Making cat lord stay on his no-teleport level would bring it in line with other recent change: - Monsters no longer willingly leave the temple levels. (c) http://www.adom.de/forums/project.ph...id=1118&page=2

I dont think that anything else is needed.

Step in right direction but I disagree it's enough. Player would still be able to stay on the stairs while fighting him and leave to regenerate when things get tough. While outside his level player can regenerate cat lord will not. Too easy for experience he is worth. You can stay in coward setting on stairs and blow him with wand of fireballs... etc.

I agree on not having him change levels. However I should point out that your character had a bit of an easy time with Skullcrusher + thief stunning + wand of paralysis. Most chars would not have these resources at their disposal. The cat lord is a big threat to many players, and to the unprepared can be certain death.

Wand of fireballs is guaranteed, potions of booze in abundance, altar is guaranteed. Put mummy wrapping on, set on coward and fireball him to death praying when necessary. If something goes wrong change level. What's complicated about this? Initially I was acid balling him. He wasn't able to kill me on coward in 4-5 turns and I was playing mist elf thief for god's sake with skullcrusher in hand (which reduces DV) and rage corruption (which further decreases DV). If you tell me that I had it easy then what race/class combo has it tough? Once again... repeat after me... Mist... Elf.... Thief....

Making him stay on the level is NOT enough. If making him stay on the level is the only change then he should be worth less exp points. He is maybe a little more difficult to kill than emperor lich and emperor lich is worth 25 thousand exp. and not one million.

Oh... and player has option to actually complete his quest....

P.S.
And maybe it's me but I feel like every game I play I have some ridiculous resources at my disposal.

Mist elves take half physical damage. If anything, they are tankier vs physical damage.

Seeing multiple characters being killed by the invisible cat lord in the highscores - that would be more then enough.

Thats you. ADOM is extremely hard for majority of the players.

They also have half hp of other races. And I have wrote you formula for killing him in two sentences if you are the most unlucky char in the universe and are restricted to guaranteed items only. Once again... he is NOT worth 1 million xp the way it is.

I will tell you how my last character met him... orcish merchant. On his level there were some death oozes in tension room. So I got cocky and decided to kill them while slowed down (and my slow monster was like level 10 or 15 so lasting loooong) ... while I was finishing last two oozes master cat appeared. I was ON HIS LEVEL far from the stairs and slowed down (my 50 speed vs. his 150)... Like the worst scenario ever to imagine... and guess what. I still managed to survive him. If a player is able to survive him while making such mistakes like I did then master cat does not deserve to be worth 1 million exp. Compared to water dragon he is much, much easier.

And as said earlier... you can always complete his quest if he is too difficult. As simple as that.

You could've stopped there - majority of characters would die from one stone ooze while slowed.

I guess you are using every side-quest and every trick possible before the final dive? Well, you've got yourself pretty nice character. Why you are so suprised that you are faaaaaaar overprepared for lower levels of CoC?

Again, completing the quest is far from simple. For some reason you want "nightmare" difficulty, when only by using everything you could possibly use - you could complete the game. This is wrong and leaves no chance for more casual players, as you could see in your previous Bug Temple request. Bear with it, please.

Emperor lich is worth about 500k xps. I suspect that if you could increase their speed to 150, slow monster yourself and invis the lich, you'd probably be in the 2-3 million xps range for killing one. If you don't use the xp-enhancing tricks, cat lord is worth around 700k including his high speed, IIRC. They're probably quite comparable in terms of the base xps offered.

Cat lord is a challenging opponent. If you don't know what you're doing and try to fight him you'll probably get eviscerated. There are ways to beat him, but, *shrug*, there are ways to beat any boss. If you have to unload a few dozen acid/fireballs and need to use multiple prayers against him, that makes him more dangerous than many of the game's other bosses, including, say, the ACW.

I do kind of agree that the xps you get from the cat lord is excessive, IMHO the problem is not how much xp he gives, but that the player can use exploits to raise his xp returns to five times his base xp return. How about removing the xp bonus for invisibility entirely (or reducing it dramatically) and capping the bonus you get from low speed, to, say, no more than 50 percent of what the monster normally gives? There's really no reason that invisible monsters in particular should give that much more xps.

As far as teleportation is concerned, one solution would be to make it that the cat lord prevents teleportation on whatever level he is on. This would eliminate all lure away/teleport strategies, and also mean that once you kill him or complete his quest, you no longer have one random level in the CoC that is teleport restricted. Also, the cat lord does panic too easily and stays panicked too long--you can drop maybe a third of his HP and then he'll run away and you can kill him by AI exploiting.

I strongly disagree with the point (a) that the player can't leave the level while the cat lord is alive. I think skipping him entirely is a legitimate strategy and I don't really think removing it is a good balancing solution.

To be honest, the Cat Lord is one of the creatures that I respect the most in the game, perhaps second only to the ACW and the water dragon. I don't think he should be buffed at all. Making it more difficult to flee from him would increase the game's difficulty a lot. I understand the position of wanting to buff the late game a bit because it has things that are easy, but particularly the Cat Lord is already one of the climax points of the late game!

