New Patch Feedback

Yesterday I accidentally crafted something when I really meant to click the down arrow to scroll through the blueprints (craft button sits between the two arrows). I know part of the reason for that is my own stupidity/clumsiness, but would some kind of confirmation dialog when attempting to craft the more advanced items be too much to ask for? This is regardless of whether or not we'll be able to scroll with the mouse wheel in the future.

 

The No Time to Grind option seems great. It'll definitely let me try out hardcore without losing a-lot of time if when I die. Aoe gold pickup is also helpful. I also love the new Icons. Aside from the bugs, I like the new additions except Perception.

The Perception tree still seems lacking. What is the main purpose of Perception? Is it for Increased Dodge Reduction, Dodge, Sight, Trap Sight, utility, or Eye Lasers? As it is, it seems to lack something for someone to pick it over other, better, choices.

Firstly, the passive Dodge Reduction on Perception is paltry. Perception has 9 whereas Swordplay has 17, Axemanship 19, Macery 17, Staff-fighting 17, The Unarmed Art 17, and Crossbows at 16. This is on top of their increased damage output and utility for their respective weapons. The only weapon skill that doesn't outdo Perception is Thrown Weaponery at 6 Dodge Reduction. Dodge doesn't fair any better either.

The passive Dodge of Perception is out done or comparable to other skills. It has 6, Artful Dodging 17 , Burglary 6, and Archaeology at 4. This trend contiues with Trap Sight as well.
While Perception sits at 3 Trap Sight, the other trees are Burglary 3, Archaeology 1, and Tinkering with 2. Perception is comparable to Burglary and better than Archaeology and Tinkering when it comes to Trap Sight, however, it doesn't compare when you add in utility.

Perception has no real utility, or atleast something that's almost always useful and is unique to Perception. Burglary is rich with unique utilities, every skill has some new utility such as giving you free lockpicks, being able to steal from vending machines and Brax, and even a vanish to escape from enemies. Even Macery offers better utility, although it isn't as unique it is rare enough to not be underwhelming, in the form of a knockback, although it's just a chance of it occuring it's useful nonetheless.

Perception, on the other hand, has Third Sight which, firstly, doesn't explain what it does clearly, secondly, seems only useful on invisible enemies, and thirdly, doesn't do anything Trap Sight doesn't already do. In addition, Second Sight's utility only offers you things you could have gotten from gear or other skills. Furthermore, the Trap Sight from Second Sight isn't useful since traps aren't deadly enough, you generally have enough Trap Sight passively to see any relevent traps, and it's not worth putting Second Sight on its long cooldown to look for a trap instead of using it while fighting for the Dodge Reduction and Dodge. The only thing Second Sight has that's unique is sight.

Sight is something that perception does well at, albeit it's the only skill that has Sight as far as I know. Consequently, Sight isn't something that would make me pick Perception over skills that give me defense, attack, or utility. It just isn't important enough to put skill points into it. Eye Lasers isn't even enough for me to choose Perception over other trees.

Eye Lasers is definitely a cool idea, but its current conception isn't fun, atleast to me. How it currently works, it seems to be the same as the Wand of Laser, which I don't mind. What I do mind is that its damage doesn't warrant its cooldown. It currently allows you to use one charge of a Wand of Laser every 32 turns. Why would I use this when I could go with Wand Lore? Not only does Wand Lore have Wands of Laser, but also it has other wands which can be used far more often than every 32 turns.

In the end, I think Perception needs a revision. Currently, other skill trees outperform it. Such as Burglary having just as much passive Dodge and Trap Sight on top of it's utility or Macery having more Dodge Reduction ontop of its damage and utility. The only thing Perception has that is unique is Sight, and that isn't important enough to take Perception over other more needed skills.


My suggestions to improve Perception are listed below.

• Change Third Sight to allow you to see stealth enemies permanently. As is, if you need to use Third Sight chances are you already saw the invisible enemy.

• Perhaps in keeping with the text for Second Sight, change the buff give you a certain amount of guaranteed hits or dodges instead. It would function like the traps that guarantee that you'll be hit work.

• Lower the cooldown on Eye Lasers. I'm not sure what a good time would be on it, but how about halfing it or atleast make it 25 turns.

