More about newer version of ADOM
The game is easier than ADOM 1.1.1. That's because of three things.
1. Character creation.
a) With the points based system it's now easy to get a character with 3 talents and the talents themselves got buffed.
b) Half of the Heir talent gifts now nice armours and reaching Dwarftown is now a lot more likely even for a merchant or farmer class.
c) Even if you don't choose to get Heir, the Skilled talents give nice early boosts to classes which have skills dice problem (such as Mindcrafter or Necromancer) and for slower levelling races. Having 80 Dodge and 80 Alertness before reaching Jharod is possible now.
d) For trolls and slow levelling classes, and for classes which get useful early class abilities, you can focus on +21% experience gaining Learner talents.
2. New locations.
a) Goblin Camp provides rocks and gear to help in early game.
b) Borderland Settlement gives a lot of potions so there's finally enough holy water. The guaranteed altar helps in sorting backpack during wilderness travel and during deeper CoC dive, when getting back to Dwarftown was too cumbersome. It helps with getting rid of dooming when drinking Darkforge pools. Also acquiring contractors from the settlement makes a few old tricks a lot more viable.
c) Fungal Caves with or even without herbalism skill yield unlimited healing, satiation and makes reaching 25 Dx, To and Wi easy in mid game. Lack of disposable healing killed a lot of mid and late game characters previously.
d) Ice Queen Domain helps in the second biggest threat - preparing for ToEF. More gear and experience can make a life and death difference in that part of the game.
3. Slight changes for things which previously resulted in a grind.
a) Darkforge is a good source of pick axes and wands of digging now. The pick axes don't break that frequently anymore. So digging around trapped doors and smithing is a lot easier now. It can result in less random gear loss and in buffed DV/PV.
b) Tomb of the High Kings has enough ogre magi and ice vortices to rely on, and there's levitation and parting water quarterstaves so crossing piranha lake and rives in general is not that frustrating anymore.
c) Pick pocketing got nerfed so if you're devoted to do it anyways you need to get the Stealthy talent to have it as it was previously.
d) A few more artifacts which are actually better than the common gear, which was not always a case with the old artifacts.
---
There is one thing to fix left though. The experience gaining system. All the above changes made some frustrating, grinding, scummy places and mechanics more fun. The experience system still results in scumming for it or in not getting all the fun which is designed into the character classes. The problem lays in the dependency on the character speed; there's a difference in experience gain from killing the most dangerous foes such as Chaos Archmage or balors between half a million and one hundred thousand. It actually hurts to wear the ring of the master cat or any speeding-up gear, or to have high Dexterity, or to be a monk. Even scumming for experience is tedious. Hurthling cup-born monk with Good and Great Learner talents can't get past xp level 45. All the level 32+ class mechanics are can be treated as useless because even if they trigger, they trigger in D:50.
Reply With Quote