QCF Design Community

As a novelty, I've decided to start a new Kingdom in DD, but this time I will carefully avoid unlocking items and gods that I don't care for. What items and gods would you blacklist?

Well... I have a funny story about that. I started a new profile and went all the way with taurog berserker through Dragon isles just to make it easier.

Unfortunately, the items that I personally would most want to blacklist - the fortitude tonic and burn salve, IMO most useless items in the game - are necessary if you want to unlock some very nice items - the strength potion and schadenfreude potion, two of the best items you can buy (and two items that you'll almost always want to take as preparations, along with the other top tier potions). In terms of deities, in my experience Dracul, Glowing Guardian, and Binlor are all you need to steamroll most of the dungeons, but I don't know if there are any deities I would never want to find (except for the brand new one, and that's only because he hasn't been balanced yet). Everything else that's unbalanced will hopefully be balanced sooner or later, so I'm not sure that it'd be worth the effort to start a new kingdom at this point (unless you're going to do it anyway).

It seems to me that allowing this is a slight design flaw. An *optional* but *permanent* change to the game state shouldn't also have (permanent) negatives attached to it. A minimaxer (which, let's face it, most people who enjoy DD probably are ) should never have to worry, before doing something, about whether it will make the game permanently harder for themselves.

This applies to unlocking gods, and also to unlocking certain niche items that start appearing in shops. Adding to the randomness of altars and shops is an unavoidable, if mild, negative. There are two solutions I can see:
- Remove the "permanent" part. Allow the player to "turn off" gods and shop items. However, I doubt this is really a good solution, as it makes cherry-picking items and gods a lot easier.
- Remove the "optional" part. Make the hardest dungeons and quests appear ONLY after you've unlocked all gods or finished all item quests of a given tier. This seems like a perfect solution to me. (Or is this how it currently works? If so, carry on. )

It is like that for complicated tasks. You have to get the first two lame potions to get the next 5 good ones.

I remember when I first did those quests. When you get the first reward, you're like "Oh cool! Two extra potion slots and two specialist potions to fill them with! Neat!" And then you do the next quest and the witch says "Now I'm going to reward you by replacing normal shop potions with those things," and I was like "That's the opposite of a reward."

The schaudenfraud is great in a shop, but the others, not so much...

For the gods, I know I definitely want to keep Glowing Guardian and Dracul. I'd like to have one 'piety farm' god. Mystera and Binlor can both give you piles of piety, but Binlor also has some useful boons (for Mystera's boons, she would have to actually GIVE me piety for me to take them, that's how bad they are). Also, Binlor gives you a free glyph, which you can convert when you leave his worship.

I'm on the fence about Taurog. He's only really solid with berserkers and monks, but I really like berserkers.

Definitely booting TIkki Tooki. Too hard to get piety for, and except for Tikki's edge, his boons are either mediocre (dodge), a penalty that you pay piety for (the potion 'boons'), or are more easily gained from equipment (poison). Also, if you feel like playing cheap, his special sub-dungeon has TONS of tiles to explore.

Going to pitch Mystera also. Except for the highly situational mana leak, anything she can do, Dracul does better.

Don't know enough about Earthmother and JJ to make a call on those yet.