QCF Design Community

Vicious or just normal game. It's like a fun aftergame thing, as most people don't beat gold before Horratio. Or maybe I have a twisted view of fun...

I guess were both guilty of that one

But do give the new GT a shot and let me know how it went.

I will ASAP. I'm still kind on confused about how it works, but I've gathered it's hell so I'm sure I'll enjoy it

This seems like more of a question like...

"Is it possible to introduce dynamic difficulty into dungeons based on class and race?"

This game doesn't have that because of the array of dungeons on offer- at least one class has a dungeon where they kick ass, and one where they fail miserably.

The issue is that everyone is crying out for the tower to be difficult for every class equally.

Trying to encapsulate the whole game into one tower is going to be difficult, but if you do it right, then no class is going to have a good time in there.

So we get a situation where balancing the tower right is an amazing feat, but COMPLETELY at odds with the rest of the game.

So the devs have a choice;

Accept that some classes are stronger than others in the tower, just like in the real game OR go against their design philosophy and tailor the tower for each and every class.

if players genuinely have a problem with certain classes being better than others in the tower, this is a possible solution:
Instead of dynamically adjusting the tower to each class, force the player to walk in with NO class- a tourist. No abilities, standard stats, conversion generates gold and shops. Stock the shops with items that effect stats.

A post-storyline vicious challenge for the Guard class could be kind of cool (it could also be kind of bland). Putting it in a special version of the Tower might be a fun "coming full circle" moment since that's how you started. Then again, at this point I think the Tower has been remade even more times than the Transmuter, so maybe big changes aren't the best idea.

I don't think there's anyway to really make this idea work. The issue of 'hard' versus 'easy' monsters isn't one of number, it's one of level. The most important non-boss monsters on the board are the 9s, 8s, and 7s. These are the monsters that can almost never be used as popcorn, and also contain a disproportionate amount of the dungeon's xp. There are a total 9 such monsters, which is a small number that is always going to be vulnerable to sampling swings.

A priest that walks into a dungeon to find that all the level 3 and below monsters are zombies isn't going to have a significant edge, but that same priest that finds a dungeon with no undead at all except for 2 zombie-9s is going to have an easy go of it.

I also think that DTD isn't a game that has very strong counters for classes. There are a lot of easy matchups, but no hopeless ones. Between preps, shops, and boons, you can usually kill your 'countering' monsters from one or two levels below. 8s and 9s can be a bit of a problem because by the time you can take on 'hard' 8s and 9s you usually want to already be engaging the boss. Even this isn't so bad if you're willing to attack the boss at level 8 instead of the more typical level 7.

I don't know. Somethings have obvious counters (curse and bandits), but things like extra attack or hp are almost impossible to counter.

I think we;ve got to a point in the beta where the devs are happy enough that classes are relatively balanced in their difficulty of use in all dungeons.

They will never be COMPLETELY balanced; that would be like balancing Starcraft with eighteen factions instead of three, and everyone agrees that balancing those three was very impressive.

The main issue is that in scenarios like the Tower, tiny differences in survivability between classes gets magnified by a thousand.

For example, the difference in a regular dungeon might be that a warlord has a few extra attacks and potions left over after killing the boss, whereas a tinker has gone down to the wire. In the Tower, you have to fight a hundred bosses, and those tiny differences add up very quickly.

This is okay in the regular game, because you can recognize a hard combination of dungeon and class and just get better.

I'm not sure if the devs have commented on this, but they seem completely opposed to any kind of dynamic difficulty.

They like their mismatched dungeons, they provide variety, and it seems they've been committed to that for a long time. I also like this approach, so maybe I'm biased, but a lot of the recent changes have been made to highlight the built-in 'dynamic difficulty' of using mismatched classes through the PQI.

Using the Tower as reason for balancing the game is a little like using an atomic clock to tell your sundail is a bit slow; it's true, but it't not really applicable.