List of must fixes

[JellySlayer]

Bit of a Necro, apologies.

Things I wouldn't mind getting fixed/ offer of suggestions are:

1] Allow other classes to learn fletching skill. (It's awesome that I got the Sun's Messenger as a Pre-Crowning Gift, but its less awesome that I keep finding Fletching Sets, but only Farmers and Archers can ever learn it. Thus, I'm almost always low on Arrows for an awesome weapon)

Having this available to a few other classes might be nice. Ranger seems a fairly logical choice, though rangers already have a pretty full skillset (and I think it's more of an outrage that rangers don't get stealth). I don't think there's any need to make fletchery always available--arrows are easy enough to find. Maybe give it to Humans as a racial skill?

5] Allow a player to achieve immunity in an element by eating 10+ of a specific element of corpses... or at least make the resistance offered increased by every corpse you consume. (I've eaten numerous fire beetle, and red dragon corpses, and yet my Fire Resistance never really improves)

I don't think this is really necessary. There's already lots of ways to get resistance in-game... it's pretty trivial to get enough counts of resistance (3-4) for you to have immunity for all practical purposes.

8] Change Crowning Gifts from being randomly assigned, to the player choosing their gift. (It can be a real buzzkill when you spend the time investing in your Diety to get Artifacts that you didn't want; A paladin not getting Justifier is a huge letdown) Or change it so that the player chooses three gifts, and the diety randomly assigns the player one of those gifts, to at least narrow down a player's chances.

I agree with grobblewobble here. If this were the case, invariably it would just mean that most of the crowning gifts would never get picked. The gods in ADOM are jerks, sometimes.

9] It might be nice if the Crowning Gift granted was based on the Combat Skills you've been levelling (When I got my crowning Gift, Hammer of the Gods, I had been levelling Shields and Polearms aggressively, and thus had LV9 in Polearms and LV8 in Shields, and thus getting Hammer of the Gods seemed a bit weird to me, as I had no skill in Hammer and Maces when it was given).

See above.

10] It might be nice for a new player to be advised at game start of the special timed-based quests at the beginning of the game, as an option for them to do. (I've been playing since 2003, and its only recently I found out about the Puppy Quest or the Wandering Outlaw Quests at the start of the game; I'd have loved to know that at the start of the game).

These quests are given by unique-looking NPCs in the town. I think it's fairly clear that they're worth talking to. The Puppy Quest is always available even if the puppy is long dead, I think. The tiny girl also does tell you to hurry.

[Burb]

I agree with grobble on most points except these.

I think it would be nice if fletchery kits would be usable with reduced efficiency by other classes though, or if fletchery were possibly learnable. It is just kind of annoying finding literally 10-20+ fletchery kits per game but the vast majority of characters can literally do nothing with such a common item. Fletchery is already an underwhelming skill even on said farmers/archers, I don't think making sets more usable would be too bad.

The inconsistency of rats vs giant rats and different kinds of vomiting I also think, while explainable, is unintuitive for no good reason. Not that it really matters in either case.

To add onto grobble's other points that I agree with,

choosing your crowning gift would indeed be a little silly and boring. I don't think that is the solution. But the main problem I have is that some classes have absolute garbage crowning gifts, like I am literally never going to want the staff options as a wizard. Even worse is the thief, cat's claw is the worst artifact weapon in the game by far, and silver key is the worst artifact (besides those that are bad because of essence of chaos and corruption or dooming) by far. Crowning gifts should at least be "decent", with the small chance of getting a really amazing gift. Or maybe tie some kind of greater Blessed buff when wielding your god's gift. I don't mind being disappointed that I didn't get the exact optimal artifact I wanted, but it's stupid that even for a low-mid game character I can get something that I'll literally never touch again.

Being able to choose your own gift just circumvents the issue that some gifts are utter crap. Otherwise, I'm totally down for random gifts of somewhat varying strengths that might make adjustments to how you play the game (being gifted with powerful melee wapon vs armor vs missile weapon or whatever).

Getting immunity from corpses would break the game. Also, I don't see why you assume you should be able to get increasing fire resistance from eating ever more corpses. Your character isn't literally morphing into a fire monster, you can only absorb so much of its intrinsics. You can only become so "giant like" (more strength) from eating giant corpses. Same for quicklings and claw bugs and so on. Just think of it more like, your stat potential for fire resist is capped at 1 instead of being more fine grained, that's all.

It's not even like immunity is that important. Resists from multiple sources stack, so you can take relatively very little damage with some proper preparation. Immunity definitely helps so that you can free up item slots for other stat bonuses, but it's not as if you need it. And getting immunity just for free really removes a lot of depth in the game from how you approach different elemental dangers.

