Hi. Thanks for an innovative game. After having played through the game (dwarfish moderation) I have some thoughts on design and balance I would like to share. My build: I played a pure spell casting mage: fleshsmithing 5pt (heal, buff, AoE), viking 5pt (DoT, shout, Nuke), math 5pt (teleport, curse), blood magic 0pt (mana), ley walker 1pt (mana), tourist 1pt (sight/traps) , vegan 4pt (hp) Level plan: Level fleshsmithing/viking first with some token point in supports as needed. Then max either mathemagic or vegan depending on if you lack hp or not. Gear: Stack magic power over all. After having tested some skill trees, this is quite possibly the best mage build, or close to it. The key here is fleshsmithing for heal and clearing out zoo's (in combination with viking shout when needed), and use thor's from viking magic nuking single targets. These do exceptional damage with high magic power. Thor's hammer will hit for over 70 end game for 5 mana and the Miasma just melts faces. If there are more enemies in a room than you can be bothered to hammer (the game gets pretty repetive after a while), just crank out the gas and everything will simmer down. With blood magic you will never run out of mana, and if you do, you have the lay walker power as backup. The only contenders here in clearing power would be rift from necromancy, but the rest of the necromancy tree is weak for mages (good for hybrids) and too much of a risk on permadeath. The only contender in single target damage is recursive curse, which you can get anyway. Fleshsmithing has the best heal, tourist the most bonuses from 1 skill point, and with teleport you are nearly immortal even if you aggro Brax (did and lived). Some easy to fix flaws: -The shout in viking magic is just too good. The fear effect hits every time and lasts for a long time. I didn't need it that often, but it was kind of weird having Lord Dredmor cowering in the corner. It should be nerfed somehow while still being useful. Maybe make it 3 turns and give it a cooldown of 7. -DoTs seem to get resisted in funny ways. Basically, they seem to resist more than nukes like Thor's, while monster take zero damage instead of half like seems to happen to nukes. Yet the icon stays on the monster. There is probably some bug there... -Lord Dredmor currently has like 1-2k hp by my calculations. It was not a fun fight considering he also resisted *all' my spells for some, reason. Thor's still hit him for half, which took like 30-40 nukes. This was not a problem as he was cowering in a corner due to the viking shout, but it was not a fun experience, and without the shout would probably have taken an hour or more of kiting to regen hp and mana. The recursive curse which I intended to down him with initially hit him for 0 damage as he resisted DoTs. -Stop spawning mobs in shops please, or please do make Brax invulnerable to AoE, it's quite an annoying way to end your characters life. Some fundamental design flaws: -Buffering input in monster turns is HORRIBLE UI design. HORRIBLE. Almost all my deaths have been due to this. This is actually a combination of several UI defects. 1) Input is buffered so your character can be locked into a course of action if you hit the move key say twice 2) Animations are different length, and some are really slow, both monster and player. This means that if you are walking around and a monster does something that takes time, you may inadvertently buffer several of your move actions. This is not fun when something unexpected happens as you are moving and monsters start wailing on you while you can only watch your character stupidly run around and die. This happened once when I had Dredmor at 1% and he teleported away and started nuking with the slow Thor's animation. God did that suck. The fix: Don't allow ANY buffering of actions from keyboard, don't allow ANY input during the monsters turn. -Making the game one move vs one action is a critical flaw making it nearly impossible to balance, as ranged will get to act many times before a melee can do something. I don't see how mage can ever be balanced against melee without making spells so weak that they become frustrating. I basically breezed through all melee content and the only thing that was moderately dangerous was when monsters spawned very close for some reason. Usually in combination with the aforementioned UI flaw above. -The game starts getting really tedious around level 6-7 or so, with a predictable monster zoo and so on. It would be nice with some new game mechanic. Maybe more ranged mobs, smarter mobs, or something. -Mages, the way they are currently designed require massive investment in magic power gear and mage classes as you get a non-linear benefit due to spells getting stronger (magic power), cheaper (savvy), more mana (sagacity) and not the least more mana back from blood magic (magic power). When you do you get excellent results, but it seems to me that it's pretty easy to gimp your spell casting power if you are not careful.
