Ancient Member
Well, I personally just reduce the amount of grinding I do to get the challenge up. Actually I don't think that the measure for difficulty should be a veteran player who minmaxes each and everything. I'm afraid this would hopelessly frustrate new players.
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Ancient Member
The best solution is to erase your own memory and try again to finish the game without spoilers.
You steal a scroll labelled HITME. The orc hits you.
Member
Guys... this approach is simply stupid. You are dismissing what I am saying because of me being experienced player and not even trying to analyze the changes that I propose. I am proposing two simple tweaks to make late game more interesting... Cause you do agree with me that late game, is less challenging than early game, won't you? It is hard to deny that there is imbalance in game difficulty early game vs. late.
Early game the player does not have access to teleportation and has to deal with it. So how come restricting potency of teleportation in the late game would suddenly be too difficult for players to handle? Especially that I am not proposing to dismiss it completely. Only to remove guaranteed sources of it and mostly making it less accessible more of a luxury than a commodity. That's it. So that it is not possible to spam it in every single game starting level ~10-15.
Ancient Member
The problem with your suggested changes is that they will help very little, while they are quite drastic.
Teleportation: the changes you suggest are quite complex and feel arbitrary to me. Being suddenly unable to teleport because there is a certain specific monster on the other side of the level that I can't see doesn't sound very enjoyable to me. If teleportation really needs to be nerfed that badly (and I don't think it is needed), let's please be straightforward about it and at least make a single, simple change, instead of a whole list of various nerfs.
Less loot: if this is going to achieve anything at all, it will just make the game last longer. You see, the inherent problem with ADOM is that you can take as long as you want.
The only real solution to this problem is to take your score seriously and play speedruns. Score depends strongly and primarily on turncount*, so if you do not only try to win, but try to maximise your score, you cannot visit all locations. If you do this, you will suddenly find yourself dealing with new challenges, because all your resources are suddenly much more limited.
*: well, to be honest there exist some grindy ways to gain extreme score, like archmage.. so you'll have to ignore those
You steal a scroll labelled HITME. The orc hits you.
Senior Member
Decreasing item drop rate only means staying in something like R5 or UC3-5 (or wherever those cavernous levels were) and grinding there for whatever wands/potions/scrolls you need. I'm very glad I don't need to do that at the moment. Instead I wonder how much harder the game would become if you removed girdles of carrying and Strength of Atlas entirely and tweaked how Strength influences carrying capacity (increase earlier thresholds, vastly decrease later ones).
Teleportation is a bit more tricky. Even if you severely restrict it, it still would be an amazing life saver as long as you have it at all. Even if you had 3 or 4 casts for the whole game, it would probably be enough to save you in all trickiest situations! The second problem in late game is speed. With typical score of 130+ and blessed seven league boots nothing can really touch you unless you severely miscalculate or it's a quickling. You don't even need gear up for increasing your speed; with Dexterity of ~40 and Long Stride + all speed talents you'll be there anyway.
Then there's slaying ammunition issue. It's so good. Criticals can be extremely powerful and huge bonuses from missile weapon skills ensure that with enough grinding you WILL be able to hit some of them. I've one-shot ACW twice in the recent months. Literally, it fell from the first slaying missile that landed. By the time you reach bottom of CoC, you will have 20-40 of each type for various missile weapons (now that sling bullets count too) and couple with your extreme speed there's really nothing that can put a serious dent on you, even without Teleportation.
Another underlying problem is that certain events or points in the game award you an awful lot compared to the rest of the game, by which I mean they are milestones and the rest of the game is just more or less boring walk towards those milestones. The offenders are:
1. Dwarven mystic - giving neutrals enough SoCRs to last them for the whole gate closing easily. Sure, it's 50% chance and you need to be neutral, but if you are lucky, you get enough SoCRs to last you for the rest of the game. The lawful reward is much more balanced, giving you a good missile (or a decent melee weapon) that isn't overpowered.
