Dredmor 1.0.10 Feedback Thread

It fits the theme. We have Evil Chest weapons that are OP, so why would Dredmor not be OP too? It is his dungeon, so he chose to leave those weaker weapons behind since he already has better stuff.

He can still be beaten easily if you plan for it. But not at all if you think you can walk up and hit him in the head with a nice weapon or even a pair of nice weapons.

 

Melee builds depend on the ability to hit things in the head.
If you're fighting Dredmor with a mage build, you:

• Drink all your buff potions and load up on food and booze
• Fire all your special bolts at him
• Hit him with all your high-damage spells

That's mostly doable. He takes a long time to go down at the moment, but he does eventually keel over.
But if you're using a melee build, you:

• Drink all your buff potions and load up on food and booze
• Fire all your special bolts at him
• ??? try to him without being obliterated ???

I'm not really seeing what amazing strategic options melee fighters have at the moment, against a guy who blinks out of range when he feels like it, nukes you with long-range spells, and absolutely pummels you if you get close.

 

Basically the melee strategy is: Get 1-2 awesome weapons, grab resists in every other slot, ignore all else. That's what I learned!

I had a dodge/counter build going with dual wield, and I was basically untouchable by anything on floor 9, I was even meleeing most specials (though I still avoid the special muscle diggles, eesh). So I'm pretty confident that Dredmor is currently balanced for end of level 15 and keeps the same stats for end of 10. If I'd gotten a nice Window of Elements and enchanted Boilerplate, I bet I could have made it through. What hurt most was that I had no idea he was on the other side of that door and I had no place to run to and pop all my buffs. Then again, this was only DM, not GR, so I have no idea how much more vicious he is on that.

 

You really cannot win Melee only. You need a mix. You require teleportation to get to him when your health is good, and you also require it to get far away when it is not.

You require a reliable means of healing quickly, and to keep your mana high enough to teleport around as needed.

Besides that, Melee is possible, but it requires good equipment to keep you alive and end him too.

Simply said, even with a perfect skillset, sometimes you will not get the right equipment or will not have the consumables required to endure.

 

I would also make Vampirism something other than a Wizard skill. Probably rogue. Scaling off of maximum health would be interesting, which lccorp2 recommended.

 

For the one in your picture, do you know if the workbench north of the blue tile has been broken? There's a script that turns off both tiles if either bench is broken, which sometimes happens due to area effects if you're fighting in the room.

I just ran into this as well. DOD 1.0.10 OS X. Red "summon monsters" tile on floor 11 won't trigger when I step into it. I'm pretty sure one was working fine a couple floors before it.

Yeah, whoever (Nicholas, I'd guess) coded this has a real sick sense of humor.

If a monster steps on it, it affects the player. I've had that happen three times already.
I tried to use a de-curse effect, and it didn't work. Apparently it's set so decurses don't think it's harmful.
If you don't have a teleport of your own, it can theoretically strand you on an island and force you to have to abandon the character (hasn't happened yet because I always take a teleport of some kind, but it's a possibility for others).

I opened the door to a zoo, and there was one inside the zoo! Impossible to get to it before a monster stepped on, even if I'd had enough trap skill to deal with the darned thing safely. Luckily I was playing a ranged character anyway, so it mostly didn't wreck me.

 

I sure hope this is a bug and not the intended behavior, or else I'm just going to mod them out of the game. Heck, I'll do it anyway until it's fixed. This is unacceptable. I suffered the same thing without realizing when a zoo door opened. I figured some monster had it as a spell.

This is because it's programmed as a DOT, which is really just DoD's way of coding "a spell that gets cast on you every turn for X turns." DOTs can't be uncursed. I only learned this recently. I also consider this a bug. There's no good reason why DOTs shouldn't be allowed to be uncursed.

These two bugs combined make the game horrible to play in lower levels where these traps exist. Especially considering that the trap alone can get you stuck somewhere you can't get out of. With all of these issues, I think the game should be immediately patched just to remove this trap until it can be made reasonable.

 

Actually as far as I knew every single dot in the game was removed with uncurse including positive ones.

The reason blink curse affects the player is because it doesn't have self="0" on the buff (which means nothing in this case, the buff doesn't do anything but helps further that it affects the player) and it triggers Monster Blink which is a targetblink (which doesn't cause the target to blink, just blinks the caster, ie the player who 'owns' the traps to a degree and casts their spells). It should instead use displace.

 

Re: Teleport Trap bug

And here I was trying to figure out for hours on end which monster(s) were casting it on me. I always seemed to end up with it when there was a roomful of baddies nearby (Zoos or otherwise), so I just assumed it was added to the Spell Repertoire of various monsters. >.>

 

I can't say with any confidence. I was only reporting what a Fax told me in IRC when I complained about failing to uncurse it.

<Glazed> Also, why is the blink curse not dispellable with an Potion of Purity?
<FaxCelestis> because it's a DoT
<FaxCelestis> purity potions only dispel debuffs

Or maybe there's a difference between Potion of Purity and other uncurse effects?

 

So I've fought the new Dredmor twice now and managed to come out of it victorious both times. The first time with a melee double shield build and the second time with a focused caster and while Dredmor was terrifyingly difficult with my melee character due to 50+ from Thor's Fulminaric Bolt, I found him to be a very easy fight with my caster.

Why you ask? Because I revoked Dredmor's magic license... I'll let that sink in for a moment.


So without the ability to cast spells, Dredmor (most powerful lich and lord of this dungeon) turns into a glorified punching bag, an impressively sturdy punching bag I'll admit, but with a teleport on hand he could never reach me to do melee damage, which was his only remaining combat option.

As hilarious as this was to do I can't imagine that it's intentional. You may want to consider giving him immunity to antimagic in addition to the other sundry buffs you've given him.