Grats on your first win! Now I'm going to play devil's advocate, here. There's several room-cleaners you left out that are at least as competitive as miasma. Tenebrous Rift, buffed up sandstorm, gas canister, squid bolts, stars align, bolts of mass destruction, charge of the steam brigade, brimstone flasks, bolt eruptors, holy hand grenades all come to mind. If you're just considering mages, that brings it down to rift, sandstorm, stars align, bolt eruptors, squid bolts, BMDs, holy hand grenades, flasks... eh okay "narrows it down". You're missing out on quite a few zoo options, there. Also, having any at all makes the tenebrous rift "risk" negligible on any difficulty. Dots can have multiple effects, and usually while the damage can be negated with a magic resistance roll, the extended effect is not, or vice versa. Nukes also get the resist roll, in addition to regular elemental resistances factored in. To avoid turning Brax hostile in shops, refrain from casting AoE spells in shops. Fixes to fundamental design flaws: Tap movement keys to move, instead of holding them down. That's 3 fixed in one go. All characters can use crossbows and throwing weapons, so melee characters, even without any distance closers (and why would you not have at least 1?), do have a range option. I also did manage to kill Dred on Going Rogue with a swashbuckler in something like 10-12 turns. So I don't really see the melee weakness there. Reading back, this sounds a bit snarkier than I had intended. What I wanted to convey is that there are still many more options available, so give the game a few more tries and see what new things you can come up with.
Hi. Thank you for your reply, but I think you misunderstood my comments a bit. 1) I mentioned rift, and I didn't mean that rift in itself was dangerous, but the necro tree was (due to the stacking health debuffs on the other spells if you are going to make full use of it), and rift isn't worth it by itself. This was also from a pure spell caster perspective, ie. no bolts, grenades etc and other unclean things (Yes I know you can use them, you can use a sword to melee also, but that is not the point of this build, and they are not in infinite supply). I'll concede that sandstorm and stars aligned can be used as zoo clearers, but the latter is actually not as good unless you want to stand in the middle of the pack, which you shouldn't want as a pure mage, and could be dangerous if you get some ranged mobs. Sandstorm is good if you stack all the glyphs, but like necromancy you basically waste a whole tree on one skill. Miasma, Rift and Sandstorm are all long duration AoEs with about similar damage, rift is slightly larger, sand storm is from what I remember overall somewhat worse due to being more expensive and more random. 2) It doesn't seem reasonable that the damage of DoTs is resisted entirely while not of nukes, this makes DoTs worthless end-game, even on yard trash the best curse in the game is rarely worth the effort due to it sometimes being outright resisted three times in a row, and it can be difficult see if it's resisted or not since the icon still shows up. 3) "To avoid turning Brax hostile in shops, refrain from casting AoE spells in shops" <-- Yes, well, the game could refrain from spawning mobs in shops to begin with. Lots of spell have AoE components, and sometimes Brax is hiding behind some corner. I can't think of why you would want to aggro Brax with an AoE (which can also be done from persistent effects like a certain potion) . 4) Not to be rude, but I'm not going to take your suggestion to tap movement keys seriously, sorry. I suspect you know little of UI design, so I will leave it at that, but this problem occurs even when you tap the keys regardless. 5) Melee player characters are today balanced to bit by having higher single target damage, but in general you cannot replicate the efficiency of a mage because you need to be close. The mage is never close to anything unless it spawns to him. 99% of all enemies die before getting to melee range. To make this fair you would need to nerf spell damage further, which would make them very boring. Yes, there are gap closers, but not that many that can be spammed. Sorry if you find my reply snarky, but I read your replies and while you do have a few points (and misunderstandings), most of them sound very defensive and apologetic.
If you want smarter mobs, download ASCII invasion. If you want cooler options for mages and melees, download various mods that 'solve' the problems. The reason Dredmor remains really awesome over a long period of time ... is the mods.
