Some thoughts about prerelease 21

[Blasphemous]

Yesterday, I have closed the gate with an L+ gray elven ranger.

I believe some of the things I have written about have already been posted by others, either as random threads or RFEs/bug reports but nevertheless, here they are:

1) Given the fact that many more monsters are now being generated, there is a much higher amount of loot to gather, disproportionately so, I think.
By the end game, I blessed everything, even single scrolls or single potions and all the worn items. I still had 30 potions of holy water left after this.

2) Another consequence of the above - throughout the game I've found lots of potions of gain attributes. All my stats have been increased on average by 30 points, half of this before the tower.
Needless to say, that part of the game was very easy. My ranger started with 12 toughness and 15 potential but I quickly got this to 20 and more with items that provide toughness bonus.
What this means is that despite herbs not being as effective at training (I tried overtraining with morgia and failed) you still don't have problems raising stats to respectable values.

3) Summoners should still be toned down a *little*. I'm not talking about the bug that increases their power as they summon more, I'm talking about lich kings filling 7x7 room with monsters in 4 turns.
Summoners should either summon fewer monsters or take longer periods between each summoning, but that's my thought. I understand if people find their current behavior acceptable (again, not counting the experience increase bug).

4) CoC levels from around ~25 onwards are crazy if you're not prepared. The monsters that spawn there can be deadly but coupled with the increased drops I mentioned earlier, it's not as pronounced as some feared.
The problem is that when you descend, you don't really know what's going to be generated in the room downstairs, it may very well be a berserker emperor or greater moloch and that means trouble or occasionally - instadeath.

5) Elemental temples now contain more random monsters. I don't think this is a good idea, I believe it would be better to disable random monster generation in elemental temples and instead buff the thematically related monsters a little.
Maybe 2 greater elementals per each of the temples? I think currently, some temples (ok, water temple maybe air) don't require too much preparation and can be taken in-stride.
One thing I noticed about mana temple - when I bolted Nurgy with a magic missile, he teleported close to me and I was able to quickly dispatch him by throwing rune-covered trident, I didn't have to deal with all the monsters or the chaos wizard summons.
I did destroy them but I was safe, knowing that the archmage is dead. Perhaps it's too easy to let him just teleport randomly because given the right circumstances, players might just skip the temple entirely and only kill the archmage, collect the orb and leave.

6) Corruption has been significantly decreased, to a point where it becomes irrelevant. This ranger had that vortex accident with Khelly so the 6 scrolls of chaos resistance were gone. Dwarven mystic also preferred to give me PoGA instead of the 4 scrolls.
What I was left with were the 3 guaranteed scrolls from bugwil, one from HMV and 2 randomly found. They lasted me till the very end, where I only had to drink two potions of cure corruption after clearing D:50 in melee, including meleeing all balors.
I also meleed two (!!!) tension rooms of balors - one around UL:3 and one on the same level as mana temple. That's a lot of corrupting hits I took and still, I was fairly safe with the minimal corruption effects.

7) This has been mentioned already by somebody else, but a lot of monsters are generated neutral which not only means they aren't an immediate threat to the PC but they will inevitably fight each other.
One time I had a great karmic wyrm battle a quickling queen, another time berserker emperor fought a titan.
Things like that occur often. Although I don't mind this behavior, as it's a bit unrealistic that all the monsters in the game are in league against the player, it makes for a strange experience.
Also, the inherent danger associated with having to deal with those powerful monsters on your path, is somewhat neutralized if you maneuver cleverly and make the hostile monster step next to a neutral one, which causes them to fight.

8) Monsters are generated in waves, each bearing a different type. Deeper in CoC, you're bound to experience *THUMB* messages on every level.
(Greater) titans mixed with (greater) molochs is a typical setup later on but they don't occur until a certain moment.
Similarly, werewolf kings show up at some stage but cease to be generated later. Same goes for several types of powerful monsters.
This is not necessarily bad, but like the previous point states, it is a strange experience.

