After watching several Let's Plays of Dungeons of Dredmor, I have to say that pretty much everybody seems to move with the arrow keys or WASD. That's fine, it's pretty much standard for games like this. However, there are numerous reasons to only use click-to-move when exploring new territory. First off, when you left-click to move somewhere, the game's AI takes over and walks your character to where you clicked. This AI is different from monster and pet AI - different and superior. While in this "autowalk" mode, your character will avoid any and all traps like the Plague, even if you haven't detected them yet. Secondly, if you see a monster or otherwise want to kill the autowalk you're currently, uh, walking, you can do this by pressing Spacebar or by using any Menu shortcut key (I, Esc, Q, etc). The problem is, if you're willing to click around while exploring new rooms (or after pulling a 'zomg moar traps!' lever), you will never walk over a trap ever. The AI will go so far as to refuse to walk at all if you tell it to walk down a one-tile wide passage filled with traps - hint, hint. This greatly devalues both the Trap Sense and Trap Affinity stats, because using this method, you can safely ignore Sense and boosting Affinity for bonus XP and picking up traps becomes completely optional save for the odd "gotta walk over it" trap in a narrow space - but that's what back-up food is for, right? And, if you're more comfortable using WASD to move around, just suffer through clicking to move while exploring new rooms - once the AI has weeded out all the traps for you, it's pretty safe to WASD your way through any rooms if you need to backtrack. I recommend clicking on every trap, and Declining to Disarm it - that way, you can see the trap as its more colorful, much more noticeable inventory icon graphic, instead of the "outline on the floor" graphic you would normally see. Yeah. My characters, even the ones without a bunch of Rogue-y levels, scoff at traps and only trigger them in those rare moments where I'm not paying attention or carelessly WASD-ing my way back to a shop or something. It's a bit disappointing that using an "alternative" movement method (one taught to you first thing in the Tutorial, no less) completely undermines the game's entire "traps on the floor" mechanics.
Imo, trap sight should be worked differently, it shouldn't be 'x tiles of sight' it should be chance to actually spot said trap, if your trap sight level is below a trap level, you shouldn't even see it. Also the rooms RNG's (many of them) have specific spots for traps, add some variation to those as well.
While you're right, I think that random pathfinding will screw people over, thus this is why it has to be this way. Honestly, once you die a few times to traps, you never let it happen again, its the Monsterous Masks, Arch Diggles, and other scary "OP" mobs that kill me.
Monstrous Masks killed my best character (Level 7) with Archaeology and a ton of melee/dual-weilding/rogue-y skills. Damn things. Honestly having "click to move" at all in a game like this surprised me a great deal. In a way, it's something that I'm not sure can be fixed - if you just have it walk you from Point A to Point B by the shortest route, it's almost completely useless. If you leave it the way it is now, it's like having a free Trap Sense Passive Skill.
I think Greg got it right. I actually only use click to move most of the time specifically due to this functionality. Makes navigating through cleared sections of the dungeons so much faster but it pretty much ruins the point of traps if I can always see where they are and avoid them. The only traps I have to deal with are the occasional one blocking a single panel passageway, but those are rare enough that they arent too troublesome. I'd hate to have autopilot always walk over traps, that's one thing that that annoys me the most about golems right now. They actually seem to try and find traps to walk over and can turn traps that can be activated multiple times into a golem blender. I think what should happen is that each trap should have a detect level and some combination of trap sight and trap sense is what reveals them, and if your skill isnt high enough, the traps are not revealed on the floor and the pathfinding shouldn't avoid them. The seemingly automatic outline over a trap is just a giant DONT WALK HERE! sign and I dont think they should show up at all unless you actually detect the trap there. I'd also change the way the trap tooltips worked so the Trap Sense stat would actually be used to determine if you detect what kind of trap it is. If you have a high enough trap sense when you detect a trap it could immediately change the tile to the more colorful trap icon, otherwise you get the outline and instead of the trap name you would see something like "Suspicious Piece of Floor" or "Badly Disguised Trap" or something nondescript like that. If your trap sense isnt high enough, maybe you can even misdiagnose a trap so something you thought was just an arrow trap turns out to be a toxic cloud or what have you? I'd really just like for both these stats to be a little more useful and make traps a little more exciting and discoverable than they currently are. I wouldnt mind if autopilot walked over traps if they havent been revealed in a system like this, but avoided like it does now if they are revealed. Also, the sooner that golems learn that traps are bad, the better! My poor mustache golems keep trying to show me where all the acid traps and toxic traps are by walking on them. I swear those two types alone must have killed 4 or 5 of them on the last floor of my latest run.
Despayre, some of that behaviour already exists. If your trap affinity is at least one level higher than the trap itself, you can see the trap icon instead of the generic outline. Traps are more of an annoyance right now than anything, unless you don't take any trap-affinity-related skills. In which case... well, hope you get good rolls on your equipment
Oh, pardon my ignorance then. Once I discovered how easily I could avoid most traps, I have rarely bothered with trap skills with the one exception of taking burglary for the free picks. The few builds I've had with trap skill bonuses have died horribly painful early deaths so I've avoided taking or raising those skills in favor of other ones that are better at helping me die at least a little deeper in.
I use moment key and I get killed by traps all the time. Thing is I am not that perceptive and still walk on them even after I see them.
