The seasonal greetings

[gjaustin]

Ehh, I think that if they lower the cost of APHEELSIK to 6 (or maybe 5) it'll be fine.

I agree that the TT boon should probably be based on level, but I kind of like the Venom Dagger not being based on level. It's like the difference between a Vampiric Blade and the Blacksmith Shield.

[dislekcia]

You guys really haven't figured out what's actually going on with the Wizard yet.

And you can't use poison to completely remove the level difference between a level 1 hero and a level 10 boss anymore? Shocking! ;P

[Dreamdancer]

You guys really haven't figured out what's actually going on with the Wizard yet.

A christmas present? I mean, with the wizard one should beat the vicious Gaan-Telet, if one hasn't done this yet, this is 9999 gold for the quest

[Lujo]

You guys really haven't figured out what's actually going on with the Wizard yet.

Well if it's not the infinte piety exploit, then I'm stumped Unless it's really a ploy to keep us busy during the hollidays. It's also entirely possible that all this just leads to the wizard having the SAME ammount of conversion as everybody else and that you did fine math on it. It's just that potions and spoons might be having an unitended effect.

And you can't use poison to completely remove the level difference between a level 1 hero and a level 10 boss anymore? Shocking! ;P

I support your move, like the new concept, I like the fact TT's boon was finaly nerfed, I explained at lenght that old posion was factualy broken. It's just that the numbers might need tweaking at some point. Or maybe even not, we just find it controversial and were spoiled by having a hack at our disposal for really long. Time will tell.

[Fran]

You never cared to test your theories, have you?^^

The wizard ability transfers the CP from the glyphs to the items converted. Everytime you convert an item, every glyph loses 10 CP. And guess what, when they hit 0 there is nothing to gain anymore. Your available CP stays exactly the same.
The point is about being able to keep the glyph without losing its conversion value.

It seems the vets only see what they want to see - it even is mentioned in the ingame description that the glyphs donate their cp to other conversions. ;D

Clever devs

Also, I'm awesome for finding out about it!

[Dreamdancer]

Finally i'm home and can play DD again
And Fran is right. Upon conversion every glyph donates 10 points, but it's value decays by 10 points. Glyph which one hasn't touched (meaning taken from the floor) don't decay.

But never the less, this seems like a nice buff for the wizard.

[Lujo]

Clever devs

Oh, that is one sneaky and clever way to think ahead. We do sometimes assume weird and annoying things, we vets, and sometimes were right. Good thing it wasn't such a time. In that case, great job guys.

And to be fair, when I first read "Donate" I thought it ment that CP carries over like it does for the transmutation scroll. Then I went and tested it, turned out that it was a completely new concept, and the halfling was getting a HP potion when I transmuted a healing potion and i happened again and again. It wasn't exactly obvious that it had a failsafe, and I guess I panicked that the wonderfull update might have one of those accidentaly glitches or misshaps and that the devs would've been on vacation. Really sorry about it, anyway

[The Avatar]

Wow. It's almost an amusing chain reaction. Someone says something not based on facts, and then everyone else sees how we can break it.

I still don't know about the new poison. You may not be able to kill a level 10 at level 1, but you also can't kill a level 3 at level 1.

[Lujo]

Wow. It's almost an amusing chain reaction. Someone says something not based on facts, and then everyone else sees how we can break it.

Technicaly what started it WAS based on facts - halflings really can convert a healing potion and get another one. And when someone said it and I tested it, it worked several times. And if it were infinite they could get piety for it. And only thing that prevented further testing is lack of time to sit down and really try to break it (which would fail, ofc).

And as for poison, well, that will need testing.

[Darvin]

And you can't use poison to completely remove the level difference between a level 1 hero and a level 10 boss anymore? Shocking! ;P

I figured my little escapade was the inspiration for this. Your change goes far beyond what was necessary to deal with a niche approach and hits it pretty hard in other places, to the point at which it is completely unusable for 1st level characters. Seriously, I cannot think of a worse use of mana at level 1 (BURNDAYRAZ does the job of suppressing monster healing better, and that does damage of its own!)

The issue is that APHEELSIK allows you to funnel exploration resources into a single combat, so against a sufficiently easy boss with enough bonuses to damage efficiency and an entire dungeon and two sub-dungeons worth of exploration resources you can eventually fell a giant. I actually feel this achievement is much less impressive than Avatar's 45 second berserker speedrun.

If you feel that you need to prevent level 1 boss kills, then you didn't need a cap nearly this restrictive. Something like 50+20/level layers of poison would do the job. That may seem excessive, but my caster-assassin in that 1st-level boss kill game was recharging 20 MP between attack runs (20 tiles) so he'd have needed 200 layers of poison per casting to pull it off. Under a 50+20/level stack APHEELSIK, that would've required me to be level 8 to do that. Your 10/level numbers effectively kills the glyph for most conventional approaches.

Frankly, if I'm willing to sink half the dungeon in exploration to get a high-level kill, then that's my perogative as to how I use that resources; in the vast majority of practical situations anything greater than 6-level difference is unheardof, and anything above a 4-level difference is very rare (and often achieved with damage-spiking shenanigans, not APHEELSIK hit and run). I feel you're using a mostly academic scenario as justification for a sweeping change that vastly overnerfs the glyph in the vast majority of practical situations.

Well if it's not the infinte piety exploit, then I'm stumped

I've figured it out. The bonus CP is deducated from the glyphs in the wizard's inventory, and when they hit 0 they stop contributing. I'd noticed the CP going down, but hadn't mentioned it with regards to the infinite loop because 0 CP glyphs obtained from altars seem to contribute to this value, so I'd presumed glyphs continue to contribute even when depleted. This is not the case, and it seems that 0 CP glyphs are not supposed to provide benefit, thus terminating any infinite loop.

It's just that the numbers might need tweaking at some point. Or maybe even not, we just find it controversial and were spoiled by having a hack at our disposal for really long. Time will tell.

I support this change for the boon and the item, and feel that with the right tweaking this could work. For the glyph, it's been beaten silly with the nerf stick when it wasn't really a problem. Yes, you could do some unreal things with it in easier dungeons. In most practical situations APHEELSIK caster antics are unheard of for low-level characters since they're so resource-inefficient, and melee-based approaches are limited by your ability to survive a single attack.