9) I have mentioned it already but here it is again - some monsters don't feel right appearing earlier than D:50, namely balors.
In the .flg file generated after closing the gate and exiting Drakalor Chain, I've discovered that 54 balors have been slain.
Fifty four balors! That's equal to 6 games completed in pre20, with 9 balors each. Something is not right here.
Now, I don't mind finding one or two stray balors before D:50, but I had two full tension rooms of them.
I don't think this is a good idea to make it possible, those tension rooms rivaled D:50 in difficulty and that's not a good thing.
I managed to pull this off because at that point I had cat ring and some other items that pushed my Dx to ~60 as well as fire orb and GoGS that also raised my St to 60.
This char was a 181 speed, lvl 40+ ranger with 7LB, built with the intention of dual wielding needle and sting so the damage output and chance to hit were stellar.
I was also equipped with sun's messenger + true aim and rune covered trident, but many other characters would be hard pressed to deal with ~20 balors and their summons at once.

10) Stealth has been significantly nerfed and I don't exactly like that. I used to be able to sneak past the steel golems in DfG if I had 100 stealth and stealthy talent but now, they are much more likely to notice me.
Stealth is still useful but I think the previous behavior was better.
It didn't give you any great advantage since certain monsters had to be killed rather than avoided, but it allowed you to roleplay the stealthy character instead of having to blast everything on your path.
Perhaps the skill could be made less common among races/classes but also brought back to be as effective as in pre20?

[grobblewobble]

With the new monster spawning I felt like the temples, as well as the final level, were much easier than the regular levels in between. That's really weird and probably not the intention.

I also ran into so many greater mimics and hiveminds that it seemed suicidal to wear the Ankh, but maybe that was a statistical fluke. How about you?

By the way, I agree with point 3. Especially since the summoned monsters are going to be made stronger in p22, there should be summoned fewer of them to compensate. Otherwise we're going to wade through seas of overpowered spiders again, like before the uberjackal effect was fixed.

[Blasphemous]

Well, I had no problems with mimics, I only had a bit more than usually so I just swapped ankh for aofa, went for the kill and swapped back.
Found two deserted shops in the game which isn't outside of what we're used to.
Some greater mimics were encountered but few enough to not be noticeable.

I agree with the temples being easier than regular levels, especially air, earth and mana temples. I could just take the mana orb and leave having only killed the archmage and ~5 chaos servants.
Earth elementals in earth temple were out of their league when there are titans, molochs and greater elementals next door or down/upstairs.

[Stingray1]

The extra items is pretty ridiculous, adom was already generating too many items.

Just a note from me, we are now experiencing the game as TB originally intended it to be wrt monster danger level, I think. We have to ask ourselves, if we were playing it like it is now all the years, then we would have been used to how it is now. That is not the case, we are used to fighting weak monsters. All the temples except the Fire temple has always been easy for me, so that hasn't changed.

One still easily kills these high DL monsters and they are worth it, for the xp. As you say corruption has been toned down too much, I especially cleared every level except the temples to see what corruption is like now and corruption was not a threat. I've had no scrolls, only 3 potions one of which I used against ACW.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Just a note from me, we are now experiencing the game as TB originally intended it to be wrt monster danger level, I think. We have to ask ourselves, if we were playing it like it is now all the years, then we would have been used to how it is now. That is not the case, we are used to fighting weak monsters. All the temples except the Fire temple has always been easy for me, so that hasn't changed.

I don't think TB ever intended the temples to be easier than their surrounding levels. The temples are the levels containing the most powerful artifacts in all of Ancardia, and Andor Drakon surely would make sure to place his elite minions there.

We are in a stage of tweaking, when we reach what he intends that will be the final state, I presume.

[Qui]

I'd say that the game probably needs more kinds of high-DL monsters. There is a lot of variety in the early and mid levels, but past a certain point there are just dragons, wyrms, molochs, titans, balors, greater elementals.

Also, temples are indeed easier than normal levels, which is sort of silly. Probably need more greater elementals, and have chaos servants and things like vapor rats exchanged with something a bit deadlier. I'd say add an appropriate colour dragons, but then it would be way too many dragons in the game.

And yes, nerf to summoners isn't really noticeable.

[adom-admin]

I'd say that the game probably needs more kinds of high-DL monsters. There is a lot of variety in the early and mid levels, but past a certain point there are just dragons, wyrms, molochs, titans, balors, greater elementals.

That's very true now that higher-level monsters have become more common. Balancing really is messed up right now and I hope to get things back on track ASAP :-(

[Sami]

I closed the gate with gnomish priest yesterday in p21 but really can't share the thoughts on finding all that crazy loot. I never had more than 20 potions of water which is way less than I normally have. I was not even using as much water as normally due to shortage. Also I only found 1 or 2 PoGAs during the whole game (none after DT), not a single wish and also had shortage of dragon slaying ammo (found only 1 pile before D:50 I think).
In mid-game (before and after ToEF) I was also running out of offensive spells, had only about 100-200 cast points on burning hands, fire bolt and lightning bolt and about 400 on frost bolt.