The corruption resistance thing is just really a bad idea. It completely goes against the design of the game. Furthermore, it doesn't "make sense". Tons of things *do not* provide resistance to the special attack the monster has. Eating a gorgon will petrify you without providing resistance, eating a paralyzing monster will paralyze you without providing resistance, eating a displacer beast will confuse you without providing resistance, eating a kobold corpse will make you sick without providing resistance. Corruption *definitely* is more closely related to these status efffect ailments rather than elemental attacks whose primary effect is direct damage to your hp.

[palandus]

@Grobblewobble; With any suggestions or criticisms comes negativity. It is to be expected on the internet. No worries.

1) Well, the reason I'd like to learn the fletchery skill, is that when I did the village dungeon and learned how to do Bridge Building via a book, I figured that it might be cool if Fletchery could be learned in a similar manner. ie You do a quest, help someone, and they give you a Manual on Fletchery. Yes, you can "technically" wish for fletchery skill, but most people would say that a wish is too VALUABLE to waste on learning fletchery. I'd much prefer to wish for increased Willpower, if I abused health-casting, over fletchery. (Which I did to, as I didn't know that a fix was implemented for that, and thus did it a few too many times and I've lost about 5-6 Willpower and Toughness now. SIGH....). And really, I find the bridge building skill to be FAR less useful than Fletchery, as you can make a temporary bridge over water with frost spells (maybe less sturdy, but it beats hauling around tons of logs to build a bridge with).

3) Yes they could be different breeds, but generally meat within a specific breed tends to taste overall the same. Plus, I get the impression that Dwarves don't enjoy the concept of eating rat, more so than the taste of rat, which is why I raised this issue.

4) You are using Vomit in two different conflicting ways. The first implies that they put the kobold in their mouth and SPIT it out, whereas eating the ant goes down into their stomach and VOMIT it up. I'd prefer that it was changed to You eat a Kobold and Spit it Out before Swallowing it, compared to Eat Kobold, vomit. Vomitting for me means that you swallowed something, and then violently spewed the contents of your stomach onto the dungeon floor. Spitting out for me means that it tasted so bad that they didn't even attempt to swallow it, and thus it is NOT vomiting. If the taste of kobold is vile, then the description should be changed to "Spitting out Kobold" rather than "Vomiting". Thus, that is what I mean by consistent meaning for Vomiting, so that Vomiting is using a single definition to imply that you swallow the food, it doesn't settle well, and you spew the contents of your stomach.

5) Well, the only reason I suggested this is because after you gain intrinsic resistance in something, you can never improve it by eating more corpses and I'd think that after eating multiple corpses, your resistance should improve the more you eat those corpses. Much like with spicy food in real life. The hotter the spice you acclimatize yourself with, the less spice affects you.

6) If the spirit of corruption was a slow downward spiral, then why is corruption applied so quickly? If you use Chaos items, you get corruption. If you get attacked by Chaos creatures, you get corruption. If you eat corrupted creatures, you get corruption. If you are in the wrong place, you get corruption. If you had chaos resistance, then it would slow down corruption, but not negate it. And if your fear is that this could become too abusable, then remove Scrolls of Chaos Resistance/Removal. My view on this is to make it so that you only have a way to resist corruption, if you have willingly eating a corpse of a chaos creature. Otherwise, you have no way to resist corruption.

8) Yes there is an optimal crowning gift. Which means that the others are sub-optimal. Thus, TheCreator should buff up those less optimal gifts, so that each gift would be on par with eachother. Its like the problem with Diablo 3 these days. There are best-in-slot legendaries and sets, and not getting them feels like a letdown. The only way to fix that is to buff the other Artifacts so that they are seen as equally wanted. Thus, a player would have a HARDER choice when choosing an Artifact gift, as each would be equally valuable rather than Justifier for Paladins is wanted always. My viewpoint on this issue is to buff up all the other less interesting artifacts, so that people would want them as much as Justifier.

Yes, but a God should realize that they are intentionally giving a sub-par gift to their champion and that champions I feel are rare as things go, so a God would likely know that they are purposefully screwing with their character by giving them a less optimal gift. And a poorly equipped champion, becomes a dead champion; or a champion that is unable to continue to provide gifts, and sacrifices to that God. So it would make sense to me that a God would want to provide their champion with something powerful... something that the champion would cherish and use in the God's honor rather than throw away and leave to gather dust... or worse, use their gift as a sacrifice to some other God (actually can you do that?). So, my belief is that the God would want their gifts to be equally desirable and help their champion out in unique ways, depending on the gift offered.

