Thoughts on 0.2.3

[Dervi]

I'm currently playing a trollish monk, and managed to reach clvl 27. I'm sometimes amazed, sometimes puzzled with this character...

1) Current fighting stats: attack 1d92, damage 1d35+38 (x4, 23%)... and this is per hand... amazing
2) Current stats: abysmal (without the shard of elemental earth and Athletics, all stats would probably be below 10)... seems that they get drained by simply breathing
3) I've found two elemental shards in the Drakalor Chain... but the two other ones are elsewhere, and I didn't find the old guy to tell me where (the level where he usually is has probably a secret passage/door I didn't find -- and I don't have found a large pick axe yet)
4) As a monk, I'm supposed to shatter stone with kicks... but the ability doesn't appear with 'x', and kicking walls still gives the "you hurt your foot" message
5) Each step I take outside of a dungeon triggers a wilderness encounter... mostly harmless, but the repetition makes the current version a PitA to play
6) Resting takes too long... I wish I could change the 100 turn count and remove those "fiddling with lock" messages while resting

[MITZE]

Yep, they're pretty awesome . . . my first (and probably only) win was with a Troll that specialized in 'Unarmed combat' (this was in V0.2.0--'Warrior monks' weren't even implemented yet!).

1) According to this thread (http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread.php/11393-The-First-Victory-Post-(-)) I made when I won, the character was doing 78-83 (so I guess 1d6+77?) damage (with eight times damage on criticals (!!!)) at about level 50 in 'Unarmed combat'--and like you said: "per hand." Terrifying.
2) Yeah, Trolls seem to start with a score of less than ten in everything except Strength and Toughness. I'm also pretty sure that being 'Bloated' abuses Appearance/Dexterity/Toughness, which doesn't help any. At least you can use the throwing ability of the profession to make dealing with shadows, wights, and other stat-draining monsters easy.
3) You can use medium-sized tools as a Troll--this is probably a bug.
4) Yeah, that ability seems to be absent. I still need to submit a report for it.
5) Every step? I noticed wilderness encounters seemed to occur often, but not that often! That might be another bug.
6) I wish that the 'rest until fully healed' command from Angband was implemented.

[JellySlayer]

I think TB has introduced cursing and dooming. You might want to see if you are somehow cursed/doomed. That could explain the wilderness encounters... Once per step seems extremely high from my experience (although they are a bit more common than I'd like, and hard to avoid).

[Dervi]

Nope, the wilderness encounter rate is simply really high. Best I've seen in that game without getting a random encounter was 3 steps...

Anyway, more remarks (and a YASD):
- the character died when going down to a level where the first room contained 4-5 hill giant bashers and a few 11-headed hydras -- instakill (a bit harsh IMHO, but in later versions, there will be ways to deal with that, like wands of teleport)
- seems strange that wearing one of a pile of armor parts only identifies that item... it should identify the pile no?
- there are a lot of corpses available for filling one's stomach in dungeons... but I've yet to see a ration generated for travels (and you don't want to be hungry in this game, or you'll lose all your stats in no time) -- this means that you're almost doomed to fight every encounter in hope they drop some corpses

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Nope, the wilderness encounter rate is simply really high. Best I've seen in that game without getting a random encounter was 3 steps...
It seems to be decent at the beginning, but increase later (with character level?) Encounters every three steps seem to be really common for characters over level 10... and yes, it's too much.

[Dervi]

I give up on 0.2.3, for two reasons...
- I've now got two characters die from mighty blows delivered by monsters on doors on the other side of a level -- this is really something that would make me consider savescumming... but now it seems impossible to do so with the checksums in the savefiles
- No matter how buff your character is, any critical hit from a large monster means instant death -- I've got level 30 characters with 500 hps instantly killed by a troll brute doing two criticals for almost 600 damage!

Clearly the first thing to balance is the monster damage output in melee. Sounds like the critical hits are calculated from the base damage, not from the output damage (dam - PV). Considering PV would probably make crits bearable, since most hard hitters do blunt damage.

Maybe add an "adventure mode" for the early releases with a limited amounts of lives -- spending hours killing bats and goblins over and over and then being instantly splattered by the first large brute doing a critical hit is starting to get really frustrating...

[grobblewobble]

- No matter how buff your character is, any critical hit from a large monster means instant death -- I've got level 30 characters with 500 hps instantly killed by a troll brute doing two criticals for almost 600 damage!

For large monsters my routine is: coward mode, disarm, berserk mode, kill, flee from other monsters, heal up, back to frontline. I also always try to wear a blessed ring of speed, which means monsters get in fewer hits. It seems reasonably safe, so far I only died to mistakes that could have been avoided (overconfidence). And to game crashes and infinite loops, of course.

It does get tiresome to kill hordes of giants and trolls this way, especially with the slow healing, as you said in the other thread. The healing skill should be improved imo, I think I will add an issue in the bug list for that.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

For large monsters my routine is: coward mode, disarm, berserk mode, kill, flee from other monsters, heal up, back to frontline. I also always try to wear a blessed ring of speed, which means monsters get in fewer hits. It seems reasonably safe, so far I only died to mistakes that could have been avoided (overconfidence). And to game crashes and infinite loops, of course.

It does get tiresome to kill hordes of giants and trolls this way, especially with the slow healing, as you said in the other thread. The healing skill should be improved imo, I think I will add an issue in the bug list for that.
My experience is like this too. I find large monsters difficult, but by no means impossible with a monk (with a non-monk, they're probably impossible). The disarming class power makes it difficult for them to hit you twice with their weapons. I had a char that killed like 10 ogre lords before dying to one (which could probably be avoided if I had been more careful and fleed with a ring of speed). Although as you say, the midgame (if troll brutes+ogres+ogre lords is the midgame) is somewhat tedious due to the slow healing and the repeated "fiddling with a lock" messages when you wait.

I agree with Dervi (at another thread) that one probably needs A LOT of luck to win 0.2.3, due to unreachable dungeons. In all the games where I had the chance to explore the wilderness around the Chain, there seemed to be at least one unreachable dungeon. I hope we are given climbing sets in 0.2.4 - I think with the current game features plus climbing sets and no entering dungeon bug, winning the game would be feasible with the right R/C combos and enough perseverance.

[Dervi]

The problem with the large monsters is the crits. I've seen hill giants doing over 200 damage AFTER having been disarmed... This is clearly out of scale with what the midgame is supposed to be. Currently, the most balanced monster is probably the hydra. They give decent challenge (5-headed at level 15, 11-headed at level 25), hit hard but they're not impossible to kill without having to be a particular race/class combo. The giants and troll brutes are clearly overpowered.

[Dervi]

Another remark: I've tried a barbarian to see if true berserking was worth it... and it seems so. Mighty blow + true berserking seems to deal a LOT of damage. However, as soon as I decided to put a level into monk (to get disarm), the true berserking mode irremediably vanished. Sounds like a bug to me...

[Dervi]

By the way, is there something other than enless similar levels in the CoC before reaching the chaos gate?