Either you were extremely lucky or I was extremely unlucky with the items but it feels like we aren't even talking about the same game...

Corruption is not usually a problem for me and I only used only one SoCR during the whole game (to get rid off two -10 speed corruptions) and ended with 6 corruptions with 1 Ap, though I did not melee corrupting monsters if I could avoid it.

[Blasphemous]

Well I'm both a completionist and a pack rat.
My game took me more than two times the amount of turns that yours did, I explored everything except library and picked up all items everywhere.
I guess that in the end this leaves me with such a large surplus of items.

[adom-admin]

1) Given the fact that many more monsters are now being generated, there is a much higher amount of loot to gather, disproportionately so, I think.
By the end game, I blessed everything, even single scrolls or single potions and all the worn items. I still had 30 potions of holy water left after this.

This has been addressed in http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2895 for p23.

2) Another consequence of the above - throughout the game I've found lots of potions of gain attributes. All my stats have been increased on average by 30 points, half of this before the tower.

Ok, with the fix above this no longer will be a problem either.

3) Summoners should still be toned down a *little*. I'm not talking about the bug that increases their power as they summon more, I'm talking about lich kings filling 7x7 room with monsters in 4 turns.
Summoners should either summon fewer monsters or take longer periods between each summoning, but that's my thought. I understand if people find their current behavior acceptable (again, not counting the experience increase bug).

I'm really looking forward to your comments about summoners in p22. There all fixes I deemed necessary have been applied and I hope that they overall will work much better.

4) CoC levels from around ~25 onwards are crazy if you're not prepared. The monsters that spawn there can be deadly but coupled with the increased drops I mentioned earlier, it's not as pronounced as some feared.
The problem is that when you descend, you don't really know what's going to be generated in the room downstairs, it may very well be a berserker emperor or greater moloch and that means trouble or occasionally - instadeath.

With the adjusted monster numbers of p23 (see the fix above) and combined with the revised monster distributions starting in p22 I'm pretty optimistic that we'll have nailed this issue, too. It is a bumpy way so far ;-)

5) Elemental temples now contain more random monsters. I don't think this is a good idea, I believe it would be better to disable random monster generation in elemental temples and instead buff the thematically related monsters a little.

That's again an unintended side effect of the larger monster numbers. It will be gone by p23.

6) Corruption has been significantly decreased, to a point where it becomes irrelevant. This ranger had that vortex accident with Khelly so the 6 scrolls of chaos resistance were gone. Dwarven mystic also preferred to give me PoGA instead of the 4 scrolls.

I would like to hear more comments about this. It might be a temporary side effects as the upcoming new quests should prolong the game and require more time. The idea behind the tuned down rate was that you have more time to explore levels instead of just power diving. Maybe there still need to be more incentives for exploring :-^

7) This has been mentioned already by somebody else, but a lot of monsters are generated neutral which not only means they aren't an immediate threat to the PC but they will inevitably fight each other.

This again should happen much less in p23 due to the reduced monster numbers. Even in p22 there should be somewhat fewer neutral monsters.

8) Monsters are generated in waves, each bearing a different type. Deeper in CoC, you're bound to experience *THUMB* messages on every level.
(Greater) titans mixed with (greater) molochs is a typical setup later on but they don't occur until a certain moment.
Similarly, werewolf kings show up at some stage but cease to be generated later. Same goes for several types of powerful monsters.
This is not necessarily bad, but like the previous point states, it is a strange experience.

That's due to the different way monsters are distributed across levels in p21. Please try again with p22 - it should be a very different experience.

9) I have mentioned it already but here it is again - some monsters don't feel right appearing earlier than D:50, namely balors.
In the .flg file generated after closing the gate and exiting Drakalor Chain, I've discovered that 54 balors have been slain.
Fifty four balors! That's equal to 6 games completed in pre20, with 9 balors each. Something is not right here.

This also should be much better in p22.

10) Stealth has been significantly nerfed and I don't exactly like that. I used to be able to sneak past the steel golems in DfG if I had 100 stealth and stealthy talent but now, they are much more likely to notice me.
Stealth is still useful but I think the previous behavior was better.

I will look into it. Stealth at some point appeared too powerful to me, almost like permanent invisibility without the disadvantages. More thoughts about this?