You Have To Put The Feedback for the DLC In The Beta Thread

You either get one or you don't. I've had many crashes that didn't result in a crash dump. But if you get one it shows up in the directory your dungeons of dredmor.exe is in.

 

Finally got set up to play the DLC. Here's some initial thoughts:

Game loads MUCH faster. Not sure if that's because I'm running it outside of the Steam framework, or if it's some new streamlined launch code in the DLC version, but the rapid transition through the launch windows is much appreciated.

Love the new splash screen, but it would be neat if you could choose which one to use.

SKILLS:
On the skill selection screen, the descriptive text overflows on both the Rogue Scientist and Warlockery. Rogue Scientist cuts off just past "will improve your" and warlock ends with "in a variety". The player can kinda guess how the sentences were likely to end, so it's not critical, but it does kinda look bad. Could probably use a little trimming of the superfluous verbiage.

Love that the crafting skills now go to 6 levels.

Perception now gives "lucky finds" upon killing monsters, but nothing in the skill description indicates this. A player who'd decided before the DLC that perception wasn't worth taking won't be persuaded to try it by the skill menu.

SMITHING RESISTS:
Smithing levels 3 and 5 grant , but the description for level 4 says "you like it hot". Either the resist or the flavor text should probably move a level, so they match.

Concerning the 2 at the end of smithing: Unless you get to floor 15, the game only has 4 monsters that do , and they're all on caster monsters that don't do much in melee and rely on just 1 to 3 to hurt the PC a tiny bit when confronted up close. Those 2 points of resist won't come up very often, but when they do they pretty much zero out the damage from a monster type. I'm not sure I have an opinion on whether that's a good or a bad thing, I just wanted to make sure it's something you're aware of.


DUNGEON:
Did the black space on the top of the walls change? It seems lighter and more speckly to me. (It's possible that it's just an illusion caused by the different angle between eye and screen due to a recent change of chairs at my desk.) If it is a change to the image file for the top of the walls, I like it. EDIT: Switched back to my usual chair (4 inches lower in height) and it looks normal again. Weird that the angle has such an impact on the darker colors.

Love the changes to the room with the levers for reaching an artifact or 3 enraged diggles. It may not be very clear (or kind) for noobs, but I think that's just fine to have a trial-and-error room in the early game for them to have to figure out.

David, I love what you did with my dining table. Custombreakable is a much better tactical option than my customblockers, and the single leg per section looks great.

CALTROPS:
Caltrop eruptions seem like they might be happening a bit much on the first floor, though I can't yet rule out RNG screw. I like the concept in general, I just find that it's frustrating when your character with very little equipment and no rogue skills sets one off in the first or second room and finds a hallway absolutely stuffed with strong iron and rusty caltrops. If you're not playing a rogue, 3-consecutive spaces of 8 damage each pretty much chops the dungeon in half until you've got several levels under your belt.

By floor two, that's not an issue as you've got a lot more HP and hopefully much better equipment, but they definitely make the first floor noticeably tougher for non-rogues than it had been. I'll need to play more to be sure, I suspect I'd be inclined to bump up the level of the rusty caltrop eruptor itself by 1 to make it a little less common on the first floor. There's always been a subset of the player base who believe Burglary and/or Archaeology are must-have skills for every character, and this only reinforces that
EDIT: It was just RNG screw. My first character had a ton of Caltrop eruptors, for whatever reason, so I assumed that the level ratings of the weakest types must be 1 and 2, instead of the 2 and 4 that they actually are.

Also, while I really enjoy the geeky humor of the d4 caltrop, I find it counter-intuitive that they'd be more damaging than rusty or strong iron. The rest of the game uses "iron is better than copper which is better than plastic" as a crafting maxim. If you just survived stepping on an iron caltrop, your first assumption will be that the plastic is going to do 25% to 50% less damage, not 33% more.


That's all for now. I'm off to make a new character and try again. (Last one died to a plastic caltrop EDIT: on floor one.)

 

Yeah. I noticed the caltrop annoyance myself.
Regarding the 3 x 8 damage, that's 24 damage. All the characters I've started with have around 28 to 30 health at level 1. And that's with Archaeology/Burglary/Perception/maces/dual-weild/and one or two other skills that change depending on my play style.
I'd imagine rogues would have even less health than that, and mages even smaller.
A warrior build without the ability to see traps would still be able to tank that damage, so I don't think the level would be cut in half for them.
I agree with you though, don't get me wrong.
It's just that a warrior would have a lot easier time dealing with it.

They may do 8 damage a hit, but unlike acid traps, they can have their damage reduced by AA/easy to get resists.
Get lucky and get full plate mail, and no caltrop is going to do any big damage to you until much later.

 

All very good points.

However, it's probably worth mentioning that:

• it takes a good bit of luck to have full plate mail on floor 1,
• being able to survive the damage of stepping on three caltrops in a row does not mean it's not a significant discouragement to do so, especially on GR where naturally healing just about doesn't exist and food comes in much smaller quantities. GR characters spend a large portion of floor 1 at well below maximum hp.
• wizards in particular have little access to trap skills, and very few hp or armour early on. The caltrops are probably a lot worse for wizards than the other two archetypes. Of course, wizards have it so easy late-game, that perhaps a bit more early-game woes is a good thing.

As I said I won't have a strongly-held opinion on it till I've played a lot more DLC to get a feel for just how much this changes the first floor (which was the only floor I'm concerned about).

 

Caltrop eruptors are great to lure monsters into. Further, if you set one off by stepping on it, it's 16 damage to get clear: 8 from the initial pop, 8 more from stepping off onto a caltrop, and then one more step and you're clear. If you set one off adjacent, it's only 8: step back and you're clear.

