I think you've heavily overstating how common they are. A couple of lost strength and toughness from advanced undead don't ruin a character. I was a new player too (can't get away with calling myself that these days, admittedly), and I never felt that these creatures were too common or would inevitably ruin my day when I met them. I just learnt to deal with them. It might have turned out different if you regularly met wights etc. in the small cave or village dungeon, but no - you find those guys in the midgame at the earliest. You'd have to be colossally unlucky to meet a vampire until the CoC graveyard, and even then I wonder how you'd get anywhere near that far with a "low DV warrior". On the list of top 100 things that are going to screw you in ADOM, stat drains don't even make, like, the lower sixties.

Strength drains are already temporary in the sense that training strength back to at least 18 is easy, especially if you've been there before (i.e. your potential is higher). Toughness drains, morgia roots, plus the corpses of the undead that drain stats. Greater daemon stat drains can affect hard-to-fix stats, but then the greater daemon is a boss fight. With a daemon. That's supposed to be a somewhat nasty affair, isn't it?

Consequences are not a bad thing. I played XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the reimagining of the old classic X-COM: Ufo Defense, recently (a great game, by the way). Your soldiers, who grow in power as they rise in rank and in some way represent your own "stats", will frequently die to aliens, more often than not because you made a strategical mistake; sometimes just because aliens are nasty like that (really, though, it was probably a mistake of yours even then). And yet, the game includes an Ironman mode in which there's only one savegame and dead soldiers are permanently dead, and it's played by more players - exclusively - than even the designers anticipated, who added the mode as an afterthought and hadn't expected players to actually want to subject themselves to permadeath. Then there's the success of FTL, which borders on mainstream - and places an equally high emphasis on deadliness and consequence. It's making a comeback, and ADOM is just in time.

What this tells us is that consequences are not a bad thing; they add to the experience since they lend weight to the decisions you make in the game. Permanent stat drains would be bad if they were unavoidable and make no sense within the game's world; but they're usually neither. There are a select few monsters that can even drain stats, and they all make sense. Vampires and wights and spectres and wraiths should be terrifying and imbued with undead malicious magic that feasts on your life force. And more importantly, stat drains need to be felt by the player, who's expecting the world of ADOM to be hostile and dangerous, or they'd lose all meaning. If you make them temporary, you'd have to make them bigger so they actually become dangerous short term, or you might as well not bother.

Am I consistently colossally unlucky? :P Also, regarding strength, most melee types start with 18+ St. So strength loss, especially when it gets beyond 2 points, starts to be a very big thing. This is the worst thing really.

That is something I would be perfectly happy with :) Make stat drains hugely meaningful in battle, instead of something to be consistently avoided with little tricks. Hell, make them work as a ranged attack!

Huh? Why's everyone groaning at me? ;P

Silfir: macroscopically, I don't think anyone here is talking about the minor undead like wraiths, wights, shadows, etc. (if they are, I'd be very surprised, I wasn't even thinking about them). I am thinking of vampires (where you need a good 30-35 PV to stand a chance at not getting hit) and the higher liches who can drain your stats with spells (which is really where the stat drains get you, the stat draining spells are bad).

Grey is of course correct that many melee types start with St >18, some start with To >25, so losing that can be a big hit. In addition, this often happens after you've done the ogre cave, making it even harder to get St back.

So... you're talking about, what, four monsters? Lich king, emperor lich, mino mage, greater daemon? All of whom are super rare except in very special (and avoidable) areas?

Well, yes, approximately. Why would anyone care about wights and such draining To? It hurts, sure, but it's extremely easy to get enough PV to fend them off [outside of the very early game, but it's not like they show up all the time there], so who cares if they can drain you? The real stat drainers that hurt are the ones that use magic. Mino mages are very solvable, you just need a wand of stunning. While there's a guaranteed greater daemon, he doesn't have that much HP and is easy enough to finish off in other ways if you can't take it. That really just leaves the greater undead--Lich Kings & Emperor Liches. [and vampires, but those are again solved by PV, though it does require a bit more PV than I would expect someone to have when they first run across them]. They're possible to take in melee, but they have such high HP and the stat drains are so bad that they simply aren't worth it at all. Why not give [pretty good] protection from them with an amulet of protection from undead? It makes the item quite useful (esp. if it really helps with the physical attacks as I noted. then one would want one against vampires or other minor undead where your PV isn't high enough). Most importantly, it gives people another option in how to take them out and (with other appropriate items) starts to give you a real chance against an undead greater vault.

I personally do not give much credence to how rare or 'avoidable' they are, given the current options to take them on.

The more I think about it the more the protecting amulet idea works, and already fits in with the game's other themes of wearing special protective items against certain threatening monsters. There's no guarantee of finding the item, of course, so it's the sort of thing you'd look out especially for as a melee type in case this sort of enemy pops up.

I like the idea of more items that help to protect the player from stat drains, but I'm more interested in the stat drain mechanic itself.

What if attempts by monsters to drain stats only had permanent effects some of the time? That is, if only 25% of the attacks would be permanent - the remainder would be temporary drains. This would make them less of an ongoing danger, without making them any less of an immediate danger. If it's not dangerous enough like that, then increase the frequency or power of the draining a bit to compensate.

Perhaps also provide some way to reclaim the lost stats - but not to gain extra stats beyond those lost.

Re: stat drains from "minor" undead during early game
Stat drain from Strength or Toughness is the worst, most depressing, spirit crushing event for melee characters: because there is no way to recoup the loss.