2. Minotaur maze - holy crap this one is ridiculous. +13 St, +11 To, +11 Pe, +4 to all other stats on average, PoCCs, very powerful twohander and a random artifact. This is of course including eating the emperor's corpse, which is totally worth it. You just get your Wi back to 25 before drinking PoGAs. Minotaur maze is not hard at all, it's just tedious and doesn't require particulary extensive preparations - only teleport control, confusion resistance and 7-10 humanoid slaying ammo + 4-6 levels in missile weapon are essential. I've been doing it without teleportation and magic mapping all the time, only caring for some Dexterity and Sixth Sense/Alertness/Detect Traps to avoid item destruction. PV and DV you have after Ice Queen's Domain and Tomb of the High Kings is always enough to tackle this location. I swear pit and stone block traps do more damage overall than enemies there.
3. Dwarven quests - these aren't bad except for the Big Punch, which is very good at this point of the game and you probably have a girdle of carrying at this point anyway.
4. Unicorn quest - very easy to do at level 30 with a huge reward
5. Water dragon cave - very good weapon if you're born under Raven and you only need two charges of teleportation and easily obtainable means of water breathing, the latter one not even being absolutely necessary if you have 100 Swimming. Searching for WDC is funny too, it looks as if there's a chance of it being on the water tile you're entering instead of being in a pre-determined location; I often find it on the very first water tile I enter.
6. Crowning - there's a recent thread for it already. You basically get an artifact suited for your class and a Wyrmlance (heh heh heh).
The last problem I can think of now is that late game locations are not challenging, only tiresome.
- Air Temple is only challenging if Yulgash summons something interesting. It's a pure gamble but very often it will be a walk in the park. I think his summoning might have been nerfed a bit too much, last time I was there he got exhausted after summoning some karmic wyrms or dragons, don't remember. Sure, kind of tough, but they couldn't target me through my invisibility.
- Mana Temple is pretty interesting. I could do without the traps and tricky digging in as they don't really make it harder at all. The PP drain is pretty nice, serves for a decent wake-up call for an otherwise extremely easy time when playing a competent spellcaster. Everything else is pretty easy though - monsters are easy and for the archmage you wear amulet of death ray resistance, use a torch and just berserk him with AotME, ha ha. Or use the humanoid slaying ammo if you don't feel that brave.
- D:50 would be only problematic if you couldn't run from balors. My recent gate closer, mist elven druid, just meleed everything with AotME on berserk. What, corrupting attacks? Who cares, I have my unicorn buddy waiting for me on the surface, and if I was attempting an ultra ending, I'd probably need some more corruptions anyway. Only balors are dangerous, but are easily kited. If you proceed with care and handle levers slowly, they will always appear one by one. Imagine how different it would be if they jumped you all at once! Wouldn't that be fun? Instead you just kill them one by one and yawn. The rest of the monsters are just boring grind, none of them can harm you except ghosts for races with short lifespans but those are easily dealt with using missiles and invisibility.
In the end I seriously think the hardest part of the late game are tension rooms. It's not a good design when you're yawning through elemental temples but are wary of a random dungeon feature. You wouldn't like fighting with 20 emperor liches but hundreds of chaos servants aren't a problem at all.
I think that's what late game locations should go for. Instead of having hundreds of chaos spawns and WMoPCs why not have strong monsters actively pursuing you? It's all so easy because you can avoid all dangers and don't have to face them head on. You know why titans are difficult? Because you can't play tag with them as easily with their eternium quarrels flying at you. I wonder how much harder would the standard game be, i.e. no ultra ending, if you just:
- don't use seven league boots
- don't use Teleportation and teleportitis (easier version: only use it for dwarven mystic and HMV scroll)
- don't use slaying ammunition of any kind
I have to try it some time. I guess Acid Ball spellcasters would still not mind it very much, ha ha.
Last edited by Scooter Fox; 09-12-2015 at 11:17 PM.
Gate closers: GE Wizard, DE Archer, Ratling Elementalist, Ratling Duelist, GE Merchant, ME Druid, HE Mindcrafter, ME Monk
Member
Originally Posted by grobblewobble
My list was just a suggestion list. Actually I think that simplest way to make changes to teleport is to:
A/ make wand of teleportation not rechargable by potions of booze
B/ Remove guaranteed wand from you know where.... Or make it guaranteed far later in the game.