• Change one of the first 3 skills to a passive buff that allows you to reroll an attack if you miss or an enemy counter attacks. The chance would be based off of your Sight so that there is a reason to have more Sight. Might even want to consider making Eye Lasers damage scale with Sight.

 

Not going to deep in on this since I haven't tried the full new Perception skilltree yet, but just noting that if it lacks in comparison versus skilltree A on point x, skilltree B on point y and skilltree C on point z then it has the pretty nifty characteristic to be much broader oriented. It can also be a nice addition to builds instead of it being a prime pick. We need secondary skills too, and I for one always liked perception for that role (the old version, since I don't have exp with the new one yet).

 

On Wand Crafting:

So far it seems ok, however it really could do with a lot higher variety of wands in general, as it is you only make about 8 different wands total?

 

Like I said, there are too many benefits from the other trees to go with Perception. It may be broad but the other trees are either focused or broad and have more utility. It needs something other than Sight for it to be a choice someone would go with over roleplay purposes.

• You don't need much Trap Sight to see traps from a decent distance, and even then you don't really need any Trap Sight if you're patient.

• The combat trees offer more passive Dodge Reduction and I haven't seen a noticeable increase in hit chance to appreciate going into Perception for this stat.

• If you want Dodge and utility, go with Artful Dodging. It has more Dodge, a distance closer/opener, damage when you dodge sometimes, and depending on what Gaslamp does with Transdimensional Dodge another distance opener.

 

Havent tried perception with the new skills so I cant judge that aspect, but Increased sight was reaaaally useful to all my range attacks. Being able to shoot/ cast on monsters at the end of the screen is a BIG help and explains to me that it could go with reduced other passive buffs.
Still what you say for eye laser and third sight seems to make sense.

@Godwin I understand your point for early crossbow and thrown stuff: there s alternatives.
But as far as monster AI, its totally different. I love randomness and I d be all for unindentified items at every game, i m a sucker for those stuff. But a monster should act in its own logic, not through a plain random variable. Say in Nethack / slash em / Adom you ll get random monsters, unindentified objects, random layouts... but roguelikes are all about the knowledge you build to deal with those situations and progress further. That s what makes it not frustrating. When Nethack spawns a mumak at you in the gnomish mines you ll probably get killed the first time, but afterwards you ll know that 1- they are silly slow 2- they can obliterate you in a couple hits and you ll play it safe.
In DoD its nothing like this kind of randomness. You may have build the knowledge already but you could still get killed because the game rolled the "shoot you" variable every turn. Dont you think octos should have a mana limit ? Do they have infinite mana and just cast when they see fit ? It doesnt really makes sense to me. A cooldown would be more realistic + more balanced + more interesting strategically speaking.
When the damage of a group of 10 octos varies from 0 to 70 per turn depending purely on your luck: it makes the game impossible to be correctly balanced. Its not like a tactically interesting situation. There s nothing on the player's side to do to really prevent this. Its just rolled on the game's side wether you re gonna go through insane shit or frollic happily through the dungeon.

I ve played Nethack for over 10 years and never retrieved the amulet of Yendor. Yet I ve never been frustrated a single time. Im also not saying DoD is too hard, I finished Dwarven on my very first playthrough and think its rather easy compared to others: but I understand the game can be unfair.

 

Yes and if you already have Artful Dodge, BlackSmithing and Swords and Dual fighting and Assassination and you want a pure melee non-spellcraft person?
Why not take perception then? That's the question, not why it should ever be your first pick. Imo it's a 'support skill', so hardly ever should be a first pick. Sight btw is pretty nice for spellcasting.

EDIT: hah we posted at the same time brobbeh

EDIT2 after reading: You make sense I personally don't have a problem with their mana being obscure and them doing different damages, since I like luck to some degree. For example a melee mob can counterattack and crit, I like that not-knowing-what-will-happpen because else all tension is gone. You can mathematically deduce who'll win the exchange and meh... sucky.

So, we both make sense... can we come to a certain middle ground? Maybe script them to be able to cast after either 4, 5 or 6 turns, and vary their damage from 50% of average to 150%?
As for the group of octo's: nuke from orbit

 

I didn't think of it from a ranged perspective. I guess Sight does have some uses. Perception is still too weak to say you have to give up points just to be able to see further.

