Decreasing item drop rate only means staying in something like R5 or UC3-5 (or wherever those cavernous levels were) and grinding there for whatever wands/potions/scrolls you need. I'm very glad I don't need to do that at the moment. Instead I wonder how much harder the game would become if you removed girdles of carrying and Strength of Atlas entirely and tweaked how Strength influences carrying capacity (increase earlier thresholds, vastly decrease later ones).
Teleportation is a bit more tricky. Even if you severely restrict it, it still would be an amazing life saver as long as you have it at all. Even if you had 3 or 4 casts for the whole game, it would probably be enough to save you in all trickiest situations! The second problem in late game is speed. With typical score of 130+ and blessed seven league boots nothing can really touch you unless you severely miscalculate or it's a quickling. You don't even need gear up for increasing your speed; with Dexterity of ~40 and Long Stride + all speed talents you'll be there anyway.
Then there's slaying ammunition issue. It's so good. Criticals can be extremely powerful and huge bonuses from missile weapon skills ensure that with enough grinding you WILL be able to hit some of them. I've one-shot ACW twice in the recent months. Literally, it fell from the first slaying missile that landed. By the time you reach bottom of CoC, you will have 20-40 of each type for various missile weapons (now that sling bullets count too) and couple with your extreme speed there's really nothing that can put a serious dent on you, even without Teleportation.
Another underlying problem is that certain events or points in the game award you an awful lot compared to the rest of the game, by which I mean they are milestones and the rest of the game is just more or less boring walk towards those milestones. The offenders are:
1. Dwarven mystic - giving neutrals enough SoCRs to last them for the whole gate closing easily. Sure, it's 50% chance and you need to be neutral, but if you are lucky, you get enough SoCRs to last you for the rest of the game. The lawful reward is much more balanced, giving you a good missile (or a decent melee weapon) that isn't overpowered.
2. Minotaur maze - holy crap this one is ridiculous. +13 St, +11 To, +11 Pe, +4 to all other stats on average, PoCCs, very powerful twohander and a random artifact. This is of course including eating the emperor's corpse, which is totally worth it. You just get your Wi back to 25 before drinking PoGAs. Minotaur maze is not hard at all, it's just tedious and doesn't require particulary extensive preparations - only teleport control, confusion resistance and 7-10 humanoid slaying ammo + 4-6 levels in missile weapon are essential. I've been doing it without teleportation and magic mapping all the time, only caring for some Dexterity and Sixth Sense/Alertness/Detect Traps to avoid item destruction. PV and DV you have after Ice Queen's Domain and Tomb of the High Kings is always enough to tackle this location. I swear pit and stone block traps do more damage overall than enemies there.
3. Dwarven quests - these aren't bad except for the Big Punch, which is very good at this point of the game and you probably have a girdle of carrying at this point anyway.
4. Unicorn quest - very easy to do at level 30 with a huge reward
5. Water dragon cave - very good weapon if you're born under Raven and you only need two charges of teleportation and easily obtainable means of water breathing, the latter one not even being absolutely necessary if you have 100 Swimming. Searching for WDC is funny too, it looks as if there's a chance of it being on the water tile you're entering instead of being in a pre-determined location; I often find it on the very first water tile I enter.
6. Crowning - there's a recent thread for it already. You basically get an artifact suited for your class and a Wyrmlance (heh heh heh).
The last problem I can think of now is that late game locations are not challenging, only tiresome.
- Air Temple is only challenging if Yulgash summons something interesting. It's a pure gamble but very often it will be a walk in the park. I think his summoning might have been nerfed a bit too much, last time I was there he got exhausted after summoning some karmic wyrms or dragons, don't remember. Sure, kind of tough, but they couldn't target me through my invisibility.
- Mana Temple is pretty interesting. I could do without the traps and tricky digging in as they don't really make it harder at all. The PP drain is pretty nice, serves for a decent wake-up call for an otherwise extremely easy time when playing a competent spellcaster. Everything else is pretty easy though - monsters are easy and for the archmage you wear amulet of death ray resistance, use a torch and just berserk him with AotME, ha ha. Or use the humanoid slaying ammo if you don't feel that brave.
- D:50 would be only problematic if you couldn't run from balors. My recent gate closer, mist elven druid, just meleed everything with AotME on berserk. What, corrupting attacks? Who cares, I have my unicorn buddy waiting for me on the surface, and if I was attempting an ultra ending, I'd probably need some more corruptions anyway. Only balors are dangerous, but are easily kited. If you proceed with care and handle levers slowly, they will always appear one by one. Imagine how different it would be if they jumped you all at once! Wouldn't that be fun? Instead you just kill them one by one and yawn. The rest of the monsters are just boring grind, none of them can harm you except ghosts for races with short lifespans but those are easily dealt with using missiles and invisibility.
In the end I seriously think the hardest part of the late game are tension rooms. It's not a good design when you're yawning through elemental temples but are wary of a random dungeon feature. You wouldn't like fighting with 20 emperor liches but hundreds of chaos servants aren't a problem at all.
I think that's what late game locations should go for. Instead of having hundreds of chaos spawns and WMoPCs why not have strong monsters actively pursuing you? It's all so easy because you can avoid all dangers and don't have to face them head on. You know why titans are difficult? Because you can't play tag with them as easily with their eternium quarrels flying at you. I wonder how much harder would the standard game be, i.e. no ultra ending, if you just:
- don't use seven league boots
- don't use Teleportation and teleportitis (easier version: only use it for dwarven mystic and HMV scroll)
- don't use slaying ammunition of any kind
I have to try it some time. I guess Acid Ball spellcasters would still not mind it very much, ha ha.
Last edited by Scooter Fox; 09-12-2015 at 11:17 PM.
Gate closers: GE Wizard, DE Archer, Ratling Elementalist, Ratling Duelist, GE Merchant, ME Druid, HE Mindcrafter, ME Monk