New Patch Feedback

I played a melee build through floor 15 and was doing okay toe to toe with Dredmor (until he knocked me away and burned himself to death before I could re-engage) and did not feel useless at all. Probably the biggest difference in my build is berserker rage, which is absolutely huge now. Not only do you get 4-6+ extra damage and extra armor once you get going, it lets you pop out your own boosted criticals when you need to make attacks count (critical Thibault Trompements are also actually pretty decent at softening enemies up once you get really high melee power.) You can get enough health that enemy crits are not immediately threatening, but enemies with high crit+counter are really deadly if you can't break through their counters with your own crits. I would say every melee build really, really needs to either take berserker rage or go dual axe + assassination to get their base crit score as high as possible.

 

I agree with most observations that kaoschan made around one page back, not necessarily the conclusions however, and I did only make it to DL12 before an unfortunate CTD made me ragequit. Since I didn't get to DL13-15 my experiences don't give the full picture, the Evil Chest-part was the exact same experience to me though. I played a Archery/tinkering/shield/unarmed/berserker rage build, with burglary and something else added for utility. I found that archery worked great for my otherwise melee character when dealing with Zoo's and enemies that can corrupt your gear, but in the evil chests I found... awesome artifacts, I would even venture so far as to call some of them OP;

For example, on DL6 I found an artifact axe, based on a broadaxe with 17 , in addition to 14 , 10 , 3 and 2 . I think there might've been some minor resistances in there as well... When I got to DL8 or 9 the artifacts got even more insane. Now it might've been that I was just extremely lucky in getting amazing artifacts (even though I used unarmed and xbows, and only got 1 xbow out of the chests). After DL3 or 4 I never got a quest reward or zoo clearing reward that was anywhere close to what I got in the Evil Chests.

They might need a slight nerf, though as I said I might just've been "lucky" What they do need for sure is a wider variety of item-types, the deeper I got, the more often I found staves and maces until I got those almost exclusively -- which kinda blew. Especially since a lot of the Tomes that were recently added (they are awesome btw) helps a unarmed char pack more of a punch than going double shield would, but I didn't see any Tomes and barely any armor-artifacts... which is a pity since, as I said, Tomes are awesome and I want to use them, but you keep giving me other artifacts with insane stats :/

Might post more later, gotta go eat nao~~

EDIT: added damage icons~~

 

the problem with melee builds as they tend to die to bad luck more often than mage builds.

One time an arch diggle critted me twice in one turn with a counterattack and put me from 60+ hp to dead.

 

Yeah I guess this happens to every melee build at least once. The double crit insta death.
That's really my only issue with melee in this game: late ennemies have a way too high chance of crit. How much is it ? Around 30 % maybe ? None should have more than 20 except maybe some rare or named monster.

 

Really late to the party because my internet was cut for a week and Dreadmor didn't update beforehand. I haven't been able to spend any time with the game until recently, but here are my first impressions.

I've been loving the new additions to old skills. I especially like the change to blood magic actually giving you mana for killing monsters.
All the new rooms are fun and creative. I still think the leavers should be replaced with glyphs in rooms you teleport around in though.
I think the chicken AI for casters is a good idea, but there should be some sort of counter for melee builds as they get completely smashed by this (maybe when it's fully implemented ).
The difficulty curve from DL1 to DL2 feels even steeper because of said chicken AI.
New items are great. Feels like there should be some more low/mid level pants/belts/greaves though.

It was mentioned earlier, but I really hate that you can't craft some items without recipes now. It was random enough (just fine, in fact, in my opinion.) when you had to grind through 2-3 levels for that 1 key item in the recipe.

This is pretty much the same way I felt. Sure you can powerlevel that one crafting skill to get the equipment you want, but that leaves you with no other skills, which seems like a fair trade off to me. There's no guarantee that you're going to find those items you need anyway. I think one solution would be to make high tier craftable equipment something you have to build up to. Something like Magma Mace where you have a weapon that you scale up to (ex. you need more metal to improve your mace up to the point where you can make it a Magma Mace). Going down the dungeon, you usually end up with 50~ iron ingots and 30~ steel, so why not increase the amount of metal you need to upgrade your weapon? I think that would make weapon scaling a bit better (for the ones you craft anyway).

I'll have more when I get some more hours in.

 

I was going to suggest many of that myself for the crafting interface:
- Mouse scrolling would be great (1).
- Clicking on any of the visible items that are not selected should move it to the middle (7).
- Tooltips for the resulting items are needed too (2).
- It would also be great to have the 'grid' view back. To choose quicker. Clicking on a resulting item in grid view would go back to the list view, with that item selected to craft.

And there should be filters and sortings.
- A checkbox you can activate to hide what you can't craft.
- A way to sort the list:
-- By materials required
-- By number of materials used
-- By required crafting skill
-- By value of the resulting item
-- Alphabetically by resulting item
- etc...

 

Managed to kill dredmor with a very tanky melee build, then the game hardcrashed. It's doable, but you need some luck with equipment, as well as craftables. I was running Mace/Shields/Rage/Armour/Burglary/Archaeology/Blacksmithing. Only DL14 and 15 posed any genuine threat.

I've got the save as the damn thing caused me to die on my second go at frying Dredmor *rage* , but ah well.

