So, there's a huge problem with the mino maze and my dander is finally up enough to post about it. I see no reason to post this as an RFE as I honestly see little chance of maze being changed for the better: the changes required are wide-ranging and have little chance of being adopted as a package. Adopting a couple of these changes doesn't fix anything and potentially just throws off the balance even further (as we see has already happened), though maybe if magic map was disabled, there'd be more of a push to change the stupid thing. Anyway, for your consideration, the post below – in convenient bullet point format.
There's a number of problems with the maze:
- The fake levels of the maze make the maze extremely tedious – i.e. it is not fun.
- Enough magic map makes the maze trivial. Teleport helps, but magic map is the really broken part.
- This obviously gives a huge advantage to spellcasting classes and disadvantages melee classes, on the whole. The maze can be completed "in 10 minutes" once you've retrieved the BUGWIL MM scrolls.
- The rewards are insanely good – I've disclaimed the maze before, but you're basically a total idiot if you don't do the maze. Granted, you're practically guaranteed a win at this point anyway, but doing the maze guarantees you a win beyond all possible doubt. It is nearly impossible to screw up after it; this is especially true for low toughness races. Doing the maze is the new grinding for herbs, except the payoff is like an order of magnitude better.
Now, the big one is the rewards, as the rest are easily solved (see solutions below). I'm sure you're wondering why the rewards are too good, so let's go through it!
- The minotaur emperor gives +6 To/St/Pe, -8 Wi, 200d10 corruption points. The stat additions work against potentials and do not care about your current value. The Ancient Stone Beast gives +2 St, +4 To for about 4 corruptions.
- You get something like 3d2 POGA (I've seen 4 and 5 POGA, I think, so 3d2 is simply a guess).
- On top of this you get multiple POCCs and a potion of strength.
- Did I mention a random artifact and three random spellbooks? This is not much incentive, in my experience, but I'll mention it anyway.
- Oh, did I forget THE BEST WEAPON IN THE GAME? Even without tacking on the vastly improved ROTMC, you get a 4d20+16 weapon (20-96 damage) that "adds" a 40% crit rate. Let's not even talk about backstabbing.
So what's the tally here – normally, at least +12 St/+10 To, a nice +4 Wi after you've trained Wi back up w/ morgia, +4 Dx. In other words, the stat gains are utterly gamebreaking. Sois the weapon.
Solutions:
- There are a couple solutions to fake levels. My preferred one, as I'm sure y'all know, is removing the fake levels. They're the real culprit of making the maze tedious – without them, it's a more..."classic" maze experience that isn't nearly as frustrating. The maze could be made a level or so deeper to compensate (i.e. ML8, 9 or 10 would have mino emp). Making the maze deeper should not be done if other suggestions (like disabling MM) are implemented. Gut was discussing on IRC how a fake level could be made apparent in some way – e.g. it contains only corruption traps. I think this is both neat and somewhat obvious to first time, unspoiled maze visitors, so it's another possible solution
- Disable all magic mapping (i.e. including Knowledge of the Ancients) on all maze levels. Optionally, also disable teleportation until the minotaur emperor has been killed (or disable and put an exit at bottom of maze – that would be pretty cool and a bit of a mindfuck – rather appropriate).
- Rewards solution is multipart:
- Put the corpse back to +3 St/To/Pe. Make it -4 Wi instead of -8. Stat additions should ignore potentials and current values as it currently does. Make it give 200d20 corruption points with a floor of 2000 corruption points.
- 1d6 POGA.
- POCC, potions of strength, random artifact, and three random spellbooks stay – they are nice added incentive, but not primary reason for visiting. [maybe make it 4 spellbooks and put one on each mino mage, somewhat unorthodox solution that just occurred to me].
- Put the cow axe back at 3d20+16. It was already a superb and very desirable weapon in 1.1.1 and would still be such. It would actually still be better in 1.2.0 because various other aspects of the game have been fixed (ROTMC gives +Crit, backstabbing does good things, etc.).
also, fix orb guardian corpses, they're still worthless. playing corruption lottery with 4 corruptions for +2 St and +4 To is laughable for most. right idea was had with mino emp corpse. - even ASB with +4 St/To for about 3 corruptions would at least make me consider it.