Thank you! From a newbie standpoint (I've been playing for 4 months now, so I'd say that I'm in newbie territory) one of the most disheartening things about DD is literally spending WEEKS beating your head against a puzzle that no matter what you do, you can't seem to crack (Thief Silver, BM Silver, Fighter Gold to name a few) and looking on the forums for ideas and guidance only to see vets post "Difficulty is fine" , "Totally doable, in fact Class X needs a nerf", and "I don't see what's so hard about it, I was wasted last night and I did it on my first try without using a single potion." A little bit of hyperbole on the last one, but that is how it often comes across, so you have no idea how refreshing it is to see a vet post something like this.
The class challenges are frequently out of line, I think. In many cases they're harder, or at least, less reliably doable than vicious, and tend to have a very mazy layout which requires restarts even if you play fine. Personally I'd like to see them at least have a more forgiving layout, given they're gating some really neat items and the silvers gave me as a vet a lot of trouble and I'm not even bothering with a lot of the golds.
I think in general when we're talking about the difficulty of the game in the forums, we're not thinking of the class challenges, and frequently we're not really thinking about Purist play either.
I agree that vicious should be either dropped or drastically nerfed before release, it was wildly borken when it was first introduced and it never stopped being broken.
I think many players have gotten used to the new 'normal' and forgotten that vicious was never meant to be a part of the game, but 'post-post-game' content, as (i think) disleksia put it.
I wouldnt like to see the game become 'easier', simply flatter in it's structure. More incentive to explore the dungeons in different ways can add replay value just as much as adding more and more tiers of difficulty. Easier to balance too.
Vicious really isn't broken atm, except in a couple of the interactions with deities being off. I mean, I enjoyed the hell out of going through the viciouses the first time (STILL haven't done Namtar), and at that point they were pretty much all harder than they are now. Soo... I don't get it. Further nerfing the vicious dungeons at this point would just make them redundant. Cutting them would be daft. They don't really gate anything *essential* and for me were/are a real satisfying endgame with some worthwhile rewards, and at least three of them are reliably beatable but interesting with a number of strategies.
Now I'd say that making the monster classes available for a good % of directional completion (say 50% overall, which is a lot of runs, but if you don't want to beat the vicious dungeons that'd make it accessible)
or vicious wins would be a nice alternative.
Really? Would you walk into Naga city with a random class and race combo? With minimal preps or purist?
Mostly. I'd probably take a god topside if I had random class/race. Demonic Library would be more of a push.
Honestly, I think that until the devs remove Vicious completely, and we see unbalanced stuff in the cold light of HARD difficulty, I doubt many players could be convinced that things need nerfing.
I think the reason the talk about balance is so skewed around Vicious dungeons atm is that the vet community have generally gotten good enough that they can beat a hard dungeon with basically anything with a ton of stuff to spare. I'm maybe the worst and probably the most arithmetically lazy player of the vets on here but I have this perspective issue now. Consequently, above-the-curve things tend to be obscured by vet skill at lower difficulty. However, it's usually still above-the-curve in a way that discourages interesting play, which is always a shame.
I'd like more incentive to do odd stuff in the hard dungeons.
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Vicious token post hard-GT is a really smart idea - though I like the idea of keeping in the slime pits quest for something else. I'm having fun on vicious low-end dungeons atm but agree that level of super-challenge should probably not be haunting my completion %s.
I only threw it in a) to be honest, as a not-so-subtle brag, b) to give some idea of just how much time I've spent playing the game. I'm sure I could do VHoS with the vicious token if I was determined to do so.
