be sneaky? Right? Give Characters a Chance to be Unnoticed After Attacks Particularly ranged attacks. That'd be cool. Not sure it'd be easy to program, though. Anyway, feel free to throw in other thoughts on how we could make these rather underwhelming stats better. Hopefully the devs will see something they like and can use without too much difficulty, so that we can have better and more varied gameplay.
I think you raise a lot of valid points and some good ideas for solutions. Personally I love the idea that there is a sneak cap for walking over each level of trap difficulty. This would really make it a valuable skill. The problem I see with it is that it wouldn't work scaling linearly. If it's 5 per level (or whatever imaginary number you want), then it would either be unbalanced toward the beginning of the game or unbalanced at the end. For example: At the start of the game it is perfectly balanced at 5 per trap level. Near the end of the game you have way too much sneak and you've run back into the problem of sneak being a worthless stat. At the end of the game it's perfectly balanced at '5' per trap level. Near the beginning of the game you can't possibly get enough sneak to walk over traps, even if you gear toward it. So it would just have to be a number on a curve designed to be an average attainable number endgame if you gear slightly in favor of it while still being possible at the lower levels if you gear for it. That may have been too verbose
Does EDR work against blocking, too? If not, it should, though obviously at a much smaller fraction than against actual dodging. After all, the more accurate your attacks, the more able you are to slip around someone's defenses.
I'd like to see reworked in general to something more roguey. Like actually "turning invisible" and backstabbing monsters or something similar. It would be especially good for Going Rogue, when monsters are much tougher.
Does the stat really work like that? I mean, I've had characters with almost 200 (mostly thanks to the Diggle God of Secrets) that were still triggering traps about half the time.
I thought about the problem of maxing Sneakiness. I was more thinking a character should be able to bypass most of the traps he can salvage and reset and/or craft if he has Tinkering. Since is / 2, even a CL 30 character with all Rogue or Wizard stats is only looking at 36 , 38 if he has Tinkering, which is enough to get past the vast majority of traps at 5 per (excluding any of the new ones, which I haven't had a whole lot of experience with yet). Sure, there's not much equipment to boost the stat right now, but that can be fixed fairly easily. On the other hand, a curve of some sort might be better. I'm not sure if each trap would require a line of code setting it's bypass or if it would be done with some generic formula. It might be nice to have one or two low level traps that are almost impossible to bypass or vice versa. I don't really know if the stat works like that. It was just a guess based on observation of the stat at work. Problem is, the stat is at work so rarely that it's hard to get a clear picture of what it does. Most people do not step on traps on purpose, for example...
Seems odd to separate 'trap walking' from 'trap salvaging' if you're trying to come up with a formula that combines them again. I'd rather just know that 'can salvage' = 'safe to walk on' instead of trying to keep track of odd rules. Other ideas for : Chance to open a chest without a lockpick (1 roll per chest) Chance to open a door without a lockpick (1 roll per door) Chance to not wake sleeping enemies when smacking them Free on unaware enemies
Or it might simply be better to make it "5 per level" while making it possible to manually overwrite the values for each trap. That way there would be slightly stronger traps that are easy to bypass if you invested any points in sneakiness, and slightly weaker traps that are difficult to get through (but not impossible). Supposedly, yes. Though I reckon there just is a hard limit of effectiveness for traps. You are right. But then again, it depends on whether we want simplicity or something close to realistic - normally, knowing how to disarm a trap isn't equivalent to knowing how to get through it without triggering it, and that one is what sneakiness (which is responsible for moving in weird ways) would be for; on the other hand, if we know how to disarm a trap, we should know how to get around it. Thus, it's a matter of choice. And I see why would the first option be chosen, considering that the second one makes sneakiness even less useful than it is.
Right, but any trap you can salvage is immediately visible when you're close to it (i.e. not the normal faint outline). Thematically I think of it as: High = Traps are so obvious any fool could walk past them High = You naturally slink around the dungeon so well that even the best traps aren't set off when you walk on them (even if you don't notice them)
As per its in-game description, should actually be the stat that affects trap identifying, not . Or am I missing something?
If there's no change, 's effectiveness should at least be increased dramatically so that people actually consider it as an alternative to disarming traps. It's definitely underpowered at the moment. edit to add an example: in one full game i step on maybe 100 or so traps by accident, but i only ever avoid setting off 2 or 3 of them.
For the first part, if walking over traps unhurt wasn't part of what did already I'd be fully behind you. But bypassing traps has been given to , the decision to move it out would, in fact, devalue much more. I do like your other ideas for the stat, and I'd definitely want to know they had been implemented before trap avoidance was moved out of .
I read roughly 60% of everything, and mostly skip bug reports and off topic discussions, and on average it only takes 20 minutes to a full hour over a day. So I don't find it too hard to believe that they have someone to skim the forums, especially when these forums are so interesting!
Sneakiness doesn't seem useless to me at all, at least once it is reasonably high, monsters genuinely seem to aggress you much less, and that's quite useful on its own.