1) Okay let's take a look at the necronomiconomics tree. You have a) a single target spammable damage bolt b) a sleep effect that can stun monsters, allowing you a getaway if you need it, or letting you bunch up groups at a choke point to aoe c) a resists buff that can stave off some early damage and add to to protect you from yourself d) a lifesteal buff, which admittedly gives little to a caster, so there is that e) a single-target nuke with minor AoE component. This one does good, low-cost damage and works well vs chest of evil named monsters f) massive, efficient room-clearing spell. 4 of those are eminently useful to a caster, for the whole game. They also have some of the best mana-to-damage ratios in the vanilla game. The temporary penalties and self-damage (trivial as it is to avoid) keep the tree from being the go-to solution for any magic user's damage needs, ever. With the exception of dredmor, you can literally open a door, cast rift, repeat for every room in the game if you want. 2) The stat you want that pierces (Magic Resist) is (Haywire). Haywire (basically criticals) bypass Magic Resistance when determining whether or not X component of Y spell takes effect. Most late-game enemies have high specifically to keep every caster from only stacking as a golden stat. And you can still mostly ignore on a lot of builds anyway. 3) Brax only spawns in the pink shops on the map, and only moves if you've tried to steal something. There are a handful of shop rooms where you could hit brax from outside with a large-scale AoE like sandstorm or rift, but (and it's been a while) I think those are all on the earlier floors, before you get capstone AoE skills. Also I'm guessing that since you said the monsters were in the shop, you could see them and had already opened the shop. Were you intentionally casting AoE's into open shops without checking your targets? 4) Dredmor is turn-based, not real-time. Treating it differently is your perogative. What you mentioned has been proposed before, and what I said has been stated before. Being condescending to me won't change what is. 5) I see tunneling diggles haven't been patched into release, yet. Regardless, some gish builds might dispute your melee/mage power comparison (astrology in particular), but that's neither here nor there. In all honesty though, you picked a name by rolling your fingers on the keyboard and your only post was talking about the game being too easy when you cheesed medium difficulty. It did look pretty trollish, but I overreacted in tone, so I apologize. Don't let me knee-jerk reaction turn you off to the rest of the forums, or the company, or Dredmor itself.
Well, I was just trying to give some constructive feedback, and I still think pretty much all of it is sound. I don't see what my forum name has anything to do with it. If it has been mentioned before then maybe it fell on deaf ears because the community is insular, I don't know. Dredmor is a good game, for an indie title at least, but there are rough edges, and if the community is not receptive to feedback then they will never be fixed. 1) For a pure casting necro mage you need to down about 5 mobs per room, which is 5-15 casts depending on how late game it is, giving you a matching amount of long duration curses per room. I have tried it, and in my opinion this is not susitainable, and the tree is just not worth it on a pure caster due to this even though Rift is good itself. You would need to take out some support tree in the build above because you still want a heal at least. Currently Fleshsmithing is an awesome starter and it caps out with a zoo-clearer that is for all practical purposes just as good as rift (requires a few more casts but is cheaper). Fleshsmithing also has a fairly cheap DoT which on a damage per mana efficiency basis is pretty close. 2) I didn't realize haywire superseded resist, but it feels like a moot point since I used most of the haywire gear I found. Still I couldn't land anything without full resist on Lord Dredmor. Regardless, DoTs are too weak against magic resist in general late game right now, and the UI mechanic makes it difficult to see what is going on. If I have both the best capstone nuke (Thor's) and capstone DoT (recursive curse), I feel that the latter should at least be preferable some of the time, but it's irregularity in working in combination with UI ambiguity was just not worth the headache. 3) Basically I feel there is no reason to spawn mobs in shops for the sole purpose of trying to entrap players into aggroing Brax, which is basically the largest trap in the game and forfeits the entire level in most cases due to the insane dredcollector spam, and usually results in death. This is not good design. 4) I think you missed my point. Never did I complain that Dredmor was turnbased, I complained that contrary to normal turn based games it buffered actions in a difficult to control fashion so that you sometimes unintentionally forfeited several actions in a row. This should be fixable, but it requires an engine fix. 5) Once again, the point was not a power comparison between current builds, which I understand might upset some, but an observation that the system is fundamentally difficult to balance due to its construction. Giving more mobs the ability to move several squares is exactly in line with what I was suggesting, and if that happens it is a good thing, but I still feel everybody should have gotten three squares of movement or something by default. Since Diggles won't touch a Vegan, I guess tunneling Diggles won't change anything from the perspective of the build above though. PS. Vegan is overpowered on a caster. DS.
Just so you're aware of your misconception, mobs don't -- can't -- spawn in shops. if you opened a door and found a mob in a shop, it was either displaced, blinked, or got shoved through a wall by a knock effect.