This is not necessarily a problem with stat drain. This is a problem with stat potentials and natural training, and the bug that there is no way to train Strength beyond the arbitrary value 18, and Toughness can only be "trained" with performance enhancing drugs up to 25.

Hopefully that was fixed with the "stats and stat potentials" and various herbalism issues.

The training limit of 18 through burden is intentional AFAIK. There are other methods that allow you to raise it higher, but they are not quite so easy.

Amulet or ring would be not a bad thing. About the other... yes, drains are nasty and they should be nasty, so changing them is totally unneeded.

I should note that GUVs are going to be easier now that the uber-jackal effect has been toned down

Why would that be the case, Mobius? The non-Liches in the undead greater vaults are certainly not what makes it hard.

It helps with the summons, if nothing else, although not that much since summons tend to be pretty random except for the ones summoned by the master liches.

Also... I'll have to check, but wasn't uberjackal effect only toned done for certain specific monsters? I'm pretty sure that there's still overall monster leveling at essentially the same rate.

Greater undead vaults are mostly tedious, more or less so depending on the layout. Usually they simply fill up too fast with summons to be even remotely beatable with just melee; the stat drains you get if you do make progress (i.e. fight and kill a lich king or emperor lich) just reinforce the point. I don't think of that as a problem because such a thing as a "melee character" only exists if you're intentionally handicapping yourself, and you can't expect to succeed at everything that way, including one of the nastiest optional challenges the game has to offer.

I really hope we won't end up in a situation where only pre-*** version victories would be considered 'true' by the fans.. Frankly, I'm against 99% of balance changes suggested here in 'old' (not CK or ME related) aspects of the game, since they mostly can be boiled down to 'give me an AOLS at start', 'get rid of random encounters', 'where's my guaranteed wish?', 'make monsters not hurt me', etc. Seriously, maybe there should be a god mode or an 'embark on a quest of buying Call of Duty <steam page link>' options in start menu?

/rant

edit: Oh, I forgot the 'make pre-/post- crowning gifts kill everything'.

that's an interesting stance when most of the -added- [not suggested] changes make the game actually harder :P

I completely and totally disagree, Silfir. I think that, in general, a "purely"* melee (or missile, or magic, or etc.) based character should be able to overcome any challenge in the game...which is not to say it should be easy. Certainly, taking a hybrid approach makes life much, much easier, but the game should not outright limit your options**. I think offering an amulet that protects you from undead stat drains (obviously not completely) is exactly in line with how the game works. I would most strongly draw an analogy to a ring of karmic absorption. There are a number of ways to take out a karmic without engaging in melee, and most of them are not particularly hard. However, if you really want to melee karmics, there is a rather rare, neat little ring that you can use to do it [mostly] safely, and that's absolutely awesome.

*wands allowed for all, of course
**this is the reason I'm completely against any more monsters being able to deflect missiles. it's a pretty cool feature of dopplegangers, but implementing it on any sort of scale is a complete cop out and just stupid

cyrilverba, have you even read this suggestion or the comments on it at all? Your inane comments are hilariously off-base, and have no place here. Maybe if you read through this and some of these balancing suggestions, you'd see that a number of them are actually good for the game.

well, i'm deliberately exaggerating, but the overall direction of 'balancing' suggestions still makes me cautious. thankfully, the creator has so far implemented mostly those that make the game more convenient, not easier. which ones did you mean?


SirTheta, your comment seems too personal for public forum, if you have any problems or questions - feel free to pm me (starting with an apology).

Cyril: why interject into a discussion about balance with hyperbole directed almost maliciously at the people you're trying to start a discourse with? As to what makes the game harder, pickpocketing is less useful, summoners aren't able to be scummed for items, the ID can't be scummed as easily for items, you can't increase your stats past their potentials through herbs, and herbs aren't as easy to sit and farm. Stoma sacrifice is capped, and you can't kick-rob stores. Boss monsters aren't able to be completely crushed by darkness/invis + 1 potion. I think this is why Theta told you to do some background research ;)

I have to say that stat-drain from lich monsters is quite annoying, but other than that, I agree that it's just as annoying as intended XD A ring/amulet of debuff absorbtion would be a nifty item.

I'm not going to apologize to you. You, not me, barged in here, disregarded the topic and suggestions at hand and basically just pointed fun at it. Not only that, but you've created a gross mischaracterization of this topic and many other balancing suggestions, most of which have nothing at all to do with making the game "easier" or "harder," although technically most of them make the game harder in some way or another. This is why you are just utterly and completely wrong--some of the biggest changes include nerfing HP casting and making your stats untrainable past their potentials with herbs. There is no way that other balancing suggestions could possibly counteract just those two, but a number of other things have been changed, too--no spellcasting with two shields [though idk who used this before], you now get corrupted when gambling, the casino guards have been hugely beefed up, 7LBs have had their movement bonus lowered, chaos bosses are harder to disable, the skeletal king now summons, you can no longer crown with stoma, spenseweed was nerfed...I could go on & on & on, and I haven't even mentioned some of the hugely scummy tactics that have been made impossible like gremlin bombing, stairhopping and detecting fake levels in the minotaur maze. While there are certainly some changes that make the game "easier," they are not at all comparable to the current direction of the implemented RFEs. and I don't think this is a bad thing because it currently makes the game a lot more interesting, just like I don't think making the game easier in some areas is a bad thing.