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QCF Design Community • View topic - Hints for vicious dungeons?
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Re: Hints for vicious dungeons?

PostPosted: Wed Dec 11, 2013 9:47 pm
by Blovski
Eh, it's an OK ability. The +5 mana is obviously the best thing but unlike the other mana boosts it comes pretty late, and has more or less only the mana bonus unless you wait even longer than the basic 100. I feel like for 80 it's alright for Paladins (not least because they can then use their potions) but I think 80/64 is a better price for it. Agree with the analogy to Stone Heart. And I sort of feel that for an ultimate ability it's pretty ho-hum.

Re: Hints for vicious dungeons?

PostPosted: Wed Dec 11, 2013 11:22 pm
by Wargasm
Not to mention a capstone that, in order to use best, you need to give up 30-50% of your inventory for. And people call JJ's prep cost crippling. GG gives lots of bonuses at the end, but any of them individually can be done better by another deity. Cleansing is really his only unique boon. I'm not really fond of GG at all and pretty much only use him if my other altars are Pactmaker and late-discovered JJ (or Dracul on a map full of undead), and after I've drank all my potions.

Re: Hints for vicious dungeons?

PostPosted: Wed Dec 11, 2013 11:27 pm
by Darvin
I've actually found that late-JJ isn't completely out of the question. If you can pull off a desecration or you happen to be a Paladin, his starting piety may be sufficient for an immediate petition. You're unlikely to see chaos avatar, but boosting either health or mana to hit an important threshold can tip the scales. Definitely a last-ditch choice, though, like if you're a bloodmage and your alternatives are GG and Taurog.

Re: Hints for vicious dungeons?

PostPosted: Thu Dec 12, 2013 12:17 am
by Blovski
GG is still a phenomenally good multi-purpose deity and probably still my favourite to play around with. I just think Enlightenment is sort of around the level of Chaos Avatar (maybe a little harder to leverage and time balanced against JJ giving you more grief early game) even as a Paladin on a map with loads of extra exp hanging around, and so it feels sort of like it should be a bit cheaper to make it more flexible (again, 80 piety/64 for Paladin seems like it would open it up a lot) or maybe offer a slightly bigger bonus per bead to make it more rewarding to stack up the beads.

Stone Heart's the only other boon that seems a bit doubtful now. Unless you get an early Lemisi and the right kind of boss it's just not coming into play. I'd probably say either go for revealed walls OR revealed enemies as a precondition, or cut down the number of walls to 8 or so if you're keeping those preconditions. Like all same-screen resist lowering things it's useless on a lot of the vicious dungeons anyway and having the walls revealed forces you to spend a lot of exploration, and with just 5% resists for 15 walls it's hard to leverage with preparations, soooo...

personally I think if you give those two and maybe Tikki Tooki's poison a tweak they'll all be in line.

That said, I understand if more god balancing seems a bit much :D

Edit: I occasionally late-game JJ and convert/kill things like mad for a chaos avatar without petition.

Re: Hints for vicious dungeons?

PostPosted: Thu Dec 12, 2013 12:27 am
by Sidestepper
I basically only use Enlightenment when I know I'm going to have loads of resources anyway and am just having fun. The opportunity cost of all of those Protections/Cleansings is too much. I wonder if it would be worth it if the enchantment effect was applied retroactively to any new beads you acquire?

Really feeling you on Stone Heart. I've been complaining about that one since forever. I think I've used it once, ever. I want to like it, but by the time you know you need it, it's almost always too late. The only way you can really use it is if deliberately hold off on using Binlor's boons until the very end, but that kind of defeats the purpose of prepping Binlor. I'd rather just pack a really big sword if I'm going to play like that.

Re: Hints for vicious dungeons?

PostPosted: Thu Dec 12, 2013 12:38 am
by Lujo
All three things are a case of bad opportunity cost deals.

Enlightment would have to be broken to match up to cleansings.
Poison would have to be broken to match up to... either TE or potions, both can kill pretty much anything if focused.
Stone heart would have to be broken to match up to the biggest damage boost in the game, maxing magic resists or killing something with a much cheaper and non-scaling alternative to unstoppable fury.

Ok, so Stone Heart could cost less walls, but it used to really kill any challenge against bossess with resists while at the same time clearing your way around and upping your magic resists (and you get a pissorff if you prep). If you guys remember, once upon a time binloring a level consisted of prepping him, spamming it and converting, it took the nerf to make more people figure out that he's basically the strongest god in the game...

Re: Hints for vicious dungeons?

PostPosted: Thu Dec 12, 2013 1:18 am
by Blovski
It's not so much a matter of making everything match up to all the other things in the gods as to giving each of them some utility in the game. As the TT exploiter in chief, do you have any strats using his Poison boon? It seems borderline useless to me right now but I might just be underestimating it.

Enlightenment in particular just never got adjusted to match up with Absolution being fixed. It's still got uses and I think is way better than the other two we've mentioned here at the moment. It just doesn't really seem to be 100 piety's worth of boon right now.

--

@Lujo, that was back when you could destroy unrevealed walls and affect unrevealed enemies. And I think when Binlor spawned Endiswal for free so was way more piety efficient at the start. Now there are three limiting factors on it (revealed the relevant enemies, revealed walls, total number of walls) which make it not practical for use in the early game while the effect is pretty tiny relative to the wall consumption so it's not practically helpful in a late game scenario either.

To illustrate, Slime Pits has around 135 walls without Binlor's prep penalty. That's 9 Stone Hearts if you use no other Binlor boon, can use every single wall topside for Stone Heart and can find the boss by the time you use the first, which is 45% resist down and 27% MR. To be honest Stone Skin and Stone Form or whatever the item that lets fireballs down resistance are invariably better choices if you want to shred resistances on a boss and the total effect seems kind of underwhelming given you would need to explore the whole map and use all of your walls to do that.

Honestly, reverting it to affect all enemies on the dungeon (seen or not) seems kind of necessary as a minimum step. Probably increase piety cost a little and decrease the wall cost as well. The only alternative to keep it useful is to ramp up the effect to make it a real resist shredder (10%/hit or so) to use before the final battle or in a late game conversion but that's making it more a bonus thing for non-Binlor worshippers than a real integrated Binlor boon.

Re: Hints for vicious dungeons?

PostPosted: Thu Dec 12, 2013 1:27 am
by Wargasm
I took Poison once, realised how very little poison I was getting out of it, haven't touched it since. Especially on a deity it's VERY easy to lose piety with, I can't justify ever spending the piety on that when I could just take a few hits without triggering JJ's punishment instead. It worked differently the last time I played before the full release or I would probably have made page-long posts about how crud it is currently. May as well not even be there IMO. At the very least it could give me back five gold or something just so there's _some_ point in taking it.

I actually used Stone Heart, and recently, to get a Supreme Slayer, so I am _not_ complaining about it. :p

But yeah, Enlightenment's opportunity cost is horrible. 100 piety for non-Paladins, effect based on how much inventory space you're willing to give up, and GG's got harsh rules. Like I said, I've used it maybe once, and Poison in its current form I'll never take again. The rest are sometimes situational, but at least viable options.

Re: Hints for vicious dungeons?

PostPosted: Thu Dec 12, 2013 2:45 am
by TheSchachter

Re: Hints for vicious dungeons?

PostPosted: Thu Dec 12, 2013 3:00 am
by Lujo