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@auricbond

By making the endgame brutally hard and frustrating as heck. At least that's been my experience with more recent Roguelikes or with older Roguelikes from the 90s and 80s.

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@grobblewobble;

Remove SoCR. Introduce resistance by eating chaos corpses. Problem solved. Now, you could only resist things rather than remove it completely. That would make it more of a downward spiral too, if you think about it.

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@jellyslayer;

8) As discussed above in my post for Grobblewobble, buff up the less desirable ones so that a choice wouldn't be so easy for a player. Yes the Gods are often jerks, in ADOM. However, a little bribery could go a long way (ie a monetary "donation") to help encourage the God to give you the thing you want, if you didn't feel that the God should just allow you to pick and choose.

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@burb

Well, if a player can use a Pickaxe without mining, why can a player not use a Fletchery Set without fletching. Obviously, having mining skill will keep the pickaxe from breaking, and thus the Fletching Set should be less effective without the skill. Alternatively, only allow Fletching Sets to drop as loot for Farmers and Archers.

Again, vomiting and spitting out are two different activities. It would be nice that when it says vomiting, it means losing the contents of your stomach, while spitting out means spitting it out of your mouth because it tastes awful.

Again, if less desirable crowning gifts were buffed up, then it would solve a lot of problems with crowning gifts. Each crowning gift should be extremely powerful, and useful in their own right and thus desirable in general.

If gifts are utter crap, then they should be buffed. Thus, if you were given a choice of which Gift to choose, it wouldn't be a simple binary choice; it would be an incomparable choice.

Okay, that is fair enough. Eating corpses shouldn't grant immunity. Thus I offer a counter-solution: Make items that normally only give a resistance to an element, to stack with your intrinsic resistance to create an immunity. For example: You have a ring of fire resistance; it grants fire resistance trait. Then later on you eat a Fire Beetle corpse, and gain intrinsic fire resistance as well. Since you have both intrinsic fire resistance and fire resistance from an item, those combine together to create Fire Immunity. Thus, items that normally only grant fire resistance could become highly desirable by players who have intrinsic fire resistance as well. While more powerful artifacts will still grant full immunity, thus meaning that those items don't require the player to have intrinsic resistance to enjoy the effects of immunity. Thoughts?

Fair enough on the Chaos Resistance. Though, if there wasn't any SoCR then having the possibility of Chaos Resistance would be very helpful.

Though, it would be nice if eating those critters did provide intrinsic resistance to their things.

[JellySlayer]

Okay, that is fair enough. Eating corpses shouldn't grant immunity. Thus I offer a counter-solution: Make items that normally only give a resistance to an element, to stack with your intrinsic resistance to create an immunity. For example: You have a ring of fire resistance; it grants fire resistance trait. Then later on you eat a Fire Beetle corpse, and gain intrinsic fire resistance as well. Since you have both intrinsic fire resistance and fire resistance from an item, those combine together to create Fire Immunity. Thus, items that normally only grant fire resistance could become highly desirable by players who have intrinsic fire resistance as well. While more powerful artifacts will still grant full immunity, thus meaning that those items don't require the player to have intrinsic resistance to enjoy the effects of immunity. Thoughts?

This is already the case. It doesn't say you have immunity, but with about 4 counts of resistance (or intrinsic + 2 more), you will basically never take elemental damage. There might be some odd exceptions (ridiculously experienced monsters in the deep ID), but for the most part 3-4 resistances is about enough. In fact, one particular area in the game requires you to have multiple stacked resistances (or immunity).

[palandus]

Ahh, I didn't know that extra sources already stack. I figured that once you had one source of resistance, it made all others irrelevant and caused no change.

Another suggestion for changes is:
Automatic Arrow Change = When you run out of arrows, it automatically switches to a new arrow, without prompting you. Make it an optional feature. Its just that as I have about 70 arrows, but each are stacks of 1 or 2 each, it gets a bit annoying to be constantly prompted to change arrows when I run out.

[platypower]

@palandus:

I've played ADOM since the 90s and I disagree, like the other posters who've responded to you, with most of what you're suggesting. It would seem your ideas are at odds with the philosophy of the game and I believe Adom would be a poorer experience for it should they be implemented. Sure, there is no shortage of quirks and idiosyncrasies. For instance, I agree bridge building is massively useless (or a terrible ordeal - I once insisted on lugging half a dozen 800s logs down several dungeon levels to the one place in the game where the skill actually comes in handy) for being such a central part of the most frequently completed quest in the game. But hey, I choose to find the humor in it.

