Perhaps this is just me, but I hate Monster Zoos. Not because their difficult or catch me by surprise but because I seem to never get the rewards for them! I fight my way though a horde of monsters only to end up with... nothing. Its infuriating because my game seems to love to just not give me the reward for no good reason. I know certain thing like leaving the floor and stuff can end the zoos bonus, (is that programed in or just a glitch?) but I find Zoos hard enough to deal with already! Does the game really need to handicap me even more!? Ok changing floors ends my reward... fine... But why does entering the pocket dimension end it as well!? I cant eat food in it! I cant drink potions! I can't do anything in it other than look at my pretty gear that Im not using cause im already wearing my best stuff . WHY does that make me lose my reward!? Idk maybe it's just me, but this has been really getting on my nerves lately. Is this designed and serve a purpose im just not seeing or is my game glitched? (Sorry if this is the wrong thread for this rant, but I didn't thing this was a glitch.)
The reason you can't go to the pocket dimension is the same reason you can't go on a different floor - you could use the portal to go to a wizard dimension and heal up.
It would be neat if Monster Zoos had some cool party for you at the end. Like a shower of confetti and dancing diggles and zorkmids for everyone. perhaps you could borrow from the Happy Birthday Dredmor mod.
The problem with Monster Zoos is the deeper in the dungeon you go, the more teleporting mobs you have and no way to track them. There have been many a time where I've been sure that one of these things have teleporting into a wall or something and thus impossible to kill.
I don't think monster zoos are too bad. I mean, if you're playing on GR and you're not in a good situation they can royally molest you, but otherwise I've been able to deal with them quite well, although slower or faster depending on my character build. For melee characters, a few squid bolts if I had them and then some clever use of terrain to funnel all of the monsters to their deaths worked fine, albeit slow compared to several AOE spells.
Being as though I play on Elvish Easy, because Dying is not fun unless you play Dwarf Fortress, , Monster Zoos tend to be really annoying for me more than a danger. So, getting crappy rewards isn't the main reason I kill them. However, I am also an Archelogist, and thefore, get rid of the crappy rewards. And I've almost never got a great reward,
The one classes I hate running into monster zoos with is stealth and distance rogues, because they get almost no AoEs or ways to handle multiple monsters at once. That's why I pretty much never use daggers, and the only rogue builds I take are scientists (rogue scientist, alchemy, tinkering, etc...), because rogue scientist gets all sorts of great AoEs for handling zoos.
Really? I almost always have Acid or Poison Bottle Bolts/Flasks for the early floors and Squidbolts for the lower ones.
I personally rather like Monster Zoos, it's a great test to see if your character is on curve with the game, you get the occasional "OHH SNAP SON!" moment from them and when you die it's always like a champ surrounded by the corpses of your newly deadified foes. Not to mention that the prices are worth every single brutal murder you have to commit in order to get them. I do however get kinda teary eyed once the dust settles and I realize that I just orphaned a small army of diggle chicks.