For melee, the only fix I can genuinely think of that'll solve the problem and give melee chars a genuine shot at clearing the dungeon is a means of converting Armour Absorption into additional spell absorption at a fixed ratio. The big problem isn't physical damage (I was at 45 mundane absorption by the end of the dungeon), it's the wierd stuff like righteous and celestial.

 

A skill that 'll temporarily convert armor absorption into magic absorption sounds like a pretty good idea.

 

That just means melee characters need to prioritize for resistances, which Archaeology handles nicely. By the time I got to Dredmor on floor 15 on my dual wielder I had 6-10 resistance in everything except existential (I'm not counting crush/slice/blast since those are handled by physical absorb.)

 

You can also take demonology and/or astrology. Astro's Radiant Aura + Celestial Aegis + Syzygy is pretty hefty, and coupling it with Celestial Circle is pretty boss.

 

With the new items and item slots, there is no excuse for a melee to ever die to an arch diggle. I think my current run has 19 piercing resist and 36 armor and over 100 block and I still hit for 80 damage with a mace and shield.

If you face a bind trying swaping in two tomes and plinking with arrows/thrown weapons.

 

I had a build like this a few days ago. Werediggle + magic circle was ridiculous. Tons of magic resistance + damage resistance.

 

I have some concerns with the "No Time to Grind" setting.

I'm a busy person with only an hour or two a day to spend on gaming, so I like the idea of halving the size of the dungeon and doubling monster XP. So I've been playing NTtG since the option was made available. For the most part, it seems to work. I've just noticed two little things I feel like I should point out.

One, Monster Zoos- While in most cases the number of monsters you can meet on a level is halved along with the size of the dungeons, Monster Zoos are not reduced in size. At first I didn't think this was a big deal. Then I leveled four or five times when I hit one of the legendary double Zoos on DL 7. With nearly 200 monsters total in the combined zoos, each netting me twice as much XP as normal it was absurdly easy to level up. Granted, that was partly because I had saved a couple of cold res. items for that level, but still. There was way more XP on that floor than there should have been. Side quests that spawn monster groups or named monsters (or monster groups with named monsters) could have unbalancing effects too.

Two, skills that give XP- I'm particularly thinking of Big Game Hunting and, of course, Archaeology. I'm sure this isn't news to the developers but on NTtG all XP gains are doubled, even traps, lock picking and bonus "kill this" XP. Veggies aren't exactly common, so I don't think Vegans will unbalance things. But there are animals on every floor and they often seem like the most common enemies, so the BGH seems to add up a bit more quickly, particularly once you've maxed the skill out and there's a chance of double XP bonuses. As for Archaeology? Let's put it this way. On DL 10 I an Eikre's Grimoire that was enchanted for +3 resistance ( I think) and +2 to a museum and wound up getting almost 40% of the XP I needed for my next level.

I haven't abused these interactions enough to know if they're broken, but they sure feel that way to me, and that's usually not a good sign. Perhaps those with more free time might find it in their hearts to abuse these interactions and see how busted they are? You'd get to play the game more...

Anyway, if it proves to be busted NTtG could just remove the Monster Zoo room and up the instances of some other potentially dangerous "boon" room, like the Dwarven Express Post or the Anvil of Krong. Not sure how the BGH and Archaeology problems could be fixed (aside from overhauling Archaeology some more, which I'm sure is a thrilling suggestion.)

Anyway, I plan to do a Burglary/Archaeology run in the near future, perhaps I'll throw in BGH and let you know how unbalanced I seem by the end of it. Whenever I should happen to die, that is.

 

In the end it's not unbalanced - there's on average enough XP in a 15-level dungeon to cap out any character, and once you cap-out more levels don't DO anything aside refill health and mana. No stat gains, no skill gains. So Archaeology etc. don't mean you go higher...you just get to the plateau at the top faster. And in the deeper levels, it evens out. Also Big Game Hunter gives IIRC 8 XP bonus per kill...even double doubled, that's only 32. You get 90someodd per picked door and chest on DL12 on NORMAL mode. XP boosts in the main balance much like warrior skills - good early, non-functional or detrimental late.

 

Yeah but having an extra level or 2 ahead of what you otherwise would and you are more likely to keep that perma death character. Many times have pulled, out a survive with 3 and 4 hitpoints.

 

Also worth noting that many of the newer skills, like Demonology, are quite long. So are the magic skills. Also, what if a person is skipping dungeon levels? A Promethean user might choose to skip level 9 and be none the worse for wear.

Also, what if a player doesn't have RotDG? No Time to Grind is still available in normal play and Archaeology's functioning won't change just because they don't have the expansion, and you don't have to have RotDG to use that piece of functionality. Ideally "Balance" is something that exists in every play format, not just one.

 

I just want to point out that I have never had any instability issues (only noticed some lag when entering shops, although strangely that is gone now) with DoD on my computer that is running xp, even on older versions of DoD, only a few patches after release date. However it did just crash recently, and I have noticed a few strange lag spikes recently on just my laptop that is running windows seven that I don't think have happened before. I am assuming it is either from this patch, a very recent patch, or a side effect of the dlc. I also want to note that I have not run any mods yet, since I plan on using mods after you guys (the devs) move on to another project, for a number of reasons.

If there is a crash report I can't find it.. anyways I hope this post is helpful, or is already common knowledge.