That said, I agree with nerfing the XP boni related with invisibility and slowness. If they indeed can pump the XP gain from 700K to 3.5 million (I haven't experienced it, I don't do exploits) I think that's clearly too much. Furthermore, the fact that these boni are used in so many shady tactics (wishing for AKW's, etc.) should send a message.

I propose two different solutions (although maybe this should go in a different RFE, unrelated to the cat lord):

1. Apply the invisibility bonus only for early and mid-game chars: it should go away after level, say, 20. At that point almost any character has a means of SeeI, or if they don't have it, they're doing it wrong. And regarding the speed bonus, make all speeds below 90 equivalent to 90 for this purpose. I like the feature that gaining lots of speed is bad for XP, because it's a tradeoff, but on the other side of the spectrum, if a player has 40 speed when killing a powerful monster he's likely just scumming.

2. Leave the boni as they are but cap them such that a monster can never give more than double its base XP. For the cat lord, 1.4 million sounds much more reasonable than 3.5 million.

The Cat Lord should slaughter every character that killed cats, give him controlled teleportation and regeneration.

1. I killed emperor lich on dwarven graveyard. It gave me exactly 25 thousand of experience. Do not really now why you say emperor lich is worth 500k. I can show you screen from my monster memory if you don't believe me.
2. I agree with nerfing slow monster/invisibility exploits. The amount of exp. I received is just ridiculous. I do not remember killing him before without see invisible instrict and it really stunned me when I jumped by 5 or 6 levels and when I entered monster memory to see how much exactly exp. I received.
3. I love teleportation idea. Make him restrict teleport wherever he is. To be honest I believe there should be some monsters in the game that should either have it as passive ability or could cast a spell that prevents teleportation. As far as I am concerned controlled teleportation is the single most overpowered thing in Adom.... even after recent changes to its cost. I mentioned this a couple of times that I basically divide the game into two stages before and after I have teleportation.

This was actually closer to 3,7 million.... so yeah. It's ridiculous. Maybe there should be a cap.... i.e. that no matter what you do to yourself you cannot get more than i.e. 2 times experience points or 1,5 experience points for the monster. I wouldn't remove it entirely since there are risks related to using slow monster on oneself. When I met master cat with 50 speed I was really scared that I would die (at that point I forgot that prayer would remove slow effect;))... But invisibility on the other hand is much less of a problem. After all, once your lifebar is dropping you know where he is.

This was death ooze not stone ooze and I had unlimited fireballs at my disposal due to alchemy....

And as far as side quests are concerned... There aren't many locations that can be treated as side quests in Adom. Rift, bug cave and maze, quickling tree are the only ones that come to my mind... and maybe gremlin cavern but other than phial you won't buff your char in there. The mentioned char did maze only from this list. This time I did maze and rift (I did rift cause I did not any have means of completing ToEF so I needed frost bolt). So for me this is all pretty standard.

You can even chat to him if not 100 percent certain exactly where he is, costing one turn, but what the heck, better than not knowing.

We do spend time to prepare our character and that time should pay off, Kordi. A player should be able to get his character to a point where it can survive everything the game throws at him.

I do however agree that the endgame should be made more challenging to make it a more exciting experience, but it should not become an almost impossibility.

The thing is that I got 3,7 million exp and there was nothing exciting about that. There was no danger at all... and I had so many tools at my disposal to kill him that it was plain boring. If I did not have wand of paralyzation he would die from improoved fireball and wouldn't even touch me. If I had no improoved fireball I had plenty of humanoid slaying ammo. If it was not enough I would got to coward and would acid ball him to death. If I had no acid ball I would have go to coward and made use of my wand of fireballs. If I had not wand of fireballs as a last resort I would kill him with a freaking orb of fire and healed myself with orb of water.

While on coward he needs like 5-6 turns to kill average character. If you boost your speed to match his this will take him even longer. You can fireball him all day long remaining in complete safety. This is not the case i.e. with water dragon or chaos dragon. Water dragon can one shot you with critical water breath. I remember seeing criticals for 600 HP back in the day (you don't forget things like this). Or chaos dragon who will confuse you and corrupt the hell out of you. They pose a real threat... master cat not so much. Therefore I seriously disagree with him being worth exp. points he is right now.

And my point was and is that you were prepared. Had you had none of those items and scummed stats it might have been a different fight.

We better our characters in preperation for the endgame, we can't expect a tough fight with every tool at our disposal.

This is so very-very-very wrong.

I bet if you made the water dragon invisible and slowed yourself just before shooting the final slayer you'll get much more than 3,7.

Just don't forget to throw a cursed potion of invisibility in her face before the rest.