And please, don't ever compare Adom to Diablo III. I'll pay Thomas $15 myself for every mainstream gamer he refuses to pander to.

[palandus]

So, let me understand this correctly. You are opposed to my ideas because I compared it to mainstream games that have failed due to major gamebreaking problems? I bring up Diablo 3 because the sole reason the item hunt is complete and utter shit is because of the existence of best in slot items. If you don't have the best in slot items, you feel that the majority of loot dropped is utterly useless. The same goes here. The reason people want Justifier or other artifacts ALWAYS is because they are best in slot items. As long as they remain best in slot, all the other artifacts will be seen as utter shit, as it isn't the best in slot item they wanted. Its not that the artifacts are worthless, but the player's perception of them compared to the artifact they wanted is utter shit.

Also, I'm not aware of this "philosophy" of the game that you and others have quoted. Where is it so that I can read it and inform myself, so I can avoid wasting everyones precious time...

If a game like Diablo 3 suffers from problems that have made the playerbase pissed off with those developers, why shouldn't Thomas learn from their mistakes and not do the same in his game. Hmmm? If each Artifact that was given as a crowning gift was equally desirable, there wouldn't be a huge let down when that player got an artifact other than Justifier. How pray tell is that a BAD thing? Hell, based on the games that do have best in slot items, the item hunt is made WORSE when that is the case, and ADOM would benefit from avoiding the same problems.

Finally, don't compare me to a mainstream gamer ever again. Only warning.

[Soirana]

So, let me understand this correctly. You are opposed to my ideas because I compared it to mainstream games that have failed due to major gamebreaking problems? I bring up Diablo 3 because the sole reason the item hunt is complete and utter shit is because of the existence of best in slot items. If you don't have the best in slot items, you feel that the majority of loot dropped is utterly useless. The same goes here. The reason people want Justifier or other artifacts ALWAYS is because they are best in slot items. As long as they remain best in slot, all the other artifacts will be seen as utter shit, as it isn't the best in slot item they wanted. Its not that the artifacts are worthless, but the player's perception of them compared to the artifact they wanted is utter shit.

I think Adom's approach to problem is that particular game has it's artifact pool which is different from other Adom game.
So one char might never have a chance to get Justifier,but has Vanquisher, Executor and bracers of war in his pool. And I would not call Executor "utter shit" compared to Justifier.

Now crowning gifts are very unbalanced, sure. But so is starsigns and the classes... Either you enjoy that sort of variance or not. And if not, well Adom might seem like rather harsh game to play.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I'm curious then, how do other corruption-less rogue-likes (which is presumably all of the rest of them) stop the end-game from getting boring?

They don't. This is arguable, but I'd say all the long roguelikes suffer from boring late game. In fact, even in ADOM the late game is widely held to be significantly more boring than the early game, even though corruption certainly spices things up compared to other games.

The underlying issue is that with permadeath, the game designer shouldn't really make experienced players die frequently when they have invested 6-8+ hours into a game, as it gets really frustrating to lose all that progress and repeat everything. So most of the long roguelikes have a structure where the early game is high-risk, but then you gather resources and become more shielded against risk (with resistances, immunities, spells/items that help you escape from danger, means of healing, AoLSs, etc.) so the late game becomes easier.

I don't think there is much of a solution to this. In fact this is hardly new to roguelikes, I have experienced it in tabletop RPGs too, the DM is not likely to kill your epic character after months or years of campaign - although in tabletop RPGs the problem is less important because risk is not such an important factor for the game being fun.

And this is probably one of the reasons why short-form roguelikes are getting increasingly popular (e.g. Brogue) and some mainstream long-form roguelikes add ways to circumvent permadeath (ToME).

[palandus]

Permanent death is very appealing for roguelikes when the time invested in the game to do anything isn't much. Permanent Death is very unappealing when you have to invest 20+ hours to get anywhere (it took me 10 hours to LV my Dwarven Priest to 22) and thus encourages players to save scum to avoid losing that character.

The problem with D&D though is that death at epic levels is never permanent. They have so many resources that death is a minor inconvenience.

It would make more sense if the early game was easier and the late game harder, but doable with resistances and immunities, or nearly impossible without resistances and immunities. The greatest difficulty should be where the greatest challenge is desired, the end game. If the early game was easier, then more players would survive to the late game and then die but feel like they accomplished something... rather than dying at LV 6, because their Wizard couldn't find a single spellbook and died being eaten alive by a Giant Rat. (that happened to me; Wizards are great when you have the spells, but terrible when you run out of them and can't find spellbooks)