Rusty caltrops (made by the eruptor) are level 1 traps, so one point of means you can turn them into XP for no risk. Rusty caltrop eruptors are level 2, so 2 makes them a non-threat. That means taking tinkering (first skill gives 1, second skill gives 1 ), burglary (first skill gives 1), archaeology (first skill gives 1), or smithing (second skill gives 1) means you can handle rusty caltrops without even needing an artifact. Otherwise, there are always knockback effects (psionics (3), demonology (1), rogue scientist (2), and clockwork knight (2) in core game give them early) or teleports (mathemagic (1), artful dodger (2), and clockwork knight (3) give early pass-arounds). Or you could summon something into it: golemancy gets a trap-triggering summon at 2nd level, as does fungal arts. So I don't really think it means that burglary/archaeology are required: it means any one of tinkering, burglary, archaeology, smithing, psionics, demonology, rogue scientist, clockwork knight, golemancy, or fungal arts is recommended, but again: there is always the lure-the-monster-into-it option. That's a large portion of the skills, and that's not even counting items (like the handy wand--craftable via wandsmithing 2--or concussion grenades--craftable from tinkering 1, and both readily available on the floor or from vendors).

AA won't help against caltrops, actually: they deal , which AA specifically doesn't help against.

Rusty caltrops deal 44. In comparison, a shoddy dwarven IED deals 53, a boulder drop plate deals 9, and a crude blade trap deals 8: none of these are considered particularly dangerous for the first floor, and deal identical damage to the caltrops. In fact, the caltrops are easier to mitigate due to their multiple damage sources.

 

I think the big issue is more when overleveled caltrops spawn on floor 1 (I've seen quantum ones there). That's nothing new though, if an inconspicious pressure plate, dwarvern landmine, or thaumite swarm trap spawns there it's already pretty bad, and I've seen those too. Just terribly unlucky.

 

New blobby squish noise is awesome.

Having "the" in the name of "the robot that loves" and especially the new "the common cave raven" results in some oddly-phrased ticker messages. "The the common cave raven collapses in a pile of gack and red mist" etc. Nothing major, but a little odd.

Very good point.

I think my problem was actually just the RNG screwing with me. I had five caltrop eruptors (at least two of them the stronger iron type) in the first 3 rooms on my first character with the DLC. It was harsh, and caused me to make some false assumptions about the level setting on those traps. My next character only found 1 on the entire floor, and the files show me that the basic eruptors are higher level than I assumed from that initial experience. The RNG just hates me, that's all. So i withdraw my objections.

 

Ouch at the RNG screw, R_B.
And thanks for telling me I have some good points.

Also, forgot that the caltrops do piercing. Armor itself helps against that because of how much piercing resist you can get.

And you're right, it's not likely to get full plate armor on floor 1.
I did with my current game though.

Also, am I the only one who really doesn't like all the new monster sound effects? Some are okay, but some, they make me wince.
Not quite fingernail on chalkboard, but annoying.

Oh, I'm not the only one when I first got Knightly leap didn't realize it meant the chess-piece movement, right?
Because for quite some time when I first played this game, I couldn't realize why it only let me move in some places.

 

I always treat caltrop eruptors as xp machines. If I can pick it up I disarm it, plop it back down and then trigger it on purpose so I can disarm all the caltrops. If I don't have enough to pick them up, I just trigger on purpose and disarm the caltrops.

 

On different note:

Code:

    <effect type="damage" transmutative="2" transmutativeF="4" secondaryScale="19"
 
affectsCaster="1" /> <!-- Tinkering -->

Should be

Code:

    <effect type="damage" transmutative="2" transmutativeF="4" secondaryScale="20"
 
affectsCaster="1" /> <!-- Tinkering -->

If the comment is to be believed (secondaryscale="19" points to smithing).

As a sidenote to that, Clockwork Knight's description mention its abilities being boosted by smithing and tinkering, but only rocket jump is affected by tinkering, and none of them by smithing.

 

So, I killed a Deep Diggle Chef and it dropped a Deep Omelet... they eat their young. They COOK! AND EAT THEM! They have chefs specifically trained for this! Diggles are even more terrifying than I first imagined and I no longer have qualms about annihilating every last one of them.

Thank you for removing the scales from my eyes.

 

You're welcome.

 

Not especially useful, unless they've made wands able to target things other than monsters? (Haven't checked since RC4.)

Random thought I had quite a while ago: is there a reason, other than being uncharacteristically nice to the player, that you start with 1 trap sight instead of 0? Among other things, this is part of why click-to-move completely negates the danger of traps. At the very least, maybe this ought to scale with difficulty.

 

Target yourself. Its an anchored emanation anyway, so it always centers on you. Stand next to it and cast.

 

Or maybe we shouldn't change it. I'm just saying...
not everything needs to be made harder in this game. Even on Going Rogue.
This is like an introduction to Roguelikes. This isn't Omega, the hardest roguelike ever made.
I am almost certain only 3 people beat it. Or something really small. And the creator made it harder after the first person beat it.

I'm just saying, in the grand scheme of things, this doesn't need to be changed.

 

Ravens might need to be toned down a little. Even with 50 EDR I hit deep ravens with maybe 1 out of 4 attacks and they deal ranged existential damage which almost impossible to find resists for.

That being said I'm still alive so... maybe they aren't too bad, but their evasion rate still seems completely absurd, most people aren't going to have 50 EDR.

 

You're killing ravens and you're still alive?