by Sidestepper on Fri Feb 01, 2013 12:48 am
The problem with extremely efficient strategies is that they become so good as to exclude themselves from the game. I wasn't trying to prove a point when I did my SMASH game, I was just fooling around with knockback and extreme damage stacking and Ooops! I killed the boss at level 1. I'm not supposed to be able to do that. I tried to justify it by saying that I had to use up the entire map's worth of resources to do it, but that isn't even true. I didn't even touch the monsters, which are the most important resource in the game, and if I had just created a +44 trisword at level one and then played the game normally I would have steamrollered it. What's more, I would be able to do this every single time I found a trisword as a gnome or halfling. The result is an item that I have to start ignoring because it's too good. I'd like to use it , but it breaks the game and is only fun to do once.
Self-policing kind of works but is against the spirit of the game. This isn't a roleplaying game, it is a puzzle game. We are expected to ruthlessly exploit everything in the dungeon, from items to monsters to religion, and heartlessly discard anything the moment it becomes less than optimal.
I'm sure that the devs are aware of the issue and have considered our suggestions. The trisword WILL be changed, it might just not happen this week. They have a lot of things on their plate, not the least of which is the parallel development My Skin and Tears, which I have been faithfully sending alpha reports to Nandrew about.
As for the general issue of preparations, I feel that DtD is really three separate games. You have Purist games where you just go in and hope you figure out a solution with the random puzzle pieces offered to you. Then you have light prep games where you take one or two items as a check against bad luck (Soul Orb for Warlords, Venom Ward for Monks, Burn Salves and Fortitude for general annoyance mitigation, etc.). Then you have fully prepped runs where you are trying to execute a specific and somewhat reproducible strategy.
In all three games, you are expected to use your resources as ruthlessly and cynically as possible, but it is not expected that you play the fully prepped game 100% of the time.