Edit: Or a crossbow... the bolt council would approve I'm sure.

 

I've actually been wondering how effective that would be, but I've never made it too him with a caster. I'll keep it in mind as something to abuse before the next patch.

 

Re: Acid Trail Traps. Here's my character's opinion on the matter:



Wasn't someone saying around here that there's no traps that do 100 damage to non-wizards? It was quite a shock to learn that wasn't true. As you can see, 111 hp after the downshift from Strong Acid Burn and Acid Burn debuffs... and I happen to know I was within a point of two of max when I stepped on the trap.

EDIT: Deleted long whiny version.

Short version: Damage from the first spell makes it look like you aren't in danger, so it's likely you'll decide to walk it off instead of taking precautions. Then, if you're 'lucky' it will keep triggering. If it does, it's devastating.

Lesson learned, but they may be a bit much.

 

Yeah. That needs to be nerfed then.
There's a difference between a nasty trap, and game breaking overpowered one.
Roguelikes and most RPGs usually have the former.
Either that or make Acid resistance a dozen times more common.
I really hope I don't run into something like that, because it's going to take a lot of effort to remove, even with Purity potions..

Dredmor is also very easy in Melee if you use a magebane bolt from whichever mod adds it. All you need is Diggle God of Death and that, and his melee damage is very tankable. Provided you have decent AA.
Meleeing him really should be easier than it is.
He's not a ninja, so, really, no need to give him insane melee stats. Seriously, he has a ton of block. How? I missed the part that said before he became a Lich he was the best shield fighter on the planet.

Unless he took lessons from the Lich of Fort Firemoth. OR he is the lich from Fort Firemoth.

 

I don't know if it's "game breaking overpowered", but it kicks pretty damn hard when the RNG wants it to.

There's a very strong RNG component to this trap. Lots of subspells and dots it can trigger, but no guarantees which ones will hit you. I got them all. I won the lottery! Now I'm a milliner! (My apologies, hat should have been posted to the other thread.)

 

I'll remove the bit about the overpowered part if enough people complain.
I know people like to burn me at the stake for wanting to make the game slightly easier.
It's just, this isn't Dwarf Fortress, you know.

Disclaimer: I never played DF, it's too confusing.

Traps being "Nerfed" so that Burglary/Perception/Archaelogy is not the only "safe" skill path through the game isn't going to be a big change I think.
I probably should try to play a character without those three combined. But really, it's a powerful combo, and I'm reluctant to give up free vending machine items, free 8 levels of experience by dungeon level 15, and Double Kronging across the sky...wait, no, that's double Rainbow.

 

I think traps in the lower levels should actually be MORE deadly. Mostly because if you survived this long it's because you learned how to avoid them. If traps don't kill me on the first few floors, then they don't kill me. Period. So if you are foolish enough to step on a trap on the lowest floors of the dungeon, you should be punished to the furthest extent of the law... or whatever it is that's in place for punishing idiocy. If you are furious about losing characters to bouts of chronic idiocy, unchecking the permadeath button IS an option.

Alternately the traps could be altered to be less deadly but harder to detect, which could make for some more interesting gameplay in the lower floors, and keep relevant beyond the 3 points you need to easily avoid all harm. Or give certain monsters knockback so they can push you into traps.... never mind, that terrifies me just thinking about it, especially if you had chains of knockback hits, but I digress.

Bottom line, get some trap sense and pay attention and traps won't kill you.

Disclaimer: None of the above is intended as a rant about my own PURE AWESOMENESS or supposed immunity to bouts of stupidity. I have lost many a character to traps on the early floors and even a couple on the mid floors due to sheer carelessness. I just happen to feel that being horribly and irrevocably punished for my mistakes is part of the appeal of DoD.

 

Not necessarily so. In my case, I learned (incorrectly, it turns out) that as long as my was full and a buff or two active, I could survive stepping on any one trap. As a result, I stopped going to much effort to avoid them. Complacency is the enemy.

Truth be told, I actually agree with you. This unexpected death was a refreshing wake up call. As they say "Shit just got REAL." Too bad I now have to start over and play 10 more floors to get that rush again.

The only part I don't like about this trap is that you can easily misjudge the danger AFTER you've triggered it. All the other acid effects you can judge after 1 turn whether or not you're in trouble. I suppose, now that I think about it, this is sort of a theme of the traps in the latest patch. Tentacular Infector causes you to explode a few turns later. Teleport curse messes with you for the length of a zoo. Hmm. That's actually kinda cool.

 

Several things you say are entirely incorrect. Most Roguelikes have instagib traps on lower levels. Meaning you cannot even detect them most of the time and you will flatly die if you trigger them. They are in no way "Nasty". They are in fact quite deadly. Game breakingly so if you choose to view it like that.

Adding more chance for lessens the chance of all other resistances. That is no solution.

And finally, Dredmor is the master of the entire game. He should be much more potent than anything else by an order of magnitude or ten. As a "Lich" he should have "Game Breaking" , and strong resistance to anything you can throw at him.

Have you ever played any of the *Band games? FuryBand? ToME? ChengBand? HengBand? All of them have many types of Liches in them. Iron Liches have excellent defense against almost everything. And they are not even close to the most potent type of Lich in a *band game.

But DoD is not another generic *Band game. It need not conform to the common idea of what a Lich is. In this game, Dredmor is the toughest thing in the dungeon and that is just how it is. He should not be fodder for everyone to slay with ease. He should be like Morgoth/The Serpent of Chaos in those aforementioned *Band games.

His skill is what makes his mediocre worth having. Without that, he may as well be a chicken in a pseudo-lich suit.

I know this probably strikes you as harsh, but I do not mean to insult or belittle your opinions. I just very strongly disagree with most of this entire post.