C/ Decrease drop rate for books of teleportation, remove guaranteed book from saving Kelly and maybe increase difficulty of teleportation spell, so that only high level chars can reliably read it (let's say acid ball difficulty)
A/ alone would change a lot without messing too much with game mechanics. However, the change that I would really love is the one I suggested later in the thread. Make teleport not work if any monster is within say 2/3 tiles of you. IMO this would balance out the "get out of jail free card" aspect of teleportation.
About monsters restricting teleportation I still think it is a cool idea but not really necessary.
As for item drop rates. I start getting your point. You are probably right that people would start grinding instead.... But still I feel like getting all the items that you need is just too easy. By mid game you stop appreciating items cause you are just overflowing with them... but I see the point that probably less drop rates equals more grinding for most players, which is not fun.
As for heavily restricting teleportation... yes. You are right. Even with 4-5 casts per game teleportation still saves your ass from those tricky situations. It is a no-brainer. You see a critical hit out of the blue that gets you to 10% of your HP... oh well, it is time to teleport. You do not even have to consider your options. I really dislike this "out of jail free card" aspect of this spell. I cannot recall any RPG where you can avoid problems as easily with one spell. Most RPGs restrict you from using get away spells once you enter combat mode as long as enemies are in sight. That is why I suggested for teleport not to work where enemies are near you. Player would have to approach enemies with much more caution and would have to leave his route of escape open at all times.
As for quests being OP. You are absolutely right. Nowadays there are so many locations to explore with powerful rewards, that by the time you go to CoC game becomes a joke. Minotaur maze is a perfect example... As for slaying ammo... yup it is an issue as well. That could partially be solved with drop rates going down or slaying ammo smashing on every single hit. Speed being OP... yes it is as well, but nowhere near teleportation. Most of the time I do not care at all about my speed cause I know that if something goes wrong I can simply teleport....
Last edited by Kordianus; 09-12-2015 at 11:08 PM.
Senior Member
I'm not dismissing anything, but I am confused by this point. We want the late game to be less difficult than the early game, yes? If my mid/late game characters got killed as often as my early game ones I'd never make it past D16.
Member
The problem is that the only challanging thing that I can think of past casino is cat lord and maybe Nuurag-Vaarn... that's it... and only because teleportation is off on their levels. Everything else can be killed on autopilot and if not it can be simply avoided.
BTW. In the last game I lured cat lord out of his level to get access to teleport. He wasn't scary anymore. I even slowed myself down for extra XP for the final blow cause I knew he wouldn't touch me. I wouldn't dare to do it if I teleport was still off.
Ancient Member
I think perhaps you play a way that is very different than me. I think the end game feels pretty balanced. I'm scared of the Balors and Chaos guys at the end, and worried about corruption, because I only usually have like one potion of Cure Corruption at the end. I don't understand how you could have a bunch without getting lucky.
I never fool around with the Cat lord if I can help it. i've lost too many characters to him and just avoid him entirely if possible.
As for powerful quests, what do you mean? The lance thing that Blup's mom gave me didn't arrive till I was on the last level, plus its a two handed weapon. I didn't even bother using it, since I'm not trained in it and I'm not going to melee chaos dudes and Balors without training or a shield. Minotaur Maze is horrible, with stat drains and all the confusion so I never do it.
And seven league boots? I only ever find them like once every other character, and even then they aren't great cause they get destroyed so easily and they don't have much PV. If I'm playing a melee guy there isn't much point to them since I have to get next to the bad guys anyways. I'm happy to see the boots, but they don't exactly change the game much. Maybe if I ever found a pair on an Archer or a Wizard.
Member
Powerful quests i.e. ice queen gives you really nice things while her quests are relatively easy to be done, rewards from minotaur emperor are just ridiciolous... same goes for bug cave... Basically, in the current versions there are so many locations to explore, that if you go to all of them your char has so much stuff, artifacts, rewards that end game is very easy.
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