 

The problem is that if Perception doesn't have anything going for it that makes it a prime pick, it's bound to be ignored in favor of more specialized trees, simply because specialization is generally preferable in the early-mid game (the best defense is a strong offense etc).

Yes, Perception offers a variety of minor stat boni, but because the first half of the tree is so bland with its three passive subskills, you're going to focus on improving your offense/defense/crafting instead. By the time you're willing to invest in the Perception tree, the stat boni it offers are largely pointless because they're easily granted by artifacts/Krongs anyway.

The tree could really do with some kind of activated skill, or perhaps even a passive proc, as the second subskill. The skill could improve your offense or defense in some way, so that players who choose to invest in Perception as their first tree aren't overly punished by the lack of weapon skill procs or defensive procs, like they currently are.

 

Still no reason to go for Perception. Why not get Berserker Rage, Vampirism, Master of Arms, Burglary, or Archaeology? They provide good defense/offense/utility with no downside, except for Vampirism but can be worked around with Coral Wands and potions.

 

You're going to have to choose your skillups anyway, favouring some over others. I don't mind if some skilltrees in my build do not need to be considered every early levelup But yeah, again, I'll get into it more after playing with Perception (which is in my current build I'm playing). You may be completely right that Perception needs something, but the Eye laser seems pretty nice bonus already, from 1.06.

EDIT: this was to Aldin, someone posted in between again, busy thread ^^ gotta go now

 

@godwin I totally think there still should be some randomness in some degrees. For instance the amount of damage of the spell + haywire chance are still there. They can still have the 16% or something chance they have to start casting at you, it doesnt matter. What matters is a cool down to avoid the magic spamfest party.
If a cooldown is set I actually think they should have a way higher chance of deciding to do a range attack at you when they see you (something more like 40%).

 

Yeah I agree Eye Lasers is a cool bonus. It's mainly the cooldown holding it back.

I agree, that's exactly what I thought when I was playing with Perception

 

As far as crafting interface is concerned:
1. As someone else pointed out -- you need to make it scrollable with the mouse wheel.
2. Hovering over the end-product should give you a tool-tip telling you what the recipe makes -- some items simply look too much alike. The only reason I was able to predict what the end-product was going to be is that I played 1.06, and read the wiki.
3. The recipes either need to start out sorted, or sortable based on the end-product.
4. It would be nice if items that you are wielding/wearing that are needed for a recipe are marked as available.
5. When you craft weapons, armor, or jewelry, it should end up in your hand, not in a random slot in your inventory so that you have to search for it.
6. The message about no room for the end-product needs to take into account space released by consuming items in the recipe.
7. When you first open up the crafting device, you have to click on the recipe you want. However, doing this does not work later on (it's really a lot more intuitive to click on what you want than to have to scroll to it, if its on your screen).
8. It would be nice if you could filter recipes to only include those you can craft (taking #4 into account).

Other than that -- I like the new burglary skill. I haven't played enough to comment on anything else.

 

My one complaint is that, despite the new crafting system, you can't craft gloves, belts, or pants. Maybe we need a Tailor skill and associated craft tree.

 

That's probably too minor to waste a skill slot and XP, unless we have some powerful items there.

 

I'd advise strongly against that: put them over the other three, buff those a bit. Add maybe a leather patch ingredient. Done.
Another whole crafting skill will just be too much effort for too little?

 

I just assumed new crafting recipes for the new item slots will be included in the DLC.

 

Is there the slight possibiliy that LORD DREADMOR has the Chicken AI set?

I killed Dredmore from ~11 tiles away with 1 firewand 10 charges and he NEVER attacked me because it seemed i was outside his range ..... i don't thing LORD DREDMOR is such a "chicken" .p

seriously ... the chicken AI need more work and finetuning

 

Well, I was thinking of having it give some abilities in addition to crafting ability. Like, I dunno. maybe it uses needles as crafting components (since you have to sew stuff), so you can throw them at people, possibly envenomed? "A Stitch in Time" could teleport you if you're going to die, but has a huge cooldown and leaves you at 1? There are stuffs you can do with it.