What the heck, endgame is aniway a speedrun versus corruption. It's challenging enough.
And if you want every boss to be unkillable while wielding a slaying weapon, you are a strange man. How is a character without Skullcrusher going to kill it then?
I remember one of my barbarians shredded to death while preparing tremendous blow. It's a lesson to learn, but it still means that Cat Lord is not a pussy. Also, unlike water dragons, he is not optional. If your character meets cat without any means to dispose of it, then you are doomed to meet him.
It seems that your general position is "ADOM is too easy", which is very wrong, because easiness of game depends on luck and player skill entirely. If you got a lucky game (as so much in this game is rangom) or you are far better than average, it doesn't mean that ADOM is too easy.

Every character meeting him has means of killing him. Fire and water orbs as well as elemental gauntlets are guaranteed. Potions of booze are in abundance and wand of fireballs is also guaranteed (well, almost guaranteed). If you are attacking him with troumendous blows which has 4000 energy base cost with I guess berserk or aggressive settings and no shield only to allow him to retaliate 12-15 times you deserve to loose your characters. Period.

And for your future gaming. Tremendous blow is a tool to be used only in two situations:
1. Enemy has excessive PV
or
2. You are sure that you can one shot your opponent.
Other than that its energy vs. damage output is inefficient to normal hit.
Cat lord does not meet neither of the criteria. His PV is 6 and you cannot one shot him even with backstabbing thief wielding humanoid slaying weapon (FYI this scenario produces arguably the highest damage output in the game up to 12 times weapons base damage).

Just checked monster memory for two characters:

Mist elve thief had: 57-81 - 65 on average - not sure if damage in monster memory is affected by mist shield or not.
Orcish merchant (and believe me when I say he really took beating from master cat): 60-140 - 75 on average

The extreme values are obviously critical hits. He can attack 3 times per turn. Since he will be most likely 1,5 times faster than average character it may happen that he will attack you 6 times in one turn.

I will skip mist elf as I do not know if the damage values quoted are correct. Orcish merchatnt had approximately 400-450 HP when facing him (do not remember correctly). I would need to to eat 3-4 criticals in a row or 7-8 normal hits for him to kill me. Let's say that on coward he is effectively able to hit me 1,5 times per his one turn (and I took a serious beating from while I was 50 speed - so I can tell you straight away he is not). Let's assume his critical chance is 20% (and it is not).

(3 attacks per turn x 1,5 speed modifier) /2 (his hit chance) x 75 (average damage) x 1,2 (critical ratio) = 3 turns to kill me.

This is extreme scenario with with unrealistic assumptions. I even deliberately screwed the formula to make it more unfavorable - if I take average damage I should not add critical ratio on top of it.

Based on this calculation I would say that in reality he needs 4-5 turns to kill you if it satisfies you.... As mentioned I faced him with speed 50 and usually I managed to survive my two turns before I needed to heal. This is 9 of his attacks or 4 turns on normal speed.


I don't doubt it... but she is more dangerous than cat lord is. She can instakill you from distance regardless of your coward setting.

What was the PV/DV score of the characters? What was level of characters?

Your math looks fine on average, but:
You can't multiply attacks by speed modifier. He either does 3 attacks in 1 turn or he does 6 attacks in 1 turn. The same is true for criticals, because he can do several of them. The same is true for miss chance, because he simply can turn on super-precision mode. You think you can stand and zap fireball wands and heal whenever you need, but that may be changed any turn. Hell, he can turn rage mode and using his speed boost to make 12 attacks per turn. Can you survive that?

Not everyone has piety, not everyone has water orb, not everyone has wands of paralyzation, not everyone has fireballs wand. You don't die because you always check that you have all the resources. Not everyone does that and nor they should always do it, because it makes the game boring as I don't know what (IMHO of course).

And getting 6 levels for killing one semi-dangerous monster using teleport and paralyzation is pure fun!
Maybe you should try Mass Effect or Follout 3 for some more enjoying, easy to handle experience?

There are already scores of monsters you kill in Adom without ever thinking about it. Press forward to victory... I don't see nothing wrong in the need to make some preparations for the monsters that are in "boss" category. The way you see the game is the following: "Once the player is lucky enough to find appropriate resources i.e. wand of paralyzation, he has green light to win the game. At the same time, player has neither need nor obligation to utilize the guaranteed resources in the game. This is all about the luck of finding this one particular thing that makes game easy.".

And FYI yes, I survived cat lord's blind rage while slowed. Deal with it.

One last thing. I do not propose to make him even tougher. What I am saying is that he is not wroth experience points you can currently receive for him. This means two things:
1. Make changes so that teleportation is no longer viable strategy against him. Stair hopping should be treated on equal footing as teleportation.
2. Lower experience points available for him. Or at least make it impossible to squeeze 3,7 million out of him.

If neither of these are implemented then as a last resort it might be wise to give him HP regeneration. Right now he does not regenerate HP at all. You can Teleport away from him and kill him with rocks or bolt him to death. So what you will miss or he will shrug 80% of them. Since his HP regeneration is nonexistant sooner or